On a compltely different topic, this year in the NBA a winning record in the East not only gets you into the playoff, it gets you homecourt advantage for the first round! Nat's comment last year about 8 just being too many teams was completely correct.

Salon's sports writer (I'm too lazy to find the link) had an insteresting idea last year: Let the top 4 regular season teams into the playoffs and give them several weeks off while all the remaining teams have a single elimination tournament (a la NCAA) for the remaining spots (I think he just wanted 2 more spots, so it'd be like football's playoffs when you have 6 teams and one round of byes).