Playoff Seeding Proposal

[Brooklyn Nets (Andre)]

Sup y’all - got an idea I’ve been thinking about that I wanted to share

What needs to be fixed:
- We have no home court advantage so there is no incentive near the end of the regular season to win if you have a playoff spot locked up.
- This doesn’t happen as much but teams might try to tank to secure playoff matchups. (Ex: I’m the 2 seed but I want to play the 6 seed instead of the 7 seed, I’ll try to lose to slide to the 3 seed). This seems backwards to try to lose to have a better chance of winning. It would be more sensible to incentivize winning at all costs

Proposed change:
- Top 3 seeds in each conference can choose their first round opponent in order of highest seed
- For the most part, the expectation is that the 1 seed would choose to play the 8 seed, 2 seed would choose the play the 7 seed, etc. But this way the highest seeds in the conference can take advantage of late season injuries to key opponents, total games played during the playoff weeks, IRL team matchups, etc.
- This shouldn’t change much in practice but it does incentive winning all the way up until the start of playoffs to be rewarded with the advantage of information-based decision making.
- This continues into the second round. The highest seed of the four remaining team gets to choose their second round opponent and the 2 leftover teams play each other.

Example scenario:
In the Eastern Conference playoffs:
1 seed chooses to matchup against 7 seed
2 seed chooses to matchup against 8 seed
3 seed chooses to matchup against 5 seed
4 seed gets left with the last remaining team, 6 seed

7 beats 1
2 beats 8
5 beats 3
4 beats 6

2 chooses to face 7
4 then faces 5

2 beats 7
4 beats 5

2 beats 4 and advances to the finals

Logistical adjustments:
- Seeding can potentially go up until the night before the first day of playoffs. So top 3 teams will have a quick turnaround to pick their opponent.
- The window of time for decision making is 12:00am CST to 6:00pm CST (realistic window is 8:00am CST to 5:00pm CST)
- 1st seed must make a matchup decision by 11:00am CST otherwise they default to playing the lowest seed
- 2nd seed must make a matchup decision by 2pm CST otherwise they default to playing the lowest available seed
- 3rd seed must make a matchup decision by 5:00pm CST otherwise they default to playing the lowest available seed
- 4th seed defaults to playing the last available seed

[Heat GM (Bryan)]

Hi Andre, first of all great writeup.

A few things I wanted to call out though,

Tanking isn't allowed in the league and there are rules to stop teams from making moves that allow them to tank.

Another one being this would open a can of worms in terms of top seeds getting favorable matchups because of injuries, sellers at the deadline etc

Examples: I get 1 seed but it was a close back and forth all year with the bucks who ended up with seed 2. Going into week 1 Giannis and Lamelo decide to rest for that week, I can now make it easy on myself and take the 2-seed matchup in round 1 and get a real threat out early. While sure this awards me for getting the 1 seed, but its too big of an advantage and this isn't something that happens in the real NBA and that is the goal at the end of the day. To emulate real-life scenarios as much as possible.

[Brooklyn Nets (Andre)]

Sanjul, to address your concerns real quick:

I agree the league does a good job policing blatant tanking especially at the bottom of the standings. I think there are 2 other categories, passively competing and actively competing. Actively competing is all the stuff the grinders are doing (making deliberate start/sit decisions, using the waiver, G league call ups, being active in trade talks to secure wins).
Last couple weeks of the season is when you see a lot of passive competing, since all you need is a top 8 seed.
The hope is that this proposed change grabs more of the passive competitors and converts them to active competitors with an added incentive for winning. 

For your specific example involving the Bucks and injured/resting players, if that scenario were to happen, another team benefits. The specific example leads to the 7 seed randomly being rewarded with a light first round matchup. My argument is that this matchup shouldn't be just left up to chance, but it should be a reward for the team that had the most wins throughout an entire season. 

Totally get the argument that this reward could be too much, but I think it does address some concepts that could be improved