Mark Cuban Wants NBA to Expand Playoffs to 10 Teams per Conference

NBA playoff basketball is so much fun that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wants more of it.

And who could blame him, considering his team plays in the tough Western Conference? The strength of that 15-team grouping makes it even tougher to serve as one of the eight postseason representatives year in and year out.

Since 1984, the NBA playoffs have featured 16 franchises that play a tournament-style bracket until one representative holds up the Larry O'Brien Trophy. No squad receives a first-round bye, and winning four consecutive rounds is the ultimate goal.

But Cuban wants an extra four teams in the field, as he explained on Cyber Dust, via Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News:

The full text can be found below:

"

Hey Mavs fans. I had an idea that I proposed to my fellow owners as food for thought

With all the concern about getting a high draft pick taking precedent over winning games , the disparity in talent between conferences and the general challenges of team building, I asked the question..

Why do just 8 teams per conference make the playoffs ? Why not 10 ?

The increased number would reduce the chances of good teams missing the playoffs in the stronger conference

It would make it harder to tank since the chance of making the playoffs increased

It would keep things interesting for fans longer into the season

Teams that suffered difficult injuries would increase their chances of recovering

We could offer a buy [sic] to the best records per conference and let the bottom 2 teams play an accelerated best of 5 series

Curious what everyone thinks about the idea?

"

Now, the inherent flaw with Cuban's idea is that it simply doesn't work logistically, and not because the extra travel expenses would pile up or players would be too concerned about extra games. The format just literally isn't possible, because only giving one team a bye in each conference while the bottom two teams play an accelerated series leaves some squads unaccounted for.

Of course, there's an easy fix.

All you have to do is hand the byes to each of the top two seeds in each conference while letting the bottom four take part in the de facto play-in rounds. Voila. Everything is solved.

Well, kind of. Working logistics still don't make this a flawless idea.

"A larger playoff field would include the good teams in the West that have missed the postseason in recent years," Dan Feldman explains for NBC Sports, also pointing out that teams trying to tank would just go to even more extreme measures. "But it would also include two teams in the East that are even worse than the conference's already-poor No. 8 seed."

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

If we're looking at the best 20 teams in the league, that's easier to swallow. But is the benefit of getting all the deserving teams in the West into the field worth having to watch even more sub-.500 squads from the league's weaker half?

According to Cuban's proposal—with the slight fix in format incorporated—this is what the 2015 field would've looked like. First, the Western Conference:

Created via Challonge.com

Even in the league's strongest section, we'd be left with a team that lost more games than it won. While the Phoenix Suns were entertaining, it's tough to claim they actually belonged in the postseason field last season.

And the arguments become even tougher in the East:

Created via Challonge.com

Do we really need to see four sub-.500 teams battle it out in the new opening round? Is that truly necessary?

It's not like that would be a problem isolated to 2014-15 either.

Only so many wins can be divvied up during any NBA season. Unless the strongest squads were winning around 50 games instead of 60, we can basically guarantee that some of the 10 best teams in each side of the Association will lose more than they win.

And one of those might be a certain team from Texas next year (note: not the Houston Rockets or San Antonio Spurs), given the free-agency trouble it experienced this summer.

There's no perfect solution here, unless the NBA accepts the idea that conferences should be mixed together, a change that would allow the true top-16 teams—or, as Cuban desires, 20—to make up the postseason field.

As long as the archaic notion that organizations from the same conference must first face off against one another persists, we're either going to be dealing with too many teams from the weaker conference or not enough from the stronger one.

Still, kudos to Cuban for supplying an idea for a fix, flawed as it may be, instead of just identifying the problem.

Adam Fromal covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter: @fromal09.