NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was in Shanghai today to watch the Minnesota Timberwolves and Golden State Warriors play their second matchup of the preseason. While doing media duties, the idea of reseeding the NBA playoffs so that the entire league was ranked 1 to 16 rather than being split by conference. His comments, via ESPN.com’s Nick Friedell:
“Reformatting the playoffs is something we’ll continue to look at. I think though it would require revisiting the regular-season schedule as well. As I’ve said before, we don’t play a balanced schedule now, as I’m sure you know. And for those that don’t, that means that teams in the East play each other more than they play teams in the West. And our feeling is, if we were going to seed 1-16, we would need to play a balanced schedule to make it fair for everyone if we were going to seed 1-16 in the playoffs. It may be that as we continue to experiment with the number of days over which we can schedule 82 games that it will create more of an opportunity for a balanced schedule.”
The idea of eliminating conferences, redoing the schedule, and reseeding the playoffs is by no means a new one. Three years ago, SB Nation’s Tom Ziller had a proposal to keep the 82-game schedule intact but balance the schedule through a five-region system. While some of the points about back-to-back games have already been improved by the league’s work the last three seasons, most of this plan still would work perfectly well.
What does all of this mean for the Timberwolves? Now that they’re a team expected to be in the playoff race, this could greatly improve the chances of them getting a favorable matchup in the first round. By most projections at this point, the Timberwolves land somewhere between the 5 and 7 seeds in the Western Conference, which puts them in a matchup with one of Oklahoma City, Houston, or San Antonio, all three of whom would likely be favored in a seven-game series against Minnesota.
ESPN’s NBA team created one idea of how the playoffs could look if seeding was removed this season.
The Wolves moving from the bottom half of the Western Conference to the top half of the overall bracket creates a much better matchup for them and already creates a fascinating matchup with Milwaukee. Not only are they the Wolves’ closest geographic rival, they also could never meet in the playoffs outside of the NBA Finals in the current system.
This is just the basic idea of how good this could be for a team in Minnesota’s new shoes: a team with a winning record in the West, but outside the true upper echelon of the conference.
The other side of this idea is that any proposal that lets the Wolves get more games outside of the current Western Conference, especially against some of their current local rivals like Chicago, Indiana and Detroit, would be hugely beneficial in terms of the power balance of their schedule. The Wolves should win every single game they have against those teams as currently constructed.
There are a lot of hoops to jump through to make this proposal work, not least that this isn’t good for nearly any Eastern Conference team. But, the WNBA moved to this system two years ago, and without it, the last two remarkable series’ between the Minnesota Lynx and Los Angeles Sparks, two Western Conference teams, would have been in the conference finals rather than on the biggest possible stage in the WNBA Finals. There’s a ton of potential upside to reseeding the playoffs, and it’s good to hear that the league is considering it, both overall and specifically for the Timberwolves’ future success.
Listen to David on Wolves Wired!
