The NBA Board of Governors announced three major rule changes for postseason yesterday.One will affect the often-criticized way in which teams are seeded for the playoffs. Another reduces the timeouts taken in the final two minutes of a game to 20 from 60 seconds, and the third change expands the postseason rosters to 15 players.

Two of these three changes are godsends; the third is just some harmless flexing on the part of the World Champions.

The change in seeding formats is long overdue. Until now, the NBA took the most simplistic route to seeding its playoff teams: The division winners received the top seeds and were followed by other teams in descending order of won-loss percentage. This format has never worked well; for instance in 1976, two losing teams, Milwaukee, 38–44, and Detroit, 36–46, battled to move into second rounds against teams with winning records. The Bucks and Pistons owed their postseason berths to finishing first and second in their conference.

That problem was somewhat trivial compared to last season, when Dallas and San Antonio fought all season for the Southwest Division title with the runner–up becoming the fourth seed in the conference. San Antonio, 63–19, won the division and Dallas, 60–22, despite having the second-best record by six games over Phoenix, the third-best team in the conference, was seeded fourth.

The new rule fixes that situation simply. Under the change, the top four seeds — the three division winners and the second-place team with the best record — will be seeded according to their records, guaranteeing that the top two teams in each conference can’t meet until the conference finals.So instead of San Antonio, Phoenix, Denver, and then Dallas, last year’s Western Conference seedings would have gone Spurs, Mavs, Suns, then the Nuggets.

This change also fixes a problem in the middle of the bracket where the L.A. Clippers did a tricky little dance of resting players to avoid finishing as the fifth seed and drawing Dallas in the first round; L.A slipped behind the Memphis Grizzlies in the final week of the regular season to finish with the sixth seed and faced the far weaker Nuggets, whom they defeated in five games. Meanwhile, Memphis was swept by Dallas in the first round.

While the rule change is in reaction to the Western Conference shenanigans last season, comparable situations have existed throughout the NBA (as in 1976), and they have become more likely since the league adopted a three division per conference format two seasons ago. This reformatting rewards rather than punishes teams for playing hard for a full 82 games.

The other major change, altering timeouts, is a Christmas-in-August gift to East Coast fans. Last season’s playoffs were the most exciting I’ve seen in 37 years of watching the sport, but they were also murder on the sleep habits of nearly every fan living in Eastern Standard Time.The second game of the nightly twin bills usually went on past 2 a.m., and one of the major reasons for this was the number of timeouts taken late in the game. Almost every change of possession down the stretch or in overtime was greeted with a timeout to set up a play. Each full timeout usually led to commercial breaks that lengthened the stoppage of play further.

The new rule will minimize the length it takes to finish a game. Teams will be allowed one full timeout in the final two minutes; all other remaining timeouts become 20-second timeouts. In overtime whereas teams used to get three additional full timeouts, they will now get two full and one 20.

I doubt I’m the only one who wondered, while watching the same ad for the 50th time that night, how long does it take for a coach to gather his players around and say,”okay men, we’re going to run our best play through our best player, watch for a double team coming from the baseline” or some variation of that comment. This new rule should speed the games along and maybe put an end to the sense that it takes two and half hours to play an NBA game: 75 minutes to play the first three and half quarters, and another 75 to play the final six minutes.

The last rule change announced yesterday is almost meaningless. Teams very rarely play more than eight or nine players in regular rotation during the playoffs. Carrying 15 active players only means that there are more bodies to get on the floor during blowouts. While it’s true that teams carry 15 during the regular season, rarely do more than 10 players a squad receive significant action in the playoffs; the rest just have a really great seat for the game.

Ironically, it was the World Champion Miami Heat, a team that played only eight men more than 10 minutes a game in the postseason, who pressed for this rule change. Either they wanted to flex a little after being crowned champions, or perhaps someone in the organization genuinely felt that Wayne Simien needed more company at the end of the bench.

mjohnson@nysun.com