NEW YORK: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said on Wednesday that the league is skeptical in abolishing its conference-style format since it would involve excessive travelling for players across the country. The NBA estimated that teams would see an increase of 150,000 travel miles in the post season if it decided to choose amongst the top 16 teams in the competition by playing in the round robin format, raising concerns of player burnout. The last season saw teams clocking 1.4 million travel miles.
Recently, NBA legend LeBron James completed a transfer from last season’s finalists and Eastern Conference team, Cleveland Cavaliers to Los Angeles Lakers in a record $154 million, 4-year deal. The move has seen mixed reactions as some of them suggested that his presence in a Western Conference team would make the Eastern Conference weaker, reducing its competitiveness to make it to the playoffs the next season.
“I think, as I’ve said in the past, the obstacle is travel, and it’s not tradition in my mind, at least,” Silver had said during the All Stars game in February.
“It’s that as we’ve added an extra week to the regular season, as we’ve tried to reduce the number of back-to-backs, that we are concerned about teams crisscrossing the country in the first round, for example. We are just concerned about the overall travel that we would have in the top 16 teams.”
“It’s still my hope that we’re going to figure out ways.”
“Maybe ultimately you have to add even more days to the season to spread it out a little bit more to deal with the travel. Maybe air travel will get better. All things we’ll keep looking at.”, he added.
Should the NBA choose amongst the top 16 teams, the league would have an uphill task of balancing the schedule so teams played the same amount of games in the regular season against East and West teams, instead of playing more against the teams on its side.
In 2016, the WNBA switched its playoff format to the top eight teams instead of by conference.
