NBA REALIGNMENT: Jack McCallum put his potential NBA-with-new-Charlotte-franchise realignment up and now I'm going to put mine up, because it's fun. Here goes:

NORTH AND EAST CONFERENCE

EASTERN
Boston
Cleveland
New Jersey
New York
Philadelphia

COMMENTS: This is a hard group to deal with because you know the NBA isn't going to break up the Knicks-Celtics-Nets-Sixers. I stuck in the Cavs.

CENTRAL
Chicago
Detroit
Milwaukee
Minnesota
Toronto

COMMENTS: These all logically fit together for me, kind of like the NFC Central or whatever they're calling it these days.

MID-SOUTH
Atlanta
Charlotte
Indiana
Memphis
Washington

COMMENTS: Every realignment plan is going to have some leap of logic, and mine is sticking these five teams together. Indiana is sandwiched between Mid-West and East and thus is squeezed south. There's not enough room for Washington in the Northeast so it goes here too. The other three are in the middle of the South. I think Indiana is culturally closer to the South than the Mid-West anyway, so here you go--my grand flawed beautiful Mid-South division.

SOUTH AND WEST CONFERENCE

GULF OF MEXICO
Dallas
Houston
Miami
New Orleans
Orlando

COMMENTS: I like this one, there's no absurd sticking of Florida teams in Eastern conferences that I hate. All of these cities are in the South geographically speaking but are not exactly what we think of as being "The South"--Texas is Texas, New Orleans in New Orleans and the Florida cities are transplanted Easterners. So here they are, pariahs dotted along the Gulf coast.

MOUNTAIN & DESERT
Denver
Phoenix
Sacramento
San Antonio
Utah

COMMENTS: The two bits of weirdness here are taking San Antonio away from the Texas teams and Sacramento from the California teams. But an all-California conference isolates either Portland or Seattle and thus cannot be done. Sacramento is the best choice to move to a different division, it's miles from the Bay Area but it might as well be light years. San Antonio is the furthest West of the Texas teams so Tim Duncan and company get stuck in here. It