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Sports

NBA has another mess to clear up 

The Original

Eli Jabbe

The NBA regular season is ending this week and the scenarios for the postseason are becoming clearer. Like previous seasons, the final weeks have featured exciting drama.

The Los Angeles Lakers stumbled into the playoffs with a victory over Seattle on Sunday. Kobe Bryant, as he has done often this season, carried the Lakers on his back with a 50-point performance. However, he didn't take the large number of shots he usually takes, finishing with an efficient 18-of-25 performance from the field. 

The win solidified the Lakers' place in the postseason, but it doesn't change the fact that the team will likely be first-round fodder for heavyweights such as Phoenix or Dallas. The Lakers will need Bryant to have monster performances in each playoff game in order to have a chance to win in the postseason. There's little doubt Bryant welcomes this challenge.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Indiana Pacers have been eliminated from playoff contention. This season has been bitter for Indiana, fell just short of the postseason after a loss to the New Jersey Nets on Sunday. This campaign has been the worst for the Pacers in almost a decade; they had a similarly poor season in 1988-89. 

In addition to these last-minute happenings, the Orlando Magic made the playoffs for the first time in three seasons. 

The weirdness of the standings situation is perhaps the most alarming thing about the NBA playoffs. 

For example, the Cleveland Cavaliers have one of the better records in the Eastern Conference at 48-32. Statistically speaking, that's the third-best mark in the East and should be good for a No. 3 seed in the playoffs, right? Wrong.

Thanks to the complications resulting from the way the playoff seeding is formatted, Cleveland is the fifth-seeded team. Who is in front of them? Teams like Miami, who gets the higher ranking because it won its division.

However, the Heat is clearly not superior to Cleveland. The Heat's record is 44-36, and the Cavaliers are four games ahead of Miami in the standings.

Rewarding division winners regardless of record is clearly unfair to teams like Cleveland and our very own Houston Rockets, who are the fifth seed in the West despite being two games ahead of Utah. The latter will enter the playoffs as the fourth seed in the West because it won its division. 

The NBA clearly has a problem at hand that needs to be fixed in order to guarantee the fairness of the playoff system. 

After all, why should weaker teams be rewarded over teams that have more than proved their worth?

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