Time to do away with meaningless divisions

Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook are on the brink of clinching the Northwest Division ... not that it means much, really. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

Friday night may bring the ridiculous spectacle of the Thunder, who play in Oklahoma City, which is located here, raising a banner to commemorate their Northwest Division championship. It’ll provide the latest example of why the NBA needs to scrap its current divisional alignments, which sometimes make little sense, particularly in the Western Conference, and occasionally provide division winners with tie-breaker advantages they don’t deserve. 

Boston was the beneficiary last season, since its triumph within the putrid Atlantic Division gave it the automatic tie-breaker over Atlanta (a division runner-up) in the race for the Eastern Conference’s third seed — even though Atlanta swept all four head-to-head games with Boston. The Lakers are guaranteed a similarly undeserved tie-breaker edge this season, since they may well end up as the only team to finish over. 500 in their division. It won’t matter, since the Lakers will almost certainly finish with a better overall record than Dallas and Oklahoma City and thus win the No. 2 seed purely on merit. It didn’t matter last year, either, since Atlanta finished three games ahead of Boston, but the principle remains: It’s a very silly way to break a tie. 

Divisions have made sense, historically, in creating rivalries and easing travel burdens. But their importance on both counts is way down now, given how the schedule works. Each team must play four games against the other four teams in its division and two games against every team from the opposite conference. That amounts to 46 games. The remaining 36 games come against the 10 teams within your conference but outside of your division. You play six of those teams four times each, the same number of times you play each of your divisional mates. You play the remaining four clubs just three times each, and the identity of those four teams changes each year based on a set rotation. 

The result is that you play 10 of the 14 teams in your conference four times each. For the Celtics, there was no real difference this season between their traditional Atlantic Division rivals (say, the Knicks) and the Bobcats. This balanced scheduling structure mostly eliminates the travel-related benefits of having divisions. It’s nice that Boston has so many games against nearby teams in New York and Philadelphia, but it doesn’t really matter all that much if they have the same number of games against the Florida teams. 

I grew up in Connecticut, living and dying with the Atlantic Division, but I wouldn’t care a bit if the NBA did away with it tomorrow. Folks have come up with all kinds of interesting ways the league could solve this issue, ranging from special intra-divisional tournaments to realignments that would at least make the Western Conference divisions more geographically sensible. 

Look: The NBA is not going to do away with the West/East conference system itself and stick all 30 teams into one big pool, no matter how much some might agitate for that kind of system whenever a team like the Pacers gets into the playoffs ahead of a team like this season’s Rockets. As cushy as today’s travel conditions might be compared to what players went through flying commercial in the 1960s, it’s still a bit much to have the Clippers traveling to Boston just as often as they hop to San Francisco. 

The easy thing would be to do away with divisions and have two 15-team conferences — the East and the West — and rank teams 1-15 within those conferences for playoff-seeding purposes. The league could maintain a nearly identical scheduling system and lose nothing but traditions no one cares about and tie-breaker advantages that make no sense. 

I’m honestly not sure why the league isn’t already built this way, or why there isn’t more agitation among fans for this kind of change. Am I missing something? 

In his piece about the importance of the Thunder’s divisional crown, Darnell Mayberry of The Oklahoman makes the case that this is a significant moment in franchise history even beyond the fact that it is one of the team’s first notable accomplishment in its new home:

But since the NBA realigned divisions in 2004 to create the current five-teams-among-six-divisions format, exactly half of the league’s 30 teams have been shutout from a division crown. In the previous six seasons prior to realignment, 17 of the then-29 teams did not win a division title.

There’s more.

Only 14 teams have won at least two division titles since the 1998-99 NBA season. Only six have won three or more. Seven teams since 1998 have garnered just one division title.

I read those same facts and come to the opposite conclusion: Half the league’s teams have won a division title in the last eight seasons! Is this really a meaningful accomplishment? I’m not taking issue with the Thunder — or any team — celebrating a division title as long as such a thing exists; raising a banner is nice, and unless you’re the Celtics or Lakers, you don’t have more than a handful of championship banners to raise. 

But  banners and ancient divisional rivalries are not enough to justify a system that, as is, has no relevance anymore.