Adam Silver: If divisions exist, winners should be rewarded
NBA commissioner Adam Silver told Bleacher Report Radio on Sunday that the league should reward division winners as long as divisions exist.
The NBA's playoff structure gives division winners an automatic top-four seed, even if a non-division winner has a superior record. San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said before Sunday's Game 7 between his team and the Los Angeles Clippers that the NBA should change its format.
"That should be changed immediately," Popovich said, according to NewsOK.com. "That doesn't make any sense."
Clippers coach Doc Rivers has also said that the NBA's playoff seeding format is flawed.
San Antonio and Los Angeles met in the first round despite the Spurs having 55 wins and the Clippers having 56.
Silver said that the NBA should either go all in with divisions or not have them at all:
"In terms of the fact that a division winner may get a higher seed than a team with a better record in its conference, as you know, that’s the way it’s been. It raises the larger issue of if we should have divisions," Silver said, according to Pro Basketball Talk. "My view is, if we’re going to have divisions, we should be rewarding the division winner. And maybe, people can fairly say, you have divisions, you reward the winner, but you don’t make a big enough deal out of the fact that they won the division, and fans aren’t even that knowledgeable about what the divisions are, and that’s a very fair point.
"I think we should go one way or the other."
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The Clippers advanced past the defending-champion Spurs after winning Game 7 111-109 in Los Angeles.
- Stanley Kay
