My Thoughts on Reseeding (12) | Favrefan's Graveyard Blog

Never has there been more parity between the two conferences than this year. Every team in the West had 50 wins or more, and two more .500 or better teams that missed the playoffs. The East, on the other hand, had only three teams with 50+ wins, six teams over .500, and a playoff team that is eight games under .500. Thus, the talks of reseeding the playoffs have surfaced. I am a Blazers fan, and were the top 16 teams to make it my beloved team would be in the playoffs. So, I must like the reseeding idea. Right? No.

The big rebuttle against reseeding is travel. For example, Portland would play Boston. I don't really care about this. There's always a day for travel budgeted in, and as long as both teams are traveling it should be as equal a playing field as any. Besides, in the regular season teams make massive road trips with no rest days, so it's not like they aren't used to it.

No, the reason that I don't like the reseeding idea is that the conferences more or less play seperately throughout the season (52 of 82 games, or over 60%, of games are played in conference). They are seperate entities with different rivalries. If we reseed, many rivalries will never meet in the conference (Cavs-Wizards and Suns-Spurs wouldn't meet in the first round this year). Boston and Detroit would have no chance of meeting in the conference finals, and the Lakers and Celtics would have no chance of meeting in the Finals this year.

There's also the issue of what to do with division and conference winners. Would the winner of the each conference automatically get the top seeds, and on down? Because then we would still have the problem of worse teams getting seeded higher. For instance, the 52 win Magic would be ranked at least three spots higher than the 55 win Suns. Thus the resseding wouldn't solve anything. On the other hand, if the reseeding completely ignored divisions, it would eliminate the point of having divisions in the first place.

Thus, the reason I don't like the idea of reseeding because it doesn't really solve anything. There would still be issues with the seeding, it would damage the quality of the later rounds, and it's not like Portland or Golden State was really going to challenge for the title anyway. There is no need to reseed.