Cheers to the NBA Board of Governors for fixing up some rules:
- The three division winners in each conference, plus the best record among the rest of the teams, will be seeded by record. That way there’s no more incentive to lose like the Clippers did. Some people publicly keep talking about Mavericks/Spurs, but the incentive to lose for home court advantage has to be the primary concern here, because it threatened the integrity of the game.
- Playoff rosters will now be as large as regular season rosters, as well as working the same way as in the regular season. I like this change; limiting the playoff rosters as has been done in the past only served to increase the luck factor of playoff injuries.
- In the last two minutes of regulation or in overtime, if you’re down to two full timeouts, one of them becomes a 20. You can no longer take a 20 into overtime. In overtime you only get two full timeouts and a 20 instead of three full timeouts. The goal here is to speed up the ends of games and I guess that’s good; full timeouts feel like they take FOREVER during the ends of close games, especially if teams go back and forth using their last timeouts, such as before Derek Fisher’s 0.4 second shot.