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The Soapbox: Realigning The NBA
25th January, 2010 - 2:03 pm

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By Daniel Leroux

One of my pet issues for a while now has been a potential realignment of the divisions to fit where teams currently are. After the depressing departure from Seattle, it seems that the league’s teams are relatively stable in terms of location in the short-term, leading to this being a good time for this restructuring to happen.

The primary factors I considered when making this arrangement:

1. Proximity in terms of both distance and time zone: One of the underrated factors in division-making is creating arrangement is what time zone teams are in. It affects things like game start time and can also provide natural boundaries. One of the big problems with the current Northwest division is that it covers three different time zones, meaning that Portland plays a fair amount of games that start shortly after 5PM while Zombie Sonics fans have games that start after 9PM for them.

2. Actual geography: It has bothered me for a while that there are Western Conference teams farther east than Eastern Conference teams.

3. Maintenance of rivalries: While I don’t believe in taking it as far as the NFL has with the NFC East, some divisional feuds are worth maintaining.

Here is my proposed alignment:

Western Conference

Pacific Division (every team whose state touches the Pacific Ocean):
LA Lakers
LA Clippers
Golden State
Sacramento
Portland

Untitled Texas+ Division:
Phoenix
Dallas
Houston
San Antonio
Oklahoma City

Midwest Division:
Minnesota
Chicago
Milwaukee
Utah
Denver

Eastern Conference

Dirty South (Southeast) Division:
Charlotte
Atlanta
Orlando
Miami
New Orleans

Untitled Second Mid-West Division (I don’t think they’d be cool with “Rust Belt”, especially including Toronto):
Cleveland
Detroit
Indiana
Toronto
Memphis

Atlantic Division (added benefit of each being in a state that actually touches the Atlantic):
New York
Boston
Philly
New Jersey
Washington

A change like this would also fit well with moving to a playoff format where the top 16 teams got in regardless of conference. Ideally, each division winner would be guaranteed a top-eight seed and they would re-seed in each round of the playoffs like the NHL and NFL do already.
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