NBA needs to move to address competitive imbalance

Allen Iverson and the Nuggets are struggling just to reach the playoffs in the West despite being on a 48-win pace. AP

RELATED • McCALLUM: Sizing up the East race

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When the NBA begins its postseason in less than eight weeks, a team with 48 victories could be sitting at home while a team with 36 victories gets rewarded with a trip to the playoffs, whatever prestige or résumé-padding comes with that and, not insignificant, the profits of at least two extra home games.

That's like taking the D students to the baseball game or the theme park at the end of the year, but leaving the B students behind.

Then, when the NBA holds its draft lottery in May, a team with 35 victories could have its nose pressed against the LCD flat panel, on the outside looking in, while a team with 48 victories sends a representative clutching shamrocks and rabbits' feet in his crossed-fingers fists, maximizing its chances of scoring one of the three best prospects in the world.

That's like doling out milk money to the kids wearing Abercrombie and stiffing those decked out in Goodwill.

Some people, even in the league headquarters at Olympic Tower in New York, will frame those above injustices as some sort of yin and yang, a half-empty predicament being rectified by a half-full situation soon after. Or vice versa. Let's cut through that masquerade to call it what it is: Two wrongs allegedly making a right.

And failing miserably.

There is no thrill in watching an overmatched No. 8 seed getting thumped by a No. 1 seed that finished 28 games ahead in the conference standings, just as there is no joy in seeing a team that finished 14 games above .500 vying with the NBA's true doormats for the quick fixes of Michael Beasley or Derrick Rose. Meanwhile, that No. 8 seed that was so fortunate to get swept out of the playoffs barely a week after its regular-season finale has to wait and wait and wait on draft night for the right to select the 15th-most-promising new player.

That's as dreary as a 4-0 Finals, which left a castor-oil taste in our mouths that lingers from last June.

All of this could come to a head again this spring, thanks to a gap between the Western and Eastern conferences that is as big as, or bigger than, any in recent memory. The potential playoff and lottery teams cited above weren't merely hypothetical; they were projections, based on Philadephia's spot among the playoff qualifiers despite its 25-32 record as of Tuesday morning and Denver's current status as a West also-ran with a 33-23 mark.

If those teams continue winning (and losing) at their current clips -- and the Rockets don't splash down now that Yao Ming has been shut down -- the 76ers would make the East field at 36-46, while the Nuggets would be out of the West bracket at 48-34. And that 12-game difference between them -- a topsy-turvy disparity between one conference's worst playoff team and the other's best lottery club -- would be by far the worst in the past decade. Double, in fact, any previous "unfairness'' factor since 1998.

It isn't unusual that what gets a team into the postseason in one conference would send you home immediately in the other; that situation has existed after eight of the past 10 seasons, including last spring when Orlando's 40-42 earned it the privilege of being swept by Detroit while the Clippers' identical 40-42 earned it a lottery shot.

The Clippers being the Clippers, they didn't improve their position at all, yet still landed Al Thornton at No. 14. Orlando's pick, held coincidentally by Detroit, was next at No. 15 and became Rodney Stuckey.

In 2006, Utah missed the playoffs at 41-41, but Milwaukee made it at 40-42. Same pattern in 2005: Minnesota missed at 44-38, New Jersey got in at 42-40. And in 2004, the gap went from Letterman-sized to jack-o'-lantern large, with the Jazz on the outs at 42-40 while the Celtics got in with a 36-46 record.

That six-game difference will look modest if Denver, Portland and even Sacramento keep winning just often enough to finish ninth or worse in the West this season. All three could wind up with better records, by far, than the least of the East playoff teams.

Funny thing is, the West's dominance of the East isn't anything special this season. Through Monday, its 198-146 record represented a .576 winning percentage, right in line with its .579 percentage since the start of the 1999-2000 season. Teams from the West have won about 600 more interconference clashes over these past nine seasons, along with seven of the last nine (1999-2007) NBA championships.

Commissioner David Stern generally has swatted away concerns about the competitive imbalance by saying it is cyclical. Which, unfortunately, is not the same thing as being random. What we have seen over the past three decades -- the 1980s and '90s favoring the East when it was loaded in Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Indiana and even Atlanta for a spell, and this decade swinging to the West -- is that the tilt lasts for a while, often in relation to players' careers.

That's why the NBA needs to fix the system, either by altering the playoffs, tweaking the draft or both.

"I think the league will take a look at that,'' Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said last week. "They changed the playoff system last year because of what happened the year before, where it seemed a little illogical. They changed it. So if they think there's a better way to do it, I think they'll look at it again.''

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