The NBA's Board of Governor, at whose helm is Commissioner Adam Silver, in cooperation with the Players Assocation, had a busy summer with plenty of exciting changes to show for it. "We always want to offer a product on the basketball court that is most competitive, exciting and fair to all teams. Parity is the goal," Silver said. The first announcement of new division reassignment took effect as team organizations soon on-the-move received official notice of the positive vote. The vote is believed to make for more competitive divisions.
Secondly, teams will now only have six seconds to cross the half court boundary before being whistled for a violation. This rule change is expected to increase tempo of the product to hold fans' interest better and reward the opposing team's defensive effort and penalize the offense for not being able to advance the ball in what the league describes as "a timely manner", as in recent history on several occasions there has been countless near-violations, were it not for the eight-second duration bailing out the offense due to a desperate long heave of a pass. The next rule change will revert what has become the "World vs USA" rookie/sophomore players during All*Star Weekend back to being "Rookies versus Sophomores" as the league has cooled on the idea of foreign talent matching up against American talent, given the prevalence of foreign talent in today's game. Going back to basics on the concept will also re-focus on the development of two-years players against promising rookie talent.
Finally, and most exciting of all, is a restructuring of the playoffs. The noise finally got too loud to ignore any longer, as re-seeding the playoffs for competitive balance over viewership concerns has been a hot topic for years, given the ebb and flow of the eastern conference. Who wants to see the Lakers or Clippers knock the other out before the NBA Finals? Push will naturally come to shove, but we could potentially see the Spurs against the Lakers/Clippers for the NBA Title--not just for the Western Conference crown. Moreover, it would eliminate a one-sided, usually four-game sweep of a mediocre #8 seed by the dominant #1 seed. This rule change resonates as a timely move, honestly, given the bombshell news of Giannis Antetokounmpo heading to a western conference team.
The rule change will instead honor win/loss records of the top 16 highest-performing teams, with relative advantages in bracket placement like we've had so far (i.e. we won't see the #1 & #2 win/loss teams squaring off in the first round). It almost guarantees that if the best teams play well, they should meet at the end--not somewhere in the middle like in years past. It could also showcase cross-conference match-ups, as we could wind up seeing a total of 9 contests between two teams that normally only see each other twice in the regular season before seeing potentially seven more cross-conference games in the NBA Finals. The division reassignment will also alleviate travel burden on teams far away from the other that wind up facing each other. Moreover, the NBA Finals (usually a travel-heavy affair) could possibly have both the Lakers/Clippers or Knicks/Nets or Mavericks/Rockets staying home for seven games, eliminating most home court advantage and travel altogether. It is also believed the re-seeding decision will encourage teams in the running for a playoff spot to compete even harder, and for those teams that may have given up, to enter the fight since there is now a chance to face an inner-conference opponent, or perhaps a rival team out west. And who doesn't love rivalry games?
