Conferences were an essential structure of the NBA in its early days but the purpose it serves no longer matters and they’re only hurting the game now.
It’s a point of endless arguments in politics and relationships — the fact that something used to be done one way doesn’t mean we should still be doing it. This applies to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the NBA. Like having two conferences. We’ve had them for over 50 years. Doesn’t mean we should.
Conferences were created in 1970 to cut down on the time players spent traveling, a time when teams flew coach. Normal-sized humans know coach isn’t designed to fit them comfortably; for pro ballers, it was worse. But every team now flies in a private jet. Sports science has made enormous leaps in restorative rest. The league could win easy points with the players union and fans who aren’t yelling at clouds or people to get off their lawn by announcing a new approach to scheduling games that transparently factors in the wear and tear of travel; as climate chaos intensifies it would also be non-suicidal to act like it matters that private jets are 14 times more polluting than commercial planes.
The NBA already has good reasons to tweak the way they schedule games and travel; it shouldn’t be boxed in by Cold War thinking about East and West. The league’s new midseason tournament could create even more avenues for scheduling teams in a mindful manner. I hear there are computers that help with that. It could take getting used to, but you can fly from Washington D.C. to Memphis about as easily as you can D.C. to Milwaukee. The logic of the conference system was always arbitrary, anyway: Chicago was in the West until a few years before they drafted Michael Jordan; they moved as part of the deal to add Dallas as an expansion team.
Whatever intent the basketball gods had when they first created six- and seven-seeds, there’s no question today’s are an abomination — no way they envisioned a dynastic defending champ and a team with an MVP wing and big. A four-seed is typically a dark horse, yet Phoenix is the favorite to win the West, despite facing a one-seed that features the two-time defending MVP. The eighth-seed in the East, Miami, nearly didn’t make it out of the play-in, but since then they bossed and bumped off top-seeded Milwaukee, then went to New York and took the series opener from the higher-seeded Knicks.
In every series, the story is about the people, not the seed numbers. The Nuggets and Suns are must-see because of Nikola Jokić and Kevin Durant and Jamal Murray and Devin Booker and Chris Paul and Michael Porter Jr. The fact that Phoenix is fourth instead of second or third makes no difference, not a whit. You think the NBA is worried ratings will be down for Lakers/Warriors because they finished the season sixth and seventh? The only number anyone cares about in the Celtics/76ers series is how many games Joel Embiid can play.
All that buzz is because the players are such enormous stars — it helps here that NBA teams are smaller than baseball, football and soccer clubs. That’s what fans care about. You want numbers? This is the first time ever the NBA playoffs saw a five-, six-, seven- and eight-seed all advance. Woo hoo indeed. In fact, the eight teams left run the gamut, with all eight seeds represented among them.
The NBA would be better if it wasn’t held back by archaic conferences
What if there were no conferences? And the league just sent the best 16 records, period, to the playoffs? It would have been amazing, that’s what. The first round would’ve had the Sixers against the Lakers. The Grizzlies facing Golden State. We could have had Knicks/Kings and Nets/Suns, KD’s old team against his new one. The worst pairing, the dreaded NBA TV series, would have been Milwaukee hosting Minnesota – two teams in opposite conferences who are just an hour-long flight from one another.
Maybe conferences mattered back in the day when the league was more parochial. Maybe back then tastes were simpler, and the public only wanted to see the Lakers and the Celtics, Magic and Bird. The 1980s Milwaukee Bucks won 50+ games seven years in a row and reached the Eastern Conference Finals three times in four years. Over in the West, six different teams met the Lakers over nine different conference finals: Seattle twice, San Antonio twice, Phoenix twice, Denver, Houston and Dallas.
You think the public would’ve been cool missing out on Magic vs. Bird to welcome Paul Pressey, Mike Mitchell, Calvin Natt, Rolando Blackman, etc., into their living rooms? Terrific second bananas, all of them; All-Stars and All-Defensive members, all. But even with those credentials, they didn’t draw the eyeballs and interest that today’s second bananas like James Harden, Draymond Green and Anthony Davis do. The NBA has succeeded in popularizing itself for an infinitude of reasons to its infinitude of fans. Conferences bring more confusion than confluence.
It’s simple: if you’re selling teams, you have 30 products to offer; if you’re selling players, you have hundreds. Finding new fans when your game is already globally popular requires fragmentation: if trophies, highlights and real-time legacy shaping aren’t enough to pull in new people, the league will offer them more, e.g. gambling. Two of the biggest demographics moving forward, younger fans and international fans, often identify more with players than franchises. People are more global than ever. The bonds of geography are as outdated as Napster.
The NBA’s biggest competitor is not the NFL; it’s world soccer. That’s their opportunity for significant growth, and they continue to make changes to better position themselves against the beautiful game: soccer has fewer commercial stoppages, so the NBA changes its timeout rules to keep the game flowing better; tournaments like the FA Cup in England are important even though they fall outside of the races for the league title and the Champions and Europa Leagues, helping convince the NBA to create its midseason tournament; soccer audiences tolerate ads on jerseys, thus the NBA anticipates its fans will, too. They have.
The Association should note that the most popular soccer leagues in the world — the Premier League, the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A — aren’t divided into arbitrary conferences. They’re all together: 20 teams in one division. I’ve yet to hear an English football fan gripe that Newcastle and Bournemouth being grouped the same as Manchester City and Manchester United is some sort of crime against nature. The founding fathers might cringe at the thought of looking across the pond for inspiration. If they’d ever seen Kevin De Bruyne or Kevin Durant play, they’d know better. Hopefully, the NBA changes theirs soon when it comes to conferences.
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