The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I'm losing interest in the NBA because the regular season means absolutely nothing. Aside from a very good reason to play fantasy basketball the NBA regular season is just useless. All it does is weed out the absolutely terrible teams from the half decent teams. what the NBA needs to do is change its playoff format.

At the moment 16 of the 30 teams make the playoffs. So more than half of the teams in the league are going to get a shot to win the damn thing. Only we all know that there aren't 16 teams capable of winning the chanpionship this year. The playoffs should be made up of the teams who are capable of winning, not just any team who finished at or near .500. This year there are three teams, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Indiana, who whill make the playoffs and will probably finish below .500. And Washington will likely finish right at .500. These teams do not have a chance to get past the Pistons, Heat, or Nets in the first round. We all know that Memphis and the Lakers and Sacramento don't have a shot in the first round against Dallas, Phoenix, and San Antonio respectively.

This isn't the NCAA tournament where you can win one game, score a huge upset, and advance to the next round. You have to win a 7 game series to advance, which is nearly impossible for a team that is clearly just not as good. This brings me to my next point. The NBA season runs for 5.5 months from November through half of April. The NBA playoffs runs for roughly 3 months, from April through June. I'm exaggerating a little bit, to be fair, as it's really half of April. My point is that the playoffs takes forever. By the time the finals get around I'm no longer intersted unless the Knicks or Nets are in it. Last year we knew that the Pistons and Spurs would be in the finals back in March and we had to wait until June to watch the damn thing. This year we can assume the same matchup and we're going to have to wait for it again. Let's not short shrift Phoenix/Dallas or Miami/New Jersey, but outside of these 6 teams it is literally inconceivable that any of the other so called playoff teams make the finals.

Here's my proposal. Change the playoff format to the one baseball has adopted. Granted, when baseball adopted their playoff policy they were actually expanding the number of teams to make the post season and basketball would be cutting it, but to change it would possibly diminish excitement about the regular season, but really build excitement about the playoffs.

Baseball has 6 divisions, 3 a piece in the National and American Leagues. Each division winner makes the playoffs and the one non-division winner in each league with the best record wins the wild card. Realistically, these are the teams in the league with a chance to win the title. If basketball were to allow only 8 teams into the playoffs by adopting this policy, it would eliminate a whole round of playoffs, which is less TV revenue, but would increase the ratings by getting rid of the unbearable first round series and making it not boring by the end of the thing.

Assuming basketball had this policy this year then the 8 teams in the playoffs would be San Antonio, Phoenix, Denver, and Dallas in the West, and Detroit, Miami, New Jersey, and Cleveland in the East. This would be a great playoff run. As it is we have to wait until the middle of May to see something like this pan out assuming no major upsets in the first round. We have to sit through the God awful first round of the playoffs where maybe the Clippers beat Denver, which isn't an upset since they have a better record, or maybe Indiana challenges New Jersey or Chicago challenges Miami. Even given a first round upset, there's no chance that a team can get through all three dominant teams in eaither the East or West to make the finals. It simply won't happen.

David Stern, do us a favor. Let's get everyone in the league office to stop sucking each others' dicks and thinking about how great your league is and fix the playoff structure. I will be very bored come June 15th when the Spurs and Pistons are playing in the finals. I won't watch this year, the same way I didn't watch last year. Get rid of the teams that don't have a shot. Shorten up the playoffs. Make it interesting for the fans.

PS - could you also exercise some kind of executive power to fire Isiah Thomas and maybe convince James Dolan to sell the Knicks?