The entire landscape of the NBA could be changing as we know it.
According to Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe of ESPN, the league is engaged in serious discussions with the NBA Players Association and broadcast partners to overhaul the calendar year.
Changes would include a reseeding of the four conference finalists, a 30-team in-season tournament and a playoff play-in. In addition, the regular season would be trimmed to 78 games.
The hope is that this will be brought to a vote at the April meeting of the NBA’s Board of Governors that would implement these alterations into the 2021-22 campaign, which also happens to be the league’s 75th anniversary.
As far as the reseeding goes, the four teams remaining would be ranked according to regular-season record, which would leave open the possibility of the two best clubs meeting in the NBA Finals.
Obviously, in that case, conferences would be eliminated for that round.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who has long been a proponent of an in-season tournament, and the league are working to ensure that teams and players would not be hurt financially by a shortened regular season and actually hope that they would benefit in the long run.
The in-season tourney would feature a divisional group stage of scheduled regular-season games. The six divisional winners will be based on home and away records in the group stage. Those six teams and the clubs with the next two best records would then advance to a single-elimination knockout round.
Players and coaches would be compensated for winning the tournament.
The playoff play-in would feature seeds seven through 10 in each conference. The No. 7 seed would host the No. 8, and the winner of that game would earn the No. 7 playoff slot. Then, the ninth and 10th place teams would battle, and the winner of that game would take on the eighth-place squad to determine who lands the final playoff spot.
Of course, the NBA and NBPA would have to reach an agreement for any of this to happen.
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