Quote:
Originally Posted by pilight
The NBA and NHL have made winning a division irrelevant. Geographic realignment is a step towards expanding the playoffs to an NBA style tournament with 16 teams included each year.
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I think people are way overstating the case for realignment here but this is just dumb “new things bad” thinking thrown in with the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Like, it’s just a stupid argument, and comparisons to other leagues do not make it smart.
I will point out here that the current NBA system where only roughly half the teams make the playoffs is actually, historically speaking, a very low number for them. After the ABA merger they had the same 16 team playoff (does the play in count as playoffs? I say no, since if a 9 or 10 seed gets in they do so at the expense of a 7 or 8) with… 22 teams, 23 after adding the Mavericks in 1980. Throughout the 50s and 60s they ran 8 or 9 team leagues with 6 of them playing in the postseason. This in short is always how the NBA has done business and if anything the move to only half the teams making the playoffs in the 90s is the new thing they’re trying out.
The sky will not fall down if baseball moves divisions around. Creating divisions in the first place didn’t kill the leagues; in fact, it kind of did the opposite because nobody cares if you were 4th in a 10 team league but in a 6 team division you might be able to contend for a title. I think that even the boomers here are mostly young enough to accept that yes, league championship series were a good add. Personally I’m down with the divisional round as well, especially since it allows the leagues to use a wild card instead of splitting into tiny divisions. If they split it out to like 12 teams and a 3rd round, meh. I’ll live. There’s just no evidence that the league wants to move beyond that, unless they expand more and more playoffs begin to make more sense.