Being a huge NBA fan and even having one small NBA connection to the league I thought I might throw out my final thoughts on this whole circus.

Nets-Lost big in this whole thing. I don't think they were ever a serious contender for LBJ. They even missed on Boozer. They have a few nice players but not close enough for any FA.

Knicks-Pay max money for a guy I don't think much of. Amare is everything what the regular season is about. Dunking,highlights and running the floor. Looking good. Amare is everything the playoffs are not about. All those things I listed do not win you playoff games. He is a terrible defender, awful rebounder and seems to be a flake at times. My one known connection has said that Amare is a "me me" player. NYC will run and look good with this pick up but will they win playoff games? I highly doubt it. Lebron knows this and knows that defense is a big key to winning championships. The NY Suns have yet to prove that they can do that. They had a great shot just because of the city but outside of that there wasn't much there.

Clipper-No need to even get into that. Their history killed their chances.

Da Bulls-As many know... I live and breath the Bulls. Since 91'. On the Lebron side of things I think you would have to be crazy not to join the this roster with Boozer on it. Between the city and the team. There are some rumors and even my connection said that the Bulls meeting didn't go as well. The bulls challenged him to take on the thrown of Jordan and for fill the legacy. They also noted that his "group" wouldn't have the free access to United Center and could come and go as they please. The Bulls basically said they are a non sense team and thats how they handled Jordan and won six rings. If that's how it really went down and then I say that's how I want my team. The NBA isn't a play ground for your "dudes" and "boys". If yoou wanna win... Come to Chicago. If you wanna play around and have everyone bow down to you than go else where. I love the Boozer signing and that makes us a better team. A championship team? No. But we can make a nice run. The more this has the gone on and more info I get... The more I am not hurting about losing Lebron.

Heat-The worst fans in the world. The biggest fair weather city. Can't sell out Miami football games unless they are winning NCs. Heat games last year are empty. The Knicks,Bulls,LA and even the Pistons sell out almost every night. Even if the teams aren't that great. Wade played the Bulls I think to pull their efforts from Lebron to him. Also with this whole documentary thing, it just smells of poor play. Bosh is so desperate to be a star it's sick. I won't even get into it. I can't see Jordan calling Ewing and Magic and saying "Hey guys lets just hook up". It's boring and gutless on so many levels. Jordan wanted to kill you. He was a killer. He didn't want to play with you. He wanted to beat you. Are you really gonna give up your prime to go play Robin to Wade? Are you gonna go be Pippen 2.0? Are you gonna cap your talent now? So sad for all basketball fans. I don't see how these three can win a NBA Title. Signing a bunch of Globe Trotters and having Bosh/Wade/LBJ isn't gonna beat the Lakers. I'm sorry Heat fans. And when they don't win a title you heat fans can go back to not showing up to the basketball games.

The Cavs-So sad. Even for someone who is a Bulls fan has to feel for this city and team. To be real, the Cavs roster is not gonna win this man any titles. Mo is a regular season player and playoff fraud. Jamison is a nice solid NBA player but won't make you a champion. Big Z is done. It's not a good roster. I think it's over and it's too bad. I wish you guys good luck. They will never forgive him for this Circus.

So my final % of tonights events.

Heat 49%
Cavs 40%
Bulls 6%
Knicks 5%

Sometimes I think Lebrons camp just puts this junk out so we can think one way and than he will go another. It's gotten so out of control I don't even know. I could be way off. Enjoy the Circus kids.

I loved Bill Simmons take.

In May, after the Cavs were ousted in the conference semifinals, I wrote that LeBron was facing one of the greatest sports decisions ever: "winning (Chicago), loyalty (Cleveland) or a chance at immortality (New York)."

I never thought he would pick "HELP!"

14. LeBron joining Wade after his 2010 playoffs flameout, in my opinion, is like Conan O'Brien getting kicked in the teeth by NBC, then overreacting and forming a late-night version of "The View" with Chris Rock, Adam Carolla and Jeffrey Ross over trying to create his own show somewhere else. (Note to Carolla and Ross: Don't get excited, it's only a hypothetical.) Total cop-out. The move of someone who, deep down, doesn't totally trust his own talents any more. And maybe he doesn't.

15. What should LeBron do? Pick Chicago. That's where the rings are. The fact that he didn't say to Bosh, "Come to Chicago with me, we'll play with Rose and Noah and win six titles together" was the single most disappointing outcome of the summer. That team would have been a true juggernaut with pieces that actually complemented each other, unlike this pickup-basketball situation that's brewing in Miami. Even with Boozer there in Bosh's place -- and I think he's a great fit for them, with or without LeBron -- it could still translate to multiple titles, because Rose could have been the best second banana since Kobe in 2001.

Just know that Kobe would have caught a whiff of those rings and gone to Chicago. Same with Jordan. Same with Magic and Bird. Chicago had the biggest competitive advantage of anyone: room for two max guys along with an under-23 franchise point guard and one of the only elite defending/rebounding big men in basketball. How can you care about winning and NOT go to Chicago?

The NBA Playoffs are a mixed bag. On a structural level, the NBA Playoffs are decidedly flawed. Basically every structural element to the NBA Playoffs is terrible, and the only saving grace to this structure is that the various flaws actually serve to mitigate each other. The reason for this is that the NBA has recognized several of the idiotic elements of the playoff structure and adapted their playoff structure to mitigate the effects of these elements, rather than simply eliminate them.

