While the World Cup has Americans thinking about soccer for five minutes, now would be the time to talk about a system used in European Football called “relegation”. As an incentive for teams not to tank games or threaten to move to other cities for better stadium deals, many leagues drop the bottom three or four teams in the standings to “second tier” leagues–and “bring up” the three of four top teams from the lower division to play in the bigs the next season. When the English Premier League finished their season a couple of weeks ago, I saw a team and their fans celebrate finishing in 14th place–thereby avoiding relegation–like they had just won the championship.
Obviously, we don’t have relegation in our American sports leagues. However, the NBA is moving very close to it. With LaBron James signing with the Los Angeles Lakers on Monday, the Eastern Conference is left with no teams even remotely capable of winning a league championship. Consider that the team LaBron played for–whether it be Cleveland the first time, the Miami Heat and Cleveland again–had represented the East in the Finals for eight consecutive seasons. And I would be hard pressed to recall a year when one of those LaBron teams was even challenged in the first three rounds of the playoffs.
The Lakers then added a few other pretty good players to surround LaBron on Monday, believing they now have the talent to challenge the two-time defending champion Golden State Warriors–who have been to four straight finals. But the Dubs had a surprise for the Lakers as they signed the best center in the league–which admittedly isn’t saying much anymore–in Boogie Cousins to shore up their greatest weakness. Throw in Houston maintaining their high-scoring lineup and the Western Conference is a conglomeration of “super teams” stacked with All Star talent–while the East is riddled with second tier talent and teams that are going nowhere fast. There was serious debate on Twitter last night among sports talking heads if the Eastern Conference All-Star team could beat Golden State and the consensus was that it would be a close game.
So now the NBA is left with the greatest imbalance of talent in sports since the National League dominated the American League in baseball back in the 1960’s–as NL teams were more willing to sign Black and Latin players than owners in the AL. And a system of relegation has developed where it’s not teams being promoted to the big show–but rather the star players leaving the lower division teams behind. Of course, the NBA isn’t going to call much attention to this one-sided conference structure. Instead, they will point out that the “East is wide open now–with any team capable of making a run go the Finals!”
What the Association should really do is run two separate playoffs next year–one for the Eastern Conference teams and allow the winner of that to join the Western Conference next year–where they can play for what will really be the NBA Championship.
