There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to shake up the lottery, the playoffs, or anything about the NBA too dramatically. A huge appeal of the NBA is that we have so much history to compare the present game to. Then again, if nobody ever changed anything, the baskets would still have bottoms.
For me, one of the few proposals that feels both dramatic and sensible is to seed the playoffs with the 16 most winningest teams in the league, and throwing out the East and West Conferences entirely. This idea goes a long way in solving the generation-long problem of the West being dramatically better than the East.