-MJ

It really makes no sense to re-seed, except if you think that we should, for some reason, reward lower-seeded teams (like the Jazz) for a high seed losing, which is what no re-seeding does.

The Jazz get rewarded for the Mavs blowing it against the Warriors – how does that make any sense?

Just re-seed. It’s simple and it’s fairer.

None of this would be a topic of conversation were the gap between the two conferences not so large. I doubt any of the Western Conference finalists that faced Jordan’s Bulls was the 2nd best team in the NBA (though that may be an interesting topic for another post). “Weak sister” championship competitors are part of every sport. I’m as frustrated as any that the East continues to be the conference wearing the pig-tails and sun dress myself. But it seems to me that it’s more than a slippery slope for any league to create an expectation that all roads leading to a championship should be equidistant. Creating those conditions is far from trivial. It does appear though that the momentum for re-seeding at least is building.

From the Newark Star-Ledger’s Dave D’Alessandro in today’s (Sunday’s) column http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/dalessandro/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1182055018124720.xml&coll=1

But it always goes back to one ineluctable snag: Reseeding would also lead to changing the regular-season schedule to a more balanced format.

“I think that would be unpopular,” Stern said, referring to owners who incur travel costs, “because that would be a fundamental change in how we do things, and it would take a longer time. It’s an idea, but one continuously rejected. The reseeding … it’s interesting. I just don’t know how you would balance it out. (But) that’s something that would get a more open hearing than the issue of playing a completely balanced schedule.”

There is no reason that we can’t come up with a system that will guarantee that the better teams don’t play each other in the earlier rounds.

Any of the proposed systems–seeding 1-16, re-seeding, or even having the East v. West in round one–would work for me. They all lead to the best teams playing each other at the end.

It’s not brain science, it’s common sense.

As for the players/picks listed above, I’m not sure if it works out salary wise (I’m not a forensic accountant, so it is hard for me to make heads or tails out of the salary cap/trade exceptions intricacies).

Speaking of star players coming to the east, how about Kobe in New York? I’m not a huge Kobe fan, but if he were with the Knicks I’m sure I could be. How much would we be willing to give up to make that happen?

-Jamal Crawford
-Channing Frye
-Randolph Morris
-Nate Robinson
-This Year’s first rounder
-Next years first rounder (top 5 protected)

And from the Lakers we would get:
-Kobe

I think this might be a good trade, although its totally possible that they would demand David Lee or Renaldo Balkman, but they already have a hustle player in that mold in Ronny Turiaf.

Exhibit A and B this year are Portland and Seattle. If ranked by RPI (which takes competitive balance into account) rather than record, both Portland and Seattle would have fallen a couple of notches in the lottery rankings. Instead, they were given better odds than they probably deserved. The bias of the system, combined with a bit of happenstance, has significantly raised the odds that the longstanding imbalance between the Eastern and Western conferences will continue into the forseeable future.