What League Needs Is a Reformat Movement

Don’t blame the San Antonio Spurs and New Jersey Nets for this low-scoring, low-rated NBA Finals.

The root of the problem is the league’s playoff format, a structure that needs to be changed as soon as possible.

It’s too late to save this postseason, so we’re stuck with a series that gets worse by the game. Only one team scored 100 points in Game 1, neither team reached 90 in Game 2, and Sunday night only one team topped 80.

That would be the Spurs, who beat the Nets, 84-79, to take a 2-1 lead in the series, a series they’re now urged to end as quickly as possible.

How much more of this do we have to take? The Nets don’t have the manpower to beat the Spurs consistently, and the Spurs lack the killer instinct to stomp on the Nets authoritatively.

Both teams are defense-oriented, which can make for some brutal ball. The 33-30 score in the first half was the lowest two-team halftime total in NBA Finals history.

“It was like a European game,” said Tony Parker, San Antonio’s French-bred point guard.

Great. We expected the NBA Finals and we got Benetton Treviso vs. Kinder Bologna.

What happened to the two best teams playing for the championship? With the talent tilted toward the Western Conference, it’s currently impossible. But some tinkering could come as close as possible to guaranteeing it.

NBA Commissioner David Stern hinted at a chance of a format change in his comments to reporters Friday night.

He said the owners discussed additional realignment when they added the Charlotte expansion franchise, and “in connection with that, we solicited input and will be soliciting further input on any questions relating to this [talent disparity], which we would consider at the same time.”

Consider this unsolicited input: Fill out the playoff brackets with the 16 best teams, regardless of conference, and seed them top to bottom.

Keep the four geographic divisions, but flip the reward for winning the division. Currently a team is assured of being seeded at least No. 2 in the conference if it wins its division, but will not hold home-court advantage in a playoff series if it faces a team that had a better regular-season record.

To preserve the balance of the tournament brackets, drop the seeding guarantees ... but give division winners home court over non-division winners to retain some incentive for the regular season.

If that format were in place this year and the seedings held true, the semifinal matchups would have been San Antonio vs. Minnesota (or perhaps the fifth-seeded “Cinderella” Lakers) and Dallas vs. Sacramento, with San Antonio and Dallas meeting in the Finals. If the Lakers had beaten the Timberwolves, as they did this year, the changing-of-the-guard Laker-Spur series would have occurred in the “Final Four,” not the second round.

There would be a problem of some teams having unfair advantages because of different schedules for teams in the Eastern and Western conferences. But teams play different schedules in the NFL, and it doesn’t detract from that postseason.

Perhaps the start of the playoffs would not be as exciting as this year’s first round, but the payoff would be better matchups later on. And that’s what the NBA playoffs should be: a crescendo that builds toward June, instead of peaking by Memorial Day.

Don’t do anything short-term such as divisional or conference realignment. Stern was right when he said everything’s cyclical. No one talked about the West’s superiority when Michael Jordan led the East’s Chicago Bulls to six championships in eight years in the 1990s.

The NBA is the only league in which the move of a single player can alter the balance of power, as Shaquille O’Neal did when he left Orlando for Los Angeles in 1996.

But a conference-free playoff system could absorb that, instead of letting geography dictate the postseason.

Last year’s high point was the classic seven-game Western Conference finals between the Lakers and Kings. Although the Nets tried their best in the Finals, there never was the sense they could win the series -- or even a game. They knew it and their fans knew it.

The Spurs won’t win this by default. But the Nets don’t have the right weapons to attack them. Their leading scorer, point guard Jason Kidd, ranked 31st in the league in points per game. They’re at their best in transition and when he’s driving to the basket.

But the Spurs are stifling the Nets’ half-court offense with their two big men and their increasing use of the zone defense.

The Nets shot 37% Sunday, and the Spurs weren’t exactly sizzling at 42%

“There’s not going to be a lot of high-scoring games,” Net Coach Byron Scott said.

Thanks for the warning.

Michael J. Fox was at Continental Airlines Arena. Maybe he can hop in that souped-up DeLorean, travel back in time and alter the course of history so we could have a Finals matchup under a revised playoff format.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.