Silver: League Not Considering Conference Restructure

Despite the balance of power shifting even more toward the West this offseason, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league will not consider rebalancing conferences or altering the playoff format for now.

Silver, though, did leave the door open for the possibility of one day rebalancing the two conferences or having a 16-seed tournament.

“Ultimately [two years ago] we concluded that given all the focus on sports science, health of our players and impact of travel, it didn’t make sense, at least at this time, to move to a rebalanced schedule because we played an imbalanced schedule,” Silver said at the board of governors news conference Wednesday.

“Ultimately I don’t recall the precise calculations, but it resulted in significantly more travel for our teams, especially for those teams on the coast. So the conclusion was at least, given the state of science on travel, we are better off staying in the conference system the way we have it and of course same implications for the playoffs. The notion of having teams crisscrossing the country in the first round didn’t seem to make sense to our teams.”

Silver admitted “many” were in favor of a 16-seed playoff when it was examined two years ago.

“Will we look at it again? I assume we will,” Silver said. “I think for the league, many of us felt that a 1-through-16 playoff made more sense and maybe there’s also the potential, in some ways a separate issue, should you reseed after every round as some leagues do? I think those are things we will continue to look at, but it is not at the top of the agenda right now.”

Source: Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN