The NBA Score: Adam Silver is right... it's time to change the Playoffs

With 20 games of the NBA regular season to go, the two best teams in the league are not in doubt. The Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors are reaching a level none of their 28 rivals can come close to. What a shame, then, that should their paths cross in the playoffs it will not be with the sport’s greatest prize on the line.

The two Western Conference juggernauts seem bound for a meeting in their Conference Finals, a contest that is likely to decide who has the honour of comfortably beating pretty average Cleveland Cavaliers or any of the other unconvincing challengers from the East.

It has the potential to be one of the great NBA series of recent years, the apogee of the league’s infatuation with the three point shot as James Harden, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry and Chris Paul duke it out along with their exceptional supporting casts.

Across three meetings this season, Golden State has a winning margin of one point but two defeats. Last month’s meeting in Houston was one of the games of the season so far, Paul putting in a virtuoso display on both ends of the floor that constituted a timely reminder of how he has all too often been left out of the conversation surrounding the NBA’s best point guard.

With no more meetings in the regular season the two seem bound for a collision course in the playoffs, though the Oklahoma City Thunder, Minnesota Timberwolves and a Kawhi Leonard-less San Antonio Spurs may believe they can force a bump in the road.

Meanwhile the Eastern Conference is very much going to type. The Toronto Raptors are an exciting young team who have outperformed expectations. The Cleveland Cavaliers might just have fixed their sink of a defence. The Boston Celtics are defensive virtuosos. Should one of them or a dark horse like the Milwaukee Bucks come out of the East, they will not disgrace themselves.

But make no mistake, ceteris paribus, the Finals will not pit the league’s two best teams against each other. NBA commissioner Adam Silver is right to consider changing that, seeding the playoffs solely on a team's record rather than keeping teams in their Eastern and Western Conferences.

"You would like to have a format where your two best teams are ultimately going to meet in the Finals," Silver said at his press conference during All Star weekend.

"You could have a situation where the top two teams in the league are meeting in the conference finals or somewhere else. So we're going to continue to look at that. It's still my hope that we're going to figure out ways.”

It will need 20 of the league’s 30 owners to vote in favour and would require a significant reorganisation of the schedule to ensure that were Boston or New York to find themselves heading out to Los Angeles or Portland in the first round, neither side were unduly punished for their air miles.

But ultimately if the purpose of the playoffs is to allow the league’s best team to rise to the top, splitting the last 16 by conference is unjustifiable - as the Warriors can well attest.

In 2016 the Warriors battled their way back from 3-1 down against the Thunder in one of the great series of the modern era, as Curry just about held himself and his injured ankle together to force his way past Durant and Russell Westbrook. When it came to the Finals they were too battle-weary to overcome LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, even though they took a 3-1 lead of their own.

The Cavaliers, by contrast, had swept two of their series out East before brushing past Toronto in a 4-2 win that was vastly easier than that scoreline suggests.

It is hardly the first time that the Western Conference has proven to be a brutal scramble for supremacy, while the East has been a serene march to the Finals for James. That is not to say he would not have hit similar heights over his career had he been playing in Los Angeles, Golden State or perhaps even Sacramento, but the truth is there has been a significant imbalance between the two conferences for quite some time now.

James, however, is resistant to any playoff changes. "It just changes the landscape of the history of the game," he said.

”If you start messing with seedings and playoffs and then you start talking about, 'Well, if this team would have played this Western Conference team, what [if] …'"

He added: "I think our league has been built the right way as far as when it comes to the postseason. There's been dominant conferences throughout time.

“In the '80s you had the Lakers who dominated the league at one point, then you had Boston that dominated the league. In the '90s you had Chicago that dominated the league. San Antonio also had its run. We had our run in the East with Miami; Golden State is having their run.”

Though the East has had its fair share of champions in recent years, all bar one of them in the last decade had one significant factor in their favour: King James himself.

And while the rest of the East remains so far behind the standards being set by the super-teams out West, there can be little justification for the status quo.