Bring The NBA Madness

The end of the 2010 regular season had been a bitter pill to swallow for the Utah Jazz. Locked in a down to the wire battle with arch-rival Denver, they had held a two game lead with 10 to play. But an agonizing final game home loss to Phoenix, combined with a late Nuggets surge, had cost them the Northwest Division title.. .and with it, the coveted first round bye that the NBA awarded to its division winners. Now, they'd have to run the gauntlet in an 8-team elimination battle for the final spot in the Western Conference playoffs. And the very first opponent would hold home court.

It was Madness. And it was glorious.

The NBA Playoffs, every year, determines with tremendous efficiency who the very best team in the Association is. No outcome catches people very much by surprise, and there is never any Cinderella Villanova-esque team that lives past the second round to spur the imagination.

It is a fantastic spectacle for people who enjoy hoop being played at its highest level. But to the casual fan's eye, it is also about as compelling as watching mutual bonds ripen. It needs a bracket. And single-game eliminations.


Imagine, if you would, the spectacle of 14 do-or-die NBA playoff games in a long weekend of eliminator hoop, with the East teams playing at MSG and the West at Staples. It would give a huge jump start to the playoffs, make division championships meaningful, when they are currently anything but, and severely limit the amount of lottery tanking and meaningless games in April, since we're now giving 75% of the league's teams and players a real shot at being on a Final 8 team.

Led by the silky outside touch of Eric Gordon and the towel-waving, boisterous Staples Center crowd, the Clips take a 10-point lead in the second quarter as Jazz coach Jerry Sloan takes his second timeout in two minutes. With the nationwide TNT audience looking on, the Jazz are in a nightmare scenario and fighting for their lives. Point guard Deron Williams silences the crowd by crossing over Davis and getting to the rack, but the veteran answers with a long three, and the crowd somehow gets louder.

Most NBA teams will lose money this year. The playoffs will be less compelling as they move forward, not more. The games will end in mid to late June, and cause everyone who watches them to wonder if the regular season is pointless at best, or an injury pit designed strictly for fantasy honks. The two weeks of ridiculously drawn out first round action, with so many days off as to prevent any but the most compelling first round series from getting popular attention, don't do anything but give the league's critics something else to mock.


As the top-seeded Hawks angrily take the floor in New York, convinced that the league has set them up against the underdog Knicks, NBA commissioner David Stern, watching from seats close to the court, can only look on and smile. His brave experiment is a success, basketball matters again in the city where it means more than any other, and the cable television ratings and total domination of the mid-April sporting conscious, coming just a week after the NCAA Finals, is just what he hoped for. Regardless of whether or not the Knicks can provide a good game, he'll soon be watching Brandon Jennings against Derrick Rose in a one-on-one battle to see whose season will continue, Larry Brown's defensive Hornets trying to take out Dwayne Wade and the Heat, and Toronto's Chris Bosh in what might be his national free agent coming-out party in a winner-take-all game against Philly, in what might be Allen Iverson's last game.

Yeah, I know. It won't happen. But wouldn't it be a more interesting league if it did?