Top-Heavy Conference
What is called a “top heavy conference”?
What is the purpose of a conference in basketball?
How are teams divided into conferences?
A ‘top heavy conference’ in basketball is a group of teams in which there a few elite teams at the top of the standings and the rest are below-average. This disparity is usually caused by an immense amount of talent on teams with a higher budget to spend on player contracts, and is most noticeable in the NBA.
Conferences are used to divide all the teams in a league into two separate groups, primarily to make scheduling of games easier. Teams that reside in the same geographic region are usually grouped into the same conference, although exceptions exist in some cases. The NBA’s 30 teams are divided into two conferences (Eastern and Western), with 15 in each one.
The success of a basketball team is almost entirely based on the team’s win-loss record. Teams with a large number of wins and few losses are generally regarded as ‘elite’, while teams that fail to compile more wins than losses are considered below-average teams that usually find themselves at the bottom of the standings.
Top-heavy conferences tend to hurt the league as a whole, as they present far too many situations in which the elite teams defeat the less skilled teams with ease. Viewership ratings suffer as a result, since neutral fans would much rather see a tightly contested battle than a blow-out victory on a consistent basis.