A Brand New Day for the NBA

In the wee hours of Monday morning, I heard footsteps approach from the direction of my youngest son's room just as I hit the sack. A moment later, the bathroom light went on. Knowing a call for help would soon be coming, I got up to find him standing at the toilet. After paying compliments on his duty, I wished him a happy birthday.

"I still three," he corrected as he looked out the window into darkness. "It's not sunny yet."

There is something assuring in a young child's gravitation to natural order that can help us all to see through the fog. Light follows dark, and a new day begins when the sun rises. When that order is disturbed - for instance, starting a birthday at some arbitrary point in the middle of the night - normal behavior is disrupted. My four-year old son sees this. Why NBA Commissioner David Stern does not have the same intuition at the age of 63 is an enigma.

In November 2003, the Commissioner proposed a playoff reformat to accompany the addition of the league's 30th team. However, his format disturbs the natural order of rewards by conferring top seeds to each conference's three divisional winners regardless of record, this despite the irrelevance of the divisional structure.

An NBA division is no more than a collection of teams that share the same time zone. They face each other four times, but they also play six of their ten remaining conference foes just as much. Any empowerment of a divisional champion flies against the league's conference orientation and catalyzes market inefficiency.

Enter the Los Angeles Clippers, arbitrageurs of the hardwood.

Strictly speaking, an arbitrager capitalizes on market inefficiencies, such as the one Stern created in this second season of his new format. The Denver Nuggets, winners of the Northwest Division despite the eighth best record in the Western Conference (Sacramento would have won the tiebreaker), earned the third spot. Lucky the sixth seed who hosts the Nuggets in the first round of this year's postseason. That spot belonged to the Clippers down the stretch and they weren't about to trade up.

Not even on that mid-April night in Memphis, where the Nuggets Bowl was hosted. A clippers win against the Grizzlies would have locked both teams in a tie for fifth in the West where a date with the Dallas Mavericks, owners of the second-best conference record, awaited. On the other hand, a Clippers loss would seal the sixth seed and a pairing with Denver.

The biggest threat to Head Coach Mike Dunleavy and his Clippers was the possibility of the Grizzlies playing down to the level of their own disincentive, but he devised an infallibly fallible game plan. Dunleavy benched three starters for the entire game and sent journeyman center Vin Baker out to take the opening tap, a privilege Baker no doubt anticipated as something entirely different from what it was. When your big man's only chance for a double double is by posting up to the hotel's bar after the game, your odds of losing are favorable.

The Clippers got themselves down by 18 before Memphis ever saw the bus that hit them. As it happens, that bus eventually carried them off to an appointment in Dallas.

On Monday night, the ramifications of the Nuggets Bowl became manifest. The Grizzlies were eliminated during prime time while the Clippers wrapped things up against the Nuggets hours later.

It gets better. The Clippers stand to reap further rewards tonight when the Lakers can close out the Phoenix Suns at home in the Staples Center. Thanks to the absence of reseeding, that would set the stage for the first playoff series in NBA history - or any league for that matter - hosted entirely in the same arena. By comparison, the Subway Series looks transcontinental. The Clippers can sail to the Western Finals without ever leaving their home court.

Arbitrageurs are also the catalyst for restoring efficiency even as they go about their opportunistic foray. Front offices across the league will contend for the services of Vin Baker next season. Perhaps the Commissioner will offer a new postseason format that possesses more natural order in its seeding - for instance, alphabetic. Of course, GM Elgin Baylor would then rename his team the Anaheim Clippers of Los Angeles, secure the top seed, and hammer Utah in the first round.

Meanwhile, 29 other head coaches will be busily spend the off-season appending their playbooks with chapters dedicated to game-losing schemes. A whole cottage industry for incompetence could rise this summer. After all, every team has D-Leaguers of their own, and turnovers and deliberate misses can only go so far if everyone is doing the same thing. It comes right down to this: you may have to put the ball in the basket for the other guy if you really want to lose.

Of course, the other guy wants a lower seeding than you and isn't about to stand around letting you score points for him. He'll have defenses committed to stopping you. Players like Shaq and Ben Wallace who can really clog up the middle will be in vogue.

Now, you're really going to have to hurry things along because you must beat the defense not in the traditional 24 seconds allotted, but in eight. Otherwise, you'll incur a backcourt violation and the other guy will get his chance to score for you. What is needed are good ball movers like Jason Kidd and Steve Nash, maybe even some creative shotmakers like Kobe and Vince Carter.

Before long, it may start to look like a real game again, one even faster than the original as teams diligently attack their own baskets and defend those of their opponents under tighter time constraints and with the best players available.

Leave it to the NBA, the league that introduced the coin flip into its draft process because it understood before all others the dangers in providing an incentive to fail. Forty years later, it has taken its game to another level by providing an incentive to fail.

And I thought Commissioner Stern was too myopic to foresee daylight following night.