NBA playoff travel is already a burden ... for West teams

This NBA pushback against open playoff seeding -- taking the 16 best teams regardless of conference and seeding them appropriately -- is making me mad not simply because it’s happening but because the excuses are pretty lame.

The league says playoff miles travel would increase more than 40 percent, and there would on average be two or more playoff series between teams separated by at least three time zones before the Finals, with a 90% of at least one such pairing every year.

Guess what? We already see big distance playoff series. They just happen to exclusively exist in the Western Conference.

Thirteen of the 15 Eastern Conference teams are in the Eastern time zone, with the other two in the Central time zone. So there simply cannot be huge playoff series distance latitudinally speaking. A 3-hour Miami to Toronto flight is about the worst you’ll get in the East under current orientation.

The Western Conference is way more spread out, with seven teams in the Central time zone, two in the Mountain time zone, and five in the Pacific time zone. So necessarily their travel burden will be greater.

If travel burden is the real reason NBA franchise owners won’t approve open seeding, then they are clearly fine maintaining the deeply unequal travel burden on Western Conference teams. The Central time zone Pelicans had to open playoff series on the Pacific seaboard in two straight rounds this year.

But hey, no one in the Eastern Conference had to cross the Mississippi before the Finals, so the system works ... for half the league.

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