Granted, pooling all the teams would be a reversal of the trend, but I never understood where this fixation with division winners came from. Okay, well, maybe I do -– more playoff games equate more money (which equates ticket prices that have gone up more than double-digit percentages in the last 10 years?) Baseball started the craze in 1995, and the other three soon followed suit, and before you know it, Atlantic Division Champions banners joined the rafters alongside the plethora of World Champion flags in Boston Garden.
But if I could use the 2008 playoffs as Example A, the divisional structure has created some strange, Twilight Zone-esque situations. What kind of world is it where a higher seed — the Utah Jazz — cede home-court advantage to a lower seed? As the series winds toward Game 6, the Utah-Houston matchup has easily become the most intriguing competition out West, but if this contest comes down to a deciding Game 7, the higher seed will play on the road, making about as much sense as Keanu Reeves being cast as Frank Sinatra.
The schedule would no longer be weighted, as every team would face the other, say, three times, for a grand total of 87 games. Thomsen declares this method would never work because, among other reasons, it would “ruin any hope of creating divisional or regional rivalries.” Really? If San Antonio and Dallas didn’t meet as often, that rivalry would go the way of the telegraph? Call me an idealist, but I don’t buy it. Regional rivalries will always exist – look no further than the Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Yankees fights of yesteryear for proof that a glut of regular season meetings don’t mean squat.
And don’t give me this “travel sucks” baloney. This isn’t the post-Depression 1930s, and you are not the Boston Red Sox catching the 9:30 train to St. Louis for a night game with the Browns. It is now the 21st century, a time in which a phone can turn into a TV and anything is just a click away. As Tony Stark said in Iron Man, the charter flights will wait on those flying, not vice versa.
Thomsen: 4. The tournament wouldn't necessarily improve.
Thomsen penned this while the playoffs were in their infancy, so he didn’t have the fortune of hindsight now available. Beyond the obvious fact that, based solely on record, Golden State and Portland would have put up better fights than Atlanta and Philadelphia, Thomsen’s claims of series being “better” or “worse” is both trivial and irrational. For example, he says that New Orleans vs. Cleveland would have been “worse” than Cleveland/Washington or New Orleans/Dallas, but I can guarantee no one would take a bathroom break in New Orleans Arena while LeBron James went toe-to-toe with CP3. And how did that Phoenix-San Antonio whoever-wins-this-series-will-win-the-West struggle turn out? With the exception of the ESPN Classic-worthy game 1, the Suns turned out to be terribly over-hyped, and Steve Nash’s inability to properly dish the ball meant that the series was sealed long before it was over.
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