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Class Warfare: The NBA’s conferences are bourgeois

By Andrew Tobolowsky

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - DECEMBER 7: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver along with Alfredo Castillo, Director of the National Finance and Sports and Culture during a press conference prior to of the Oklahoma City Thunder against the Brooklyn Nets as part of the NBA Mexico Games 2017 on December 7, 2017 at the Arena Ciudad de México in Mexico City, Mexico. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2017 NBAE (Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images)
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - DECEMBER 7: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver along with Alfredo Castillo, Director of the National Finance and Sports and Culture during a press conference prior to of the Oklahoma City Thunder against the Brooklyn Nets as part of the NBA Mexico Games 2017 on December 7, 2017 at the Arena Ciudad de México in Mexico City, Mexico. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2017 NBAE (Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images) /
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Reportedly, Adam Silver is thinking about doing away with conferences come playoff time. To be clear, the idea seems to be that conferences would matter for the purposes of the regular season, but once in the playoffs, teams would be seeded No. 1-16. This is a terrific idea even though it therefore doesn’t go far enough.

The reason is that conferences are so bourgeois. It’s obvious to see what people like about them since they produce rivalries, and games, and memorable subplots — can anyone beat the Cavs in the East, for example. And if what seemed like it should reasonably be happening was actually happening, that is, if there were a generally even distribution of talent between east and west, that would make perfect sense. But there isn’t, and hasn’t been, and there’s some pretty obvious reasons why.

Here’s the basic issue with conferences: we treat them as if they have the same amount of talent, and the same number of good teams, whether they do or not and, specifically, we create our mechanisms for trying to make the NBA more balanced on the basis of that assumption. When that assumption is wrong, as it has been for some time, the result is that talent disparities escalate quickly.

The most obvious mechanism for this messed-up distribution is what we can call the “lottery presumption” — basically, we presume that teams that miss the playoffs are the ones that most need high draft picks to get better. If we didn’t have conferences, that would be true. Since we have conferences, it isn’t. In a season where the tenth team in the West is better than the fourth or fifth team in the East — which may well be the case this year, depending on how you feel about the Jazz — then the better team will also get the much better draft pick.

Were that all, you’d live with it, but there are two other major problems that are based in the existence of conferences. When they are unbalanced, as they have been for a long time, and when the top free agents want to sign with the best teams, the top free agents are going to sign in the West. Second, having more good players, and more good young draft picks, means much more flexibility on the trade market. The Rockets seemed to be sputtering along for several years, finishing just out of the playoffs time after time, but because they actually had a competitive team despite that, which means they had players people wanted, they were able to trade for James Harden, and here they are now.

Really, we’ll probably never know how much the fact that the NBA has, until now, been premised on a relative system of value rather than an absolute one, has changed NBA history. We don’t know how many Eastern conference champs actually wouldn’t have made it through the West’s gauntlet, and we don’t know how every team’s final win totals are impacted by the fact that they play their own conference 52 times and the other one only 30 times. How much better or worse would any team look with a 41-41 split? Who can say.

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But the larger point is that people who want to keep conferences want to keep them because they’re comfortable. They don’t like upheaval, they don’t like radical proposals merely because they’re radical — even if the result would be a more just, a more meritocractic society. In fact, they hate it for that reason. They’re soft, and they’re weak, and frankly they disgust me. This proposal cranks open the door to getting rid of conferences altogether, which is obviously what should happen. Those who cannot survive in the new world do not deserve to.

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