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NBA to seed conference playoffs by record, no preference for division winners
Those seeking comprehensive NBA playoff seeding reform have now achieved a major victory. The league announced Tuesday evening that the East and West playoffs will no longer give seed and tiebreaker preference to division winners, thereby ensuring that the eight winningest teams in each conference will earn both postseason berths and tournament position on their win-loss records rather than arbitrary geographical locations. Commissioner Adam Silver had indicated as early as February that such a change would be put into effect for the 2015-16 season.
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Check out the NBA's press release for full details on the changes to playoff seeding and qualification:
As part of the modifications, the eight playoff teams in each conference will be seeded in order of their regular-season record. Most recently, every division winner was guaranteed a top four seed in its respective conference regardless of its record but did not receive home-court advantage if its playoff opponent had a better record.
The Board also approved changes to tiebreak criteria for playoff seeding and home-court advantage. Head-to-head results have become the first criterion to break ties for playoff seeding and home-court advantage between two teams with identical regular-season records; the second criterion is whether a team won its division. Under the old tiebreak system, a division winner was awarded the higher seed and received home-court advantage in a series if the two teams met in the playoffs.
The NBA’s Competition Committee unanimously recommended each of these changes prior to the Board of Governors vote.
Under these new rules, a division winner will not automatically qualify for the playoffs. While such a scenario seems unlikely given that more than half of each conference's teams make the postseason, it does represent a significant shift in how the league views the importance of success relative to divisional peers.
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Support for these changes has existed for some time, but it reached critical mass following the run-up to the 2015 playoffs, in which the Northwest Division champion Portland Trail Blazers earned a No. 4 seed in the wildly competitive West despite finishing with four fewer wins than the No. 5 Memphis Grizzlies and No. 6 San Antonio Spurs, both from the Southwest Division. That setup gave the Grizzlies a relatively easy first-round matchup against the injury plagued Blazers and saddled the defending champion Spurs with a very difficult series against the Los Angeles Clippers, which they eventually lost in a seven-game classic. That series proved to be one of the best of the last five years, but it was unfortunate that it occurred so early in the playoffs.
Division performance now matters only as a tiebreaker, not an inconsequential factor given that the Houston Rockets beat out the Clippers for the West's No. 2 seed based on that criterion last April. Nevertheless, a major part of the NBA's structural history is now perhaps best considered as a way to ensure geographical rivals play each other four times per season. Thta's a big shift — one that makes it clear just how arbitrary the various seeding and tiebreaker designations really are. The NBA and its competition committee can do away with decades of history if they consider it to be in the league's best interest.
For that reason, reform advocates will likely now feel more emboldened to push the postseason format change they believe matters most — the dissolution of conference-based qualification in favor of putting the 16 best teams overall into the playoffs. If divisions only serve as tiebreakers, then there's little competitive reason to say that conferences are especially more important. Plus, if the NBA wants to cut down on travel in the regular season, it can always opt for a plan similar to Tom Ziller's use of five quasi-divisional regions. Such a system would produce the occasional playoff matchup that sends the Golden State Warriors to Boston, but that does not appear especially more ridiculous than last April's Portland-Memphis series.
Again, these are only the competitive reasons why it's in the league's best interest to abolish conference preference for the playoffs. The best counterargument to reform advocates is that the NBA cannot only consider competitive fairness when TV schedules need to be optimized and entire regions of the United States must have some kind of rooting interest. Whether the NBA ever decides to launch a full-throated defense of those responsibilities remains to be seen.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at efreeman_ysports@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
