Reading Grantland today, Zach Lowe had a fantastic column (as usual) on the glaring and frustrating imbalance between Conferences in the NBA. It's a narrative that everyone is aware of, and it's been a part of NBA life dating back all the way to at least the 80's. One Conference always seems to be way stronger than the other. This, obviously, creates several competitive balance issues, particularly in regards to how postseason eligibility is determined and how scheduling is done. There will, in all likelihood, be teams (TEAMS! As in more than one!) in the West this season that win 45 plus games and miss the playoffs, while the bottom seeds in the East will be at or below .500. And this occurs despite the fact that East teams get to play 22 more games against the East than West teams do. Zach Lowe covers the issue much better than I could in his column, so I'd recommend reading it if you haven't done so already.

Searching for Balance: The NBA’s Lopsided Conference Problem

This fan post is about the idea I had today as I was thinking about NBA realignment. I'm primarily trying to get my thoughts out in front of me to get a better grasp on them, but I'm also hoping for some discussion on potential solutions on what is clearly one of the NBA's largest shortcomings. Although I'm not really sure anybody even reads FanPosts so maybe I'll just end up being some weirdo shouting opinions to nobody in particular while those nearby pretend not to notice. I'm pretty okay with either scenario.

So without further ado, I present to you, The NuggetsGonnaNugg Stone Cold lead pipe lock to fix the NBA's competitive balance issue as well as possibly global climate change and Hot Pockets that are still frozen in the middle master proposal:

To begin with, each team would play every team twice, once at home and once on the road. That puts us at 58 games right off the bat. From a basketball standpoint, we could probably just call it good right here. But owners tend to enjoy money (weirdos), and unless they magically forget that they have always gotten 41 games worth of gate revenue, a significantly shorter season is not happening. So we need more games. Around 24 more. And there are 30 teams. And you want the schedules to be relatively even. And everyone has to have an equal number of home and away games. And there are travel issues. And concerts booked at arenas. And player health is a concern. It all adds up to change being a Nurkic of a problem (again, Lowe paints a much prettier picture than I am capable of, read his column).

The solution that I came up with involves placing every team into season-long, 10 team divisions determined based on the previous year's standings. Each team would play the other 9 teams in their division two more times, once at home and once on the road. These additional 18 games could all be played at the end of the season, at the beginning, spaced throughout the other 58, home-and-homes, or you could even have teams hosting consecutive games as mini baseball-esque series. This would put us at 76 games a season, meaning each team would have to sacrifice 3 home games, far from an unreasonable request.

An individual team's schedule would look like this:
2 games against each of 20 NBA teams, one home, one away
4 games against each of 9 NBA teams, two home, two away

So really not a whole lot is being changed from the current schedule as far as games played, how the schedule is put together, how travel works for teams, etc. The big change comes from the divisions.

There are a lot of different ways that the divisions could be put together. I'm sure there's some algorithm's you could compile to determine the most fair way to do it, but I went for simplicity because I was doing all of this over my lunch break and I wanted time to attempt to enjoy my underwhelming salad that seemed like a good idea at the time. Essentially, my method was to take the standings from last season, and group the teams into groups of three in order from 1st to 30th. So group A would be Spurs, Thunder, and Clippers, group B would be Pacers, Rockets, and Trail Blazers, and so on down the line. The top team in group A would then be placed in a division with the second place team in group B, the third place team from group C, the 1st place team from group D, and so on.

This is what the Groups ended up looking like, with divisional teams highlighted in the same color:

Here's what the divisions would look like this year:

It's not a perfect system by any means but it's pretty fair overall. There might be better ways to put the divisions together but overall you could feel pretty confident that teams are playing relatively equivalent schedules. Playoffs would be the top 16 teams based on record seeded 1-16. Each season would start fresh with new divisions, you'd see a lot of different teams on a year-to-year basis, and overall the schedule could be put together pretty similarly to the current one.

The biggest issue I see is that there is a significant amount of roster and coach turnover from year to year in the NBA, so basing the schedule off of last year's standings may not always be effective. Teams like Cleveland have splash free agencies while teams like Oklahoma City and Indiana have bad injury luck. But the NFL has been making their schedule with similar concepts for years and it seems to work pretty effectively. Usually when one team steps back there's another team to step forward, and it seems unlikely that one division would be significantly unbalanced in comparison to the other two.

There also may be some owners hesitant to sacrifice three game's worth of home gate revenue. But losing 3 games isn't exactly going to bankrupt an organization, Plus they could make up for it by hosting international professional basketball tournaments which would be a lot of fun for everyone involved (I know it's never going to happen but I will always long for it and you can't make me stop).

It also doesn't do a very good job preserving traditional rivalries, but any sort of alignment overhaul is going to justifiably be putting those as a second priority to competitive balance. And as Mr. Lowe pointed out, geography will preserve many of those rivalries. I'd also add that today's NBA in many ways has become just as much about mini-rivalries that sprout up for a few short years and then fade away based on circumstances. Spurs-Heat, Spurs-Thunder, Bulls-Celtics, Heat-Pacers, Lakers-Kings all come to mind.

I'm past the point of rambling here, but the more I think about this the more I like it. I think it's a best of all worlds solution. I like it better than any of the proposals that were mentioned in the column and I think it, or a similar system, would be relatively easy to implement without rocking the boat very much.

For my great work, I'll be expecting to hear from Commissioner Silver on my job offer as Associate Commissioner any day now, but I'll only take the job if he agrees to change the NBA logo to a picture of Rocky the Mountain Lion eating a Taco Bell taco and/or shopping for a car at Kuni Lexus. I would also settle for a silhouette of Gallinari doing his Bellissimo celebration.