Adam Silver

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver addressed the possibility of reformatting the playoffs without conference affiliations during a news conference today in Shanghai, China.

In a video posted on NBA.com, Silver said the main obstacle is the unbalanced schedule that the league currently has. All teams play 30 games against the opposing conference and 52 against their own, which the commissioner said would have to change to make an open playoff system equitable.

“Our feeling is if we are going to seed teams one through 16, we would need to play a balanced schedule to make it fair for everyone,” Silver said. “It may be as we continue to experiment with the number of days over which we can schedule 82 games that it will create more of an opportunity for a balanced schedule.”

Silver, who said earlier this week that “there’s nothing magical” about keeping an 82-game schedule, believes the league will eventually examine its entire format, from season length and playoff changes to possibly having teams located overseas.

Although nothing will likely happen soon, Silver indicated the league has a long-term goals of expanding international exposure and creating the fairest possible schedule and playoff system without overtaxing its players.

“Counterbalancing seeding the teams one through 16 is also the desire to create more rest for our players, and when possible reduce the amount of travel,” he said. “In adding the extra week to the regular season this year, we were able to eliminate completely four games out of five nights, which is I think the first time in the history of the league we were able to do that, plus we have back-to-backs at an all-time low. If we took the existing format and the additional schedule and seeded teams one through 16, we’ll be adding additional travel because you could have teams criss-crossing the country in the first round.”

Silver cited the WNBA playoffs, which are seeded without regard to conferences, as an example of the format working successfully. He also noted that the West has been a stronger conference for several years and promised that the the league will keep examining re-seeding possibilities.

3:43pm: An update to Wojnarowski’s original article details the currently proposed legislation and we have the highlights here:

• Teams would be able to drop four spots in the lottery. Currently teams can drop no more than three spots.
• The three worst teams would have equal probabilities of landing the first pick.
• The odds for those three worst teams would be flattened, closing the gap between their odds of landing the top pick and the subsequent teams’ odds of landing the top pick.

Another idea that the Competition Committee came up with is to prohibit teams from picking in the top three in consecutive years.

2:37pm: The NBA’s Competition Committee could potentially vote on draft lottery reform prior to the 2017/18 season, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN writes.

Commissioner Adam Silver is a strong advocate of discouraging tanking and could do so by lowering the odds that basement-dwelling teams have of snagging the top picks.

While legislation for reform could be voted on and put in place prior to the season, that doesn’t mean that any changes would necessarily affect next year’s draft. More realistically, Wojnarowski writes, modifications to the lottery process would be phased in over time.

The NBA’s Competition Committee is expected to vote on the idea of sending a formal recommendation to the league’s Board of Governors next week. If the vote goes through, the committee will be able to decide whether to pass the league office’s recommendations on to the next stage of the process or modify them and send them along.

Ultimately it will be team owners with the final say when they, if necessary, hold their own vote on whether or not to implement the recommendations at the Board of Governors meeting in September.

Currently the draft process gives the team with the fewest wins a 25% chance of landing the first pick and a 64.3% chance of staying in the top three.

The team with the second fewest wins has a 55.8% chance of staying in the top three while the third-worst team in the league has a 46.9% chance of staying there.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the five best lottery teams have only a 1.8% to 4% chance of landing in the top three.

Modifications to the weighting system could tip the scales in favor of teams who finished with better records, lessening the temptations of blatant futility.

In addition to the earlier trade deadline that Luke Adams wrote about this morning, the NBA approved several other significant rules changes today. Reducing the number of timeouts per game and moving the mandatory stopping points are among the alterations outlined by Tim Bontemps of The Washington Post.

To speed up the pace of play, especially in the final few minutes, the league’s Board of Governors has cut the maximum number of timeouts from 18 to 14. Also, mandatory TV timeouts have been moved to the seven- and three-minute marks of each quarter, and overtime timeouts have been reduced from three to two for each team.

The 20-second timeout has been eliminated, as Bontemps notes that they actually lasted 60 seconds while regular timeouts stretched to 90 seconds. The new rules consider all timeouts to be “team timeouts” that will last 75 seconds.

Other moves to speed up the game include enforcing the 15-minute limit for halftime and imposing delay-of-game penalties on shooters who walk behind the 3-point line between free throws.

“I would say, in this case, we’re pretty happy with the length of our game,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at a news conference today. “We were more focused here on the pace and flow of the game. What we heard from our fans and heard from many of our teams was that the end of the games in particular were too choppy. I think since I was a kid, that’s an issue people have been talking about, the last two minutes of our game. . . . We think these new changes will have a significant impact, especially at the end of the game.”

Silver also announced an earlier start date to the season to cut down on back-to-back games. This year’s opening night will be October 17th.And although several stars moved from the Eastern to the Western Conference this summer, there are no immediate plans to shift the conference alignment or change the playoff format, relays Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN.com.

The league plans on discussing the current one-and-done rule with the NBA Players Association over the next year with the hope of raising the minimum age for draft-eligible players from 19 to 20, Greg Logan of Newsday relays.

“This year, the projection is that we’re going to have 20 one-and-done players coming and actually being drafted. When we first changed the minimum age from 18 to 19, the following year in 2006, we had two one-and-done players. So my sense is that it’s not working for anyone,” Silver said.

Silver added that teams believe players coming to the professional ranks from college after just one season aren’t as well-prepared as they should be. The league and the union agreed to table this issue in order to finalize the CBA this past winter.

Silver also addressed Phil Jackson‘s comments about Carmelo Anthony. Jackson previously said Anthony, who holds a no-trade clause, may be “better off somewhere else.” The players union took exception with the Zen Master’s statement, but Silver said no punishment for the Knicks executive is forthcoming.

“We did not consider disciplining Phil Jackson for those comments about potentially trading Carmelo,” Silver said. “The view of the league is that it’s not reciprocal. Players can’t trade themselves. Teams can trade players. So there’s never been a history of fining a team or disciplining a team executive for talking about trading a player.”

The commissioner also spoke about several other issues, as Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com passes along. Here are more highlights from his press conference:

• Silver addressed the NBA’s resting issue, calling for owners to be more involved in the team’s decision to rest players. Silver recognized that the league needs to reduce the amount of back-to-back and added that playing less than 82 games will not be considered. “It’s not 82 games, it’s not the length of the season, it’s the time between the games and that there’s a direct correlation between fatigue and injury on the part of the players,” Silver said.
• The commissioner acknowledged that the league has a tanking issue and suggested that changes could be on the horizon. “We’re not at the point where we’re going to have relegation to the Gatorade [Development] League and the way they do in Europe [with soccer],” Silver said. “That would stop it, but we’re not prepared to do that. But I think there’s more we can do to disincentivize teams from that behavior.”
• The league currently has no plans for expansion. “From my standpoint, for the league, you want ultimately a league where 30 teams are in a position where they can ultimately compete for championships and also be economically viable,” Silver said. “From an economic standpoint, we are doing better than we did historically, but we’re still not at a point where we have 30 teams that are profitable. … I also have to look at the potential for dilution of the existing talent we have before we expand. I have no doubt at some point we’ll turn back to it, but at least in my last discussions with our owners on this, most of them said let’s keep focusing on the health of these 30 teams and the quality of the competition. When we feel we’re in a better place with the 30 teams we have, maybe at that point we can look to expand.”