
The NBA is looking into restructuring the formatting of the playoff seeding, Commissioner Adam Silver told ESPN’s Nick Friedell:
NBA commissioner Adam Silver acknowledges that the league will “continue to look at” the possibility of reseeding teams 1-16 in the playoffs, regardless of conference affiliation.
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“Reformatting the playoffs is something we’ll continue to look at,” Silver said before a preseason game between the Golden State Warriors and the Minnesota Timberwolves at Mercedes Benz Arena. “I think though it would require revisiting the regular-season schedule as well. As I’ve said before, we don’t play a balanced schedule now, as I’m sure you know. And for those that don’t, that means that teams in the East play each other more than they play teams in the West. And our feeling is, if we were going to seed 1-16, we would need to play a balanced schedule to make it fair for everyone if we were going to seed 1-16 in the playoffs. It may be that as we continue to experiment with the number of days over which we can schedule 82 games that it will create more of an opportunity for a balanced schedule.”
Related to the balanced schedule, Silver recently said that the NBA isn’t married to the 82-game length of the regular-season schedule.