Two of the NBA’s best teams, the San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks, are on a collision course for a second-round playoff series, yet few basketball fans are happy about it. The problem has little to do with the longtime rivalry between the two Texas teams. No, folks are disgruntled because of the timing: This clash of the titans is slated to happen a round too soon.

Logically, the two best teams in the conference should, barring an upset, meet in the conference finals. But the NBA’s playoff setup, in which the three division winners get the top seeds and a second-place team, regardless of record, can do no better than the fourth seed, is flawed. The 2005-06 campaign has seen that inequity taken to an absurd extreme.

Going into last night’s action, the Mavericks’ 59-19 record placed them eight games ahead of the Western Conference’s no. 2 seed, the Phoenix Suns, and a whopping 15 games ahead of the no. 3 seed, the Denver Nuggets. Yet if there are no first-round upsets, these lesser teams will battle in one series while Dallas and San Antonio (currently 60-18) play in the other conference semifinal. In other words, the best and second-best teams will play for the right to meet the winner of a series between the third- and fourth-best teams. This is the sort of thing the NCAA pays people a lot of money to prevent.

The NBA has offered only perfunctory “we will have to look into it in the offseason” responses to the problem. There is, however, a rather simple solution: Let the first-round seedings remain in place – they do serve the important purpose of rewarding teams for winning their division – but reseed the teams in the second round according to their regular season record. Not only would this avoid scenarios such as the one likely to occur in the Western Conference this year, it would increase the drama of the final week of the regular season.

Let’s take a look at how this would work in the Western Conference. Assuming the current seedings hold, the second round of the playoffs would feature San Antonio (60-18), Dallas (59-19), Phoenix (51-26), and Denver (44-34). And yes, feel free to substitute Memphis or the L.A. Clippers for Denver, since either the Griz or Clips could finish with a better record than the Nuggets and beat them in the playoffs, too.

That would leave a series between San Antonio and Denver (or Memphis or the Clippers) and a rematch of last year’s conference semifinal between Dallas and Phoenix. If the teams with the best regular-season records won out, then San Antonio and Dallas would get to add another chapter to their long rivalry in the Conference Finals.

This setup would also add spice to the end of the season in the Eastern Conference. Consider Cleveland’s situation. At the start of play last night, the Cavaliers (47-30) were ranked fourth in the Eastern Conference behind Detroit (62-15), Miami (51-27), and New Jersey (47-30).The Cavs are well ahead of Washington (39-38), the East’s fifth seed.

In the current playoff format, there’s nothing much for the Cavaliers to do but go through the motions until the postseason begins next weekend. But if the second-round seedings were allotted according to regular-season records, then the Cavaliers would stand a chance of passing New Jersey during the final five games of the regular season, thus avoiding a possible second round matchup with Detroit.

These kinds of imbalances are likely to happen again. A look at the NBA standings this decade shows that in every season except 2000, there was a conference where the second-place team in one of the divisions had a better record than a division winner. Now that the league has expanded to six divisions, this situation will happen with even more frequency – and the inequities will be more glaring. The sooner it is fixed, the better.

The NBA has a progressive history of adapting to change. In fact, three years ago, the league decided at midseason to alter the playoff format so that first round series, previously best-of-five matchups, would extend to best-of-seven contests. Changing the seeding format in the second round is a similarly minor tweak, one that would credit teams for playing hard throughout the 82-game schedule. Without it, teams like Dallas and Cleveland will continue to be punished for their geographic location rather than rewarded for their fine play.

mjohnson@nysun.com