Why nba finals format

May 20, May 17, November 10, Want every headline right at your fingertips? Sign up to receive NBA emails! But a team that spent six months outplaying its competition deserves a meaningful edge in the Finals.

Breaking up that streak of three road games and ensuring that a typically pivotal Game 5 will be played in the arena of the team with home-court advantage makes that edge mean a little more.

Looking at this year's matchup, the San Antonio Spurs were markedly better than the Miami Heat during the regular season, amassing 62 victories to the Heat's Now, if the Spurs split the first two games in their building, they won't face the possibility of elimination in three straight roadies.

That's a clear advantage for them, and one they earned through superior regular-season performance. Maybe the Heat will come out with a greater sense of urgency, knowing they won't get a chance to swing the series with a trio of contests in Miami. Then again, it's hard to imagine either team will be looking ahead at the series setup in the early going.

This is the Finals, and the two teams that have survived this long have done so by focusing on the task at hand and mentally eliminating excuses.

Ultimately, the scales won't tip significantly. And the decision to go back to the more sensible format was as much about practicality as it was a desire to increase the advantage of the team with home court. The Spurs head into these Finals looking more formidable than the Heat.

They're deeper, survived a tougher conference and probably should have beaten Miami in six games last year. This schedule tweak isn't designed to throw the Finals into total upheaval. But it's going to change things just a tad, perhaps tipping things in San Antonio's favor ever so slightly. It is safe to say that although arguments can be made in its favor, many fans, writers, and players have viewed the NBA Finals format as fundamentally unfair to the team that enters the series with home court advantage.

If the home team loses one of their first two games at home then it could easily spell doom for the presumed favorites if their performance cannot match up with their travels.

The Heat lost Game 1 to the Spurs and were immediately behind the eight-ball because of the impending fear that the Heat had to take one game out of San Antonio in order to just bring the NBA Finals back home for a Game 6.

For Miami, that sigh of relief came in Game 4 when the Heat took a win from the Spurs to tie it up and bring about the Game 5 that we just talked about. The Heat lost the battle, but they won the war by bringing the series back to South Beach and holding their home court in the last two games to win it all. It did not work out for the Heat in They had the same series deficit against the Mavericks and went down like Sonny Liston in Game 6 as Dirk Nowitzki won his ring.

The next year, however, as the series was tied at two games apiece, instead of Boston hosting the Lakers in the pivotal Game 5, it was played at the Forum, where the Lakers won by 9. Boston, however, could not hold their home court and the Lakers won Game 6 to win the title in the Boston Garden, which still irks Celtics fans today.

Bostonians grimaced at the time that if the previous format had stayed in place, the Celtics would have won the title. The only team to lose Game 6 at home and still win the title was the Spurs against the Pistons, which goes to show how evenly matched that Finals actually was.

And even though the Celtics and Spurs came damn close in and , no road team won Game 7 of the Finals in the era. Sure, it is only two out of potentially seven games in the NBA Finals that get switched up at the end of the day. The format is not exactly a revolutionary concept, as any fan of Major League Baseball will stand up to tell you, but what I always found curious is that it never received an official slang term or nickname over the years.

Those middle three games were heavenly for a team if they took a game on the road in the first two and held their home court. Ask the Pistons, who laid a smack down on the Lakers in Games 3, 4, and 5 to clinch the title in Detroit. The Heat did the same thing to the Oklahoma City Thunder in But that worm tended to turn at times during the Finals, too, and your home island wound up more maddening than the Island of Dr. I remember as a kid thinking that the Lakers had won the title in after taking Game 1 from the Bulls in Chicago.

Little did fans in Lakerland know what was about to occur. The Bulls soundly won all three games in L.