Seeds and match-ups

After dropping the series opener at home and then the first two on the road, the Dallas Mavericks face a 3-1 deficit in their series against the Golden State Warriors. The Mavs are the number one seed in the Western Conference, and if the NBA playoffs were March madness, they would have many a bracketeer sweating over potentially losing their projected winner in the first round. Mark Cuban is pissed. (I'm speculating. Don't quote me on that.)

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everyone would have picked the Warriors to upset Dallas. After all, entering the series Golden State had won five straight against Dirk and company, and were the only team Dallas didn't beat this year. So, the question is, given the choice, would Dallas have selected a different opponent in the first round, and pawned the Warriors off on somebody else?

I think sports fans and analysts generally underestimate the importance of match-ups in all sorts of situations. Or maybe I underestimate sports fans and analysts. But the guys on TV have been saying since game one that the Mavericks were going to come around and win this series. And some of them will surely continue to say so even if Golden State leads game five by fifteen points entering the fourth quarter.

Can't we see by now that the Warriors are a really bad match-up for Dallas? They make Dirk Nowitzki, who normally dominates games at the offensive end and gets lots of rebounds at the other, take silly shots and look like just another middling player.

The Mavericks only lost 15 games during the regular season, three of those coming against Golden State. Factor in multiple losses to Phoenix and Utah and you get 18 teams against whom they swept their season series. This is a team that matches up well against almost everyone. It seems they would have been better off playing any other team in the first round, even Phoenix or San Antonio. At the very least, losing to one of those teams would not carry the same embarrassment.

But, in fact, the NBA has explicit measures in place to prevent Dallas and San Antonio from meeting too early in the playoffs. Despite the fact that divisions within the conferences are almost meaningless in terms of scheduling (teams play division foes four times each, and a total of 36 games against the remaining ten conference foes, meaning four games against six teams and three against the other four teams), they account for the divisions when they seed the teams for the playoffs.

Except now they have this exception. So even though Utah and Miami were division winners this year, they didn't get the 3 seeds. They got the 4s. San Antonio and Cleveland garnered 3 and 2 seeds, respectively, despite not winning their divisions. But, it stops there. Houston and Chicago, despite having better records, respectively, than Utah and Miami, did not get 4 seeds (or 3, in the case of Chicago, who also had a better record than Toronto). Except, for all practical purposes, Houston is the 4 seed, and Utah the 5, because Houston got home court advantage in the series.

Anyone want to argue that this isn't nonsense? The divisions are practically meaningless, except to organize a few playoff match-ups. Practically speaking, there is no ill effect in the Western Conference this year, because only Utah and Houston swapped seeds, and Houston appropriately got home court advantage. But in the Eastern Conference, the 6 seed Nets got to play Toronto, who had the fourth best record, instead of Chicago. And the poor defending champion Heat was swept away by the Bulls as a result. Oh well. Who wants to see Shaq win again, anyway?

The most equitable system, if we want teams with better records to have an advantage, is probably to let the highest seed choose its first round opponent from among the seven other conference playoff teams, and then let the 2 seed, assuming it's not them, choose from the other five, and so on. That way teams like the Mavs can avoid unfortunate match-ups against generally poorer teams. (Golden State may be a special case this year, because they benefited from a trade at the deadline and played very well down the stretch.) Barring that, teams should at least be seeded according to their records, rather than their more or less arbitrary divisions.