Let top NBA seeds pick their playoff opponents

An annual plea to establish some additional benefit to winning a top seed.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Cattleya Orchird and Three Hummingbirds, Martin Johnson Heade, 1871

For years, NBA pundits have called for the league to allow the top three seeds in each conference to pick their first-round opponents from among the lower seeds. The WNBA did this for a minute — the WNBA is a 12-team league and has had some weird playoff structures — but the NBA has never tried it. Every year, there’s a great example of why this would be beneficial to the league as a whole and make the playoffs a little more exciting. This season is no exception.

The concept:

• You decide your 8-team field in each conference through the play-in tournaments.

• The No. 1 seed in each conference picks their first round opponent from among the Nos. 5-8 seeds in their conference. Most of the time, they’ll just pick the No. 8 seed.

• The No. 2 seed in each conference picks their first round opponent from among the remaining bottom three seeds.

• The No. 3 seed in each conference picks their first round opponent from among the remaining bottom two seeds.

• The No. 4 seed matches up against the last team remaining.

• This is all televised like the All-Star Draft with a day’s gap before the start of the first round. Put it on TNT, for the love of the Basketball Gods. A representative from each top-3 seed is on hand to announce their pick. Live cams in war rooms and whatnot.

That’s it.

Why is it important this year in particular?

• Look at the jumble in the East. The Heat are now favorites to win the No. 1 seed. That might earn them a series against the Brooklyn Nets to start out the playoffs. Should Kyrie Irving be able to play at home and Ben Simmons return to action, you might imagine that the Heat would prefer to play the Cavaliers, Raptors or even Bulls in the first round. Haven’t they earned the right to have a less challenging first round by winning the No. 1 seed?

• The same thing applies to the Suns out west. Phoenix would probably smoke the Lakers in the first round, again. But if LeBron and Anthony Davis are healthy, and the Nuggets didn’t get their Nikola Jokic co-stars back, or the Timberwolves seem a lesser threat, why should the Suns not get the benefit of a more manageable opponent?

• On a similar note, it appears the 4-5-6 seeds in both conferences will remain extremely tight. So the 3 seed may or may not get the preferred opponent in the first round — it’s pretty much random chaos to determine their opponent. And if it’s not random chaos, it could be left to teams trying to lose games to avoid certain match-ups. Wouldn’t it be better if teams were desperately trying to win games late in the regular season to get the better seed?

• Why would you fight for No. 4? Because that eliminates you from being “drafted” by the Nos. 1 or 2 seed. So if you’re the Cavaliers and you’ve been snakebit by injury and think the Heat or Sixers might draft you into a first-round match-up, you fight like hell to get to No. 4 to face the Celtics or Bulls (or Nets!) instead. If you’re the Jazz and you fear the No. 2 Grizzlies or Warriors picking on you, you fight like hell for No. 4 to avoid that and get a Mavericks or Nuggets match-up instead.

• What if CP3 and Devin Booker went to James Jones and Monty Williams and said, “We want the Lakers. Pick the Lakers.” Can you imagine LeBron’s Instagram caption?

• What if Joel Embiid went to Daryl Morey and Doc Rivers and said, “I want the Nets. GIVE ME THE NETS.” Just incredible potential drama.

Chaos is an integral part of sports, and trying to erase chaos often backfires. See: replay review. But this is an area where removing a little bit of the random nature of how the game functions could increase competition levels at a critical time in the season, where overall competition levels fall. The play-in had this very goal and this very effect. It’s unanimous that the play-in has been a huge success in boosting regular season competitiveness among a swath of impacted teams. The effect for the opponent draft will be smaller, but it’s still worth pursuing.

After all, creating this extra drama that fans have agitated for over years — like with the play-in and the All-Star Draft — has been working. There’s a lot of upside and not much downside here: create bigger benefits for winning regular season games, create a 30-minute soap opera broadcast, spice up some of these rivalries.