On the other hand, the structural idiosyncrasies of the NBA Playoffs do yield several advantages from an entertainment standpoint to the NBA Playoffs. Combined with the inherent advantages of basketball games themselves, the NBA Playoffs become one of the most entertaining championship systems on a game-by-game basis. Unfortunately, this comes at the completely unnecessary expense of diminishing the overall narrative of the playoffs.

To begin with, let us look at the inherent advantage that basketball games have in a playoff atmosphere, namely that basketball is a high scoring sport, which leads to two positive results. Firstly, the score often changes multiple times every minute. In a playoff atmosphere the stakes are much higher than during the regular season, which in turn leads to elevated attention that lasts the entire game, unless it turns into a blowout, whether it is high or low scoring. Secondly, the high rate of scoring can lead to close games including multiple high-important scoring plays in the final minute, which can result in multiple swings of emotion for each team’s supporters in a way that slower paced sports cannot match. To look at this in another way, we can consider sports as a series of events (scoring) and buildup to events. As basketball is high scoring, it benefits from having a much higher number of events and buildups, which is beneficial in a playoff atmosphere where a fans attention to the game is already elevated.

This inherent advantage that springs from basketball games is the biggest positive of the NBA playoffs, as it makes every game exciting in a way that football, baseball, and hockey are not (this is not to say that football, baseball, and hockey do not have comparable merits, but they do not benefit as much from a playoff atmosphere). Unfortunately, the NBA Playoff structure is an abject failure of taking these individually games and turning them into an exciting narrative. The primary reason for this is that the NBA has too many teams in the playoffs.

Here are the records in games and series for the upper seed in the first round since 2003, the year that the first round became a best-of-seven series:

Matchup	Game Wins	Game Losses	Game %	Series Win	Series Loss	Series %
1-8	54	17	0.761	13	1	0.929
2-7	56	19	0.747	14	0	1.000
3-6	45	32	0.584	9	5	0.643
4-5	46	37	0.554	10	4	0.714

Notable here is that the 1 and 2 seeds have a combined series record of 27-1 (the lone loss being Golden State over Dallas a couple years back) and are 110-36 in individual games. Now, one could argue that this makes the 7 and 8 seeds underdogs that otherwise disinterested fans can root for, a la mid majors in the NCAA Tournament. While this is an interesting notion, it’s also inaccurate. Professional teams rarely can generate any type of national support unless there is something about the team itself that would lead fans to root for them. For instance, many people rooted for Golden State over Dallas because Golden State had been very bad for a long time and thus stirred national sympathy (the same thing exists for teams like the Cubs). However, there was no great outpouring of support for say, the Detroit Pistons against Cleveland last year. The result of this is that the 1-8 series and 2-7 series are typically uninteresting formalities featuring teams that generally do not deserve to make it to the playoffs.

The logical solution to this problem is to remove the 7 and 8 seeds. The 3-6 and 4-5 seeds could play either a play-in game or best-of-three series to face the 1 and 2 seeds, as that way the more deserving 5 and 6 seeds would still make the playoffs and the 1 and 2 seeds wouldn’t have a long layover that would make them rusty. Alternatively, the bottom four seeds could just be scrapped, an idea that has merit, as no team in the bottom half has made it past the conference semifinals since 8^th seeded New York made it to the NBA Championship in 1999, a lockout-shortened season in which New York finished 6 games out of first place. Before that, the Houston Rockets won the NBA as a 6-seed in 1995, the lowest seed ever to win the championship.

To finish off, we will examine the two elements of the NBA Playoffs that unnecessarily detract from their ability to award the best team or most deserving team the championship. First of all, the expansion to three divisions, combined with division winners getting a guaranteed top 4 seed, is terrible in conception. The NBA has already had problems with this issue in 2006, when the worst team in the Western Conference Playoffs (Denver), was awarded a high seed for winning its division. This is patently unfair to teams who amass better records in the regular season, as it forces them to face a much more difficult path to the finals.

The other poor structure in question is the bracket used by the NBA. In the NCAA, the bracket structure to the tournament serves two purposes. The first is to make the tournament more entertaining, as it spawns bracket pools across the country. The other is practical in origin. It is impossible to play more than four games at a single site. If teams were reseeded after every round, they would either have to find a way to play an entire regional at one site, which would take a very long time, or go to the expense of flying teams around the country on with very short notice for both the teams and fans as to where their next game will be. Both of these measures are impractical, thus making reseeding impractical. These issues are non-issues for the NBA and the bracket fails to make the NBA Playoffs more compelling. Thus, it makes much more sense to reseed the teams every round rather than have a bracket system, because reseeding teams serves to lend weight to the regular season and thus give it more meaning. The NFL and NHL recognize this, which is why both leagues institute reseeding and thus have fairer playoffs. The only thing to be said about the bracket structure in the NBA is that it mitigates the problems of its asinine seeding structure, which really makes one wonder just what on Earth led the NBA to institute this system in the first place…

Probably something money related.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for those interested. Next in the series will be the NFL, to round up the professional leagues.