Tich’s Take
This is officially ridiculous.
It has been officially ridiculous for a while now, actually.
The NBA playoffs are about the start and two teams with winning records will be sitting at home watching three teams with losing records play instead. I know we live in a world where someone named Snooki was famous once, but that still does not make any sense.
By any measure, the Western Conference’s ninth place team — currently the Oklahoma City Thunder — is better than the sixth through eighth place teams in the Eastern Conference. The main measure — actual win-loss record — proves it the most. The Thunder are 43-36 while the sixth-place Bucks have 39 wins.
And this season is nothing compared to last year. Phoenix went 48-34 and inexplicably missed the playoffs. Well, technically it was not inexplicable, just very poorly explicable. Guess who had an identical record in the East? Just the three-seed Chicago Bulls. Yes, the three-seed. The Suns won 10 more games than the East’s eighth-seeded Atlanta Hawks.
How is this legal? Where is President Obama when you need him?
Basically, playoff spots are given to teams who draw a bigger straw rather than the team who actually, you know, has a better record over 82 games. I guess it really is better to be lucky than good.
Conferences might mean something in college sports, but in modern professional sports, they serve little purpose outside of scheduling and tradition. In general, doing something for tradition’s sake is illogical and dangerous, but sometimes traditions do have merit.
This is not one of those traditions. This is like one of those traditions where your aunt makes a terrible casserole at Thanksgiving that nobody eats. Just stop making the casserole, for goodness’ sake.
Keep conferences and divisions for scheduling purposes. That is fine. Teams should play regional teams more often than teams on the other side of the country. That is perfectly sound and logical. Teams can even still get banners or T-shirts when they win their division and everything. But a team with the 15th-best record in the league should not miss the playoffs in favor of a team with the 18th-best record.
There is literally no argument as to why the best 16 teams do not make the NBA playoffs instead of the top eight from each conference. It contradicts math and logic. How does a team that does worse in a worse conference end up getting substantially more of a reward? Is a “C” better than a “B”? Is any other type of ice cream better than chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream? What kind of bizarro world is this?
Pretty much every American sports league has a similar broken playoff system, so at least the NBA is not alone in its incompetence. The Carolina Panthers were 7-8-1 this past year and hosted a first-round playoff game because their division was just that much of an atrocity. Seven teams with better records than Carolina missed the playoffs.
I will not even go into the problems with baseball’s terrible system, but just know that it is bad.
The NBA prides itself in being an innovative league and Commissioner Adam Silver is always thinking a step ahead. It is time to do the smart, logical, correct, etc. thing, NBA.
Do not let luck triumph over good.
TICHENOR is the sports editor.