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It's time to blow up the NBA playoff system

Why let bad East teams keep some worthy West squads from postseason?

Image: Dwight Howard, Samuel Dalembert
H Rumph Jr. / AP file
Samuel Dalembert, center, and the 76ers have just a .450 winning percentage but would be in the playoffs if the season ended today.
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OPINION
By Mike Celizic
NBCSports.com contributor
updated 9:47 p.m. ET March 3, 2008

Mike Celizic
If the reason to have playoffs is to give the best teams during the regular season a chance to duke it out for the championship, the NBA is in big trouble. As it stands now, some of the best teams in the game will be sitting at home and teams that have won 15 fewer games will be pretending that they actually belong in the league’s showcase event.

Just look at the standings. If the playoffs started today, the New Jersey Nets would be in the playoffs with a .441 winning percentage, and the Denver Nuggets would be out with a .593 winning percentage.

Also out would be the Portland Trail Blazers with a .517 winning percentage, while going to the dance would be the Philadelphia 76ers, who are blazing along at a .450 clip. In the East, the Wizards, who are one game under .500, are just about a lock for the playoffs.

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This is a double whammy for the league and the teams involved. While teams like the Nets may benefit from two home games at playoff prices by making the playoffs, they don’t make the NBA draft lottery. But the Nuggets, who are one of the league’s better teams, do. The lottery and the draft are designed to make bad teams better. In this case, it makes a good team better and bad teams worse.

Better to just ditch the whole East-West thing and simply take the six division champions and then the next 10 best teams on winning percentage. That, at least, is fair, which is more than can be said of the current system.

At a minimum, adopt a rule that no team that can’t win at least as many games as it loses can get into the playoffs until all teams that can meet that simple test of mediocrity are in first. If there are any slots left, then let them go to the conference that has the fewest teams in the playoffs.

I know that no playoff system is completely fair. That’s something we accept as a fact of life. But the situation the NBA is facing is so blatantly wrong it demands a change in the way the playoffs are structured.

And no team so demonstrates that as the Nuggets. They stand in ninth place in the NBA West, 1.5 games behind the Warriors. If they had the same record in the East, they’d be the fourth seed in the playoffs, good enough for a first-round series as the home team. (Actually, if they were in the pathetic East, they’d probably be playing .650 ball and be in third place, challenging the Pistons and the Celtics for supremacy of the conference – and the overall first seed in the playoffs.)

If this were a one-year deal, you could dismiss it as an aberration. But since Michael Jordan retired for the second time after the 1997-98 season, the West has won seven of the subsequent championships, with the East’s only titles going to Miami two years ago and to the Pistons in 2003-04.


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