Want to see the NBA blow up its current playoff format? Here's the biggest obstacle.

With LeBron James now leaving Cleveland for Los Angeles, the balance of power in the NBA - already heavily shifted toward the Western Conference - has grown even wider.

With James gone, the West now sports all of the NBA MVP winners since Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki won in 2007.

Also consider that since 1999, Western teams have won 14 championships and Golden State has won three of the past four (and after adding All-Star Boogie Cousins, it may be soon four of five).

The East has won six titles since 1999, and James is responsible for half of them.

So many people and publications -- including Forbes -- are calling for the NBA to scrap its current playoff system with eight Eastern seeds and eight Western seeds playing on opposite sides of the bracket. The most popular proposal is for the NBA to seed 1 through 16 by record, regardless of conference.

This might produce a Golden State-Los Angeles championship series, or even a Lakers-Celtics semifinal series. Think TV (and the league) might like that?

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, as clued in a leader of a major professional sports league as there is, has already considered such a scenario.

But the issue, he says, is playoff travel.

Silver's league estimates an increase of 40,000 miles of travel in the postseason if it scrapped its current conference format and took the top 16 teams.

Silver said a "1-16" format would allow the two best teams to meet for the title, but has always expressed concerns over travel.

“I think, as I’ve said in the past, the obstacle is travel, and it’s not tradition in my mind, at least,” Silver said at the All-Star break. “It’s that as we’ve added an extra week to the regular season, as we’ve tried to reduce the number of back-to-backs, that we are concerned about teams crisscrossing the country in the first round, for example. We are just concerned about the overall travel that we would have in the top 16 teams.”

The league says it averages about 90,000 miles of total travel in the postseason and estimates that would increase to 130,000 under the new format. It estimates, based on historical data, an average of 2½ series per year matching teams separated by three time zones before the NBA Finals, with about a 90 percent chance of at least one per season.

The WNBA switched its playoff format to the top eight teams instead of by conference in 2016.

Also, a "1-16" format might also change regular-season schedules, because teams would likely need to play the same amount of games against East and West teams, as opposed to the current system.

Such a regular-season schedule change, the league says, would create about 150,000 additional miles of travel, up from 1.4 million miles of total travel in 2017-18.

“It’s still my hope that we’re going to figure out ways,” Silver said. “Maybe ultimately you have to add even more days to the season to spread it out a little bit more to deal with the travel. Maybe air travel will get better. All things we’ll keep looking at.”

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This story was originally published July 4, 2018 at 11:53 AM.