Well, the playoffs are set…sort of. There are still some teams jockeying for position, but we now know the 16 teams that will comprise this year’s playoff field.
And the 12th-best team in the league, the Golden State Warriors, will not be playing in the postseason.
We knew this was coming. It has been obvious since the start of the season that a good team from the West was going to miss the playoffs this season. Not only that, but the Portland Trailblazers probably should have made the postseason too.
I suggested this almost a year ago, but what if we threw the conferences out and just seeded the playoffs #1 through #16? Our first round matchups would look like this:
#1 Boston vs. #16 Portland
#8 Phoenix vs. #9 Orlando
#4 New Orleans vs. #13 Cleveland
#5 San Antonio vs. #12 Golden State
#2 Detroit vs. #15 Toronto
#7 Houston vs. #10 Dallas
#3 LA Lakers vs. #14 Washington
#6 Utah vs. #11 Denver
Just look at these storylines: Shaq vs. Dwight Howard, CP3 vs. LeBron, the slow it down Spurs versus the up-tempo Warriors, the Lake St. Clair battle between Detroit and Toronto (separated by just a four-hour drive), the Battle for Texas (Houston vs. Dallas), the Battle in the Mountains (Utah/Denver) and, of course, Kobe facing the team that gave him Kwame Brown.
Potential second-round matchups: Celtics/Suns, Hornets/Spurs, Pistons/Mavs and the Lakers/Jazz. Tell me you’re not going to want to watch as much of that round as possible.
If it were up to me, I’d give the best team in each conference one of the top two seeds, so that would make the Lakers the #2 seed and the Pistons #3.
What do you think? Should we scrap the current system?
