With the San Antonio Spurs’ demolition of the Cleveland Cavaliers nearly complete, much of the attention will turn to fixing the NBA playoff system.

The attention isn’t merely the work of idle minds in need of something more interesting than this year’s Finals: The NBA playoff system is broken. A final that involves the third best team versus the seventh best team (and that may be too kind to the Cavaliers) is flawed, especially since the Cavs didn’t exactly run a table of stronger opponents to get to the Finals.

One of the best solutions I’ve read comes from Golden State Warriors’ broadcaster Bob Fitzgerald. Fitz’s solution, which is posted at his blog on the team’s Web site, goes a bit deeper than the other ideas I’ve seen. He starts with the fact that the country is too big to have all 30 teams lumped into two conferences.

This may not be obvious to fans in the Northeast. Travel for our local teams involves a lot of hop scotch plane trips like New York to Boston, Philadelphia, or Washington, and “long” interconference itineraries means flights to Indianapolis, Miami, or a real hike out to Chicago. By contrast consider an entirely plausible agenda for the Portland Trailblazers: four road games in five nights in Memphis, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Minneapolis, followed by a home game on day seven. NBA players may well be the best-conditioned athletes in the world but that much airtime would reduce Brandon Roy from playing like the next Gary Payton to playing like the current Gary Payton.

Local fans who have watched the Knicks or Nets at the end of their west coast road trips should nod knowingly, and does anyone remember how listless the Lakers (who hadn’t entered their late season funk) looked in the Christmas Day game last year? Travel fatigue is a big reason why road teams win only 40% of their games.

Fitz’s plan is to break up the conferences from two sets of three divisions into three sets of two. The composition of the divisions would stay the same (though the Northwest Division would change names to the Mountain and the Central would become the Midwest) but their alignment would change. The Atlantic and Southeast Division would form the Eastern Conference. The newly christened Midwest Division and the Southwest Division would comprise the Central Conference, and the Pacific and Mountain would make up the Western Conference.

Given the current strengths of the teams it would silence all the Western Conference provincialists right away. Their conference would no longer rule; the Central Conference would be the strongest, though probably not for long with Durant and Oden presumably making new homes for themselves in the Mountain Division.

This alignment addresses the travel issue by creating more interconference games. Each team would play two games against nonconference foes (40 games), and four against their conference opponents (20 more), and five against their divisional ones (another 20). This would add up to 80 games, and my tweak to Fitz’s plan is to allow the league to distribute the other two games as it sees fit. I can’t imagine fans complaining about an extra San Antonio-Phoenix matchup or an extra Cavaliers-Pistons clash.

The product of this in the regular season is to create more regional rivalry matchups and fewer fatigued teams, but the real benefit comes in the postseason. Liberated from binary constructs, Fitz’s plan takes the six division champs and the 10 other best records and seeds them into a bracket. If this plan had been in effect this season, then there would have been one team change: Orlando misses out (it’s not as if anyone noticed them anyway) and the Los Angeles Clippers are in. Then with brackets running 1–16, 2–15, 3–14, etc., the matchups get very interesting. No. 4 Detroit, another slow-paced defensive stalwart would have to deal with the Golden State blitz in the first round, and no. 7 Cleveland would have to tangle with no. 10 Denver. Rather than having Houston and Utah, the fifth and sixth best teams in the league battle in the first round, the Rockets would draw the no. 12 L.A. Lakers (imagine TV execs frothing at the mouth over the Tracy McGrady-Kobe Bryant matchup), and the Jazz would get no. 11 Miami.

If the seedings held on the right side of the bracket (i.e. where the no. 2 and no. 3 seed are) then the San Antonio-Utah series takes place before the Spurs-Suns, not after. The Suns would have to deal with the Cavaliers to get to semifinal round, which would be lots of fun. Meanwhile, if Golden State wreaked havoc on brackets, then they would get Dallas in the semifinal round, which would have made for even more drama than their first round upset.

What’s more important is that Fitzgerald’s plan both eliminates one of the persistent inequities of the NBA regular season schedule while correcting an extreme and growing imbalance in the postseason. It’s entirely conceivable that the off-season will begin late tonight and implementing these changes should be a priority.

mjohnson@nysun.com