The NBA regular season is just about 25 percent completed, and there are still 14 teams in the 15-team Western Conference with legitimate designs on one of the eight playoff spots. What’s more, no one — not even the Warriors or Rockets — has run away with the lead. The top seven teams in the West are within two games, and all 14 playoff-aimed teams are within five games of the No. 1 seed.
This is a mess! Things could sort out over time as teams on the low end hit the skids and the best squads take off. (When Stephen Curry returns to action in a week or so, Golden State might go on a 20-game winning streak just because they can.)
But imagine the West stays this tight and deep. What sort of impacts would it have on the league and the season?
Here are five potential impacts from a messy West.
1. East teams will dominate the top of the draft lottery
As things stands on Monday morning, East teams would have seven of the top eight slots in the NBA draft lottery. The Suns have the second worst record in the NBA (and should end up with the worst given the conference imbalance — bad East teams play other bad East teams more frequently, while Phoenix has no other “bad” West teams to play).
This all means that right now, with the Suns at No. 2 and using the new lottery odds, the East has a 73.5 percent likelihood of winning the No. 1 pick, a 60 percent likelihood of sweeping the top three picks, and a 20 percent probability of claiming all of the top five picks.
In other words, if this West situation keeps up, don’t expect much Zion Williamson or R.J. Barrett in those 10:30 p.m. ET starts next season.
2. Trade market depression
Who in the West will be selling talent if everyone has a real shot at the playoffs? If 14 of 15 teams are looking to add pieces at the February trade deadline, will there be a healthy market where players and picks can change hands? The Suns don’t have many players to move who would be in a playoff rotation.
You’d have half of the East teams potentially willing to deal, and perhaps a few West playoff teams (hello Lakers) would be willing to make big swings to shore up their rosters. But this smells like a recipe for a depressed trade market given all the uncertainty.
The saving grace is the star-studded free agent market. That could have some teams on the lower end of the West playoff race willing to part with talent for all-important cap space. There’s also the matter of a few desperate teams in the West mix, like the Pelicans. That could be a cherry bomb in the proverbial plumbing.
3. A more exciting home stretch
We usually have so many useless games in the last months of the regular season as teams out of playoff contention run out the string. If this keeps up, you wouldn’t see a single game between two West teams without playoff implications until some of these 14 teams begin getting eliminated (officially or otherwise) from contention.
You’d still have some tank battles involved East teams and the Suns, but a deeper potential playoff field decreases the incidence of pointless League Pass plague games in February, March, and April.
(In related news, I am already dreading the West tiebreaker spreadsheet. Although …)
4. West seeding will matter less
If the eventual West playoff teams go into April bunched up, seeding may actually matter much less. Of course, home court advantage is always preferred, but as we saw last season, match-ups matter much more than the number in front of the team name when the difference between the Nos. 3 and 6 seeds is only a win or two. We’ve seen this a few times in recent seasons, where a team that falls to No. 5, 6 or 7 is actually just as good as No. 2 or 3.
Of course, that could lead to some opponent-seeking shenanigans on the final night of the season as teams seek out a preferred first-round foe. That could be solved by the NBA adopting the old G-League policy that the top three seeds in a conference get to choose their first-round opponents in order from among the bottom four seeds.
If we’re talking about potential reforms, we might as well talk about the big one too.
5. Calls for top-16 seeding will reach fever pitch
The push for abolishing conferences for the purpose of playoff seeding has grown in strength just about every year over the past two decades because just about every year the No. 9 team in the West is better — often substantially — than the No. 8 team in the East. Last season was especially egregious: the Nuggets missed the playoffs with 46 wins, and would have been the No. 6 seed in the East but for geography.
The NBA has fully resisted the calls for top-16 seeding and will continue to do so. The more likely eventual solution is a play-in round, which in reality exacerbates the problem by giving even worse East teams unearned chances at the playoffs while putting hard-earned spots in the West at risk.
But if we have three .500 or better teams in the West miss out on the playoffs while a 40-42 team claims the East No. 8 seed this season — as we are currently on pace for — even the reform-resistant NBA may struggled to beat back calls for change.
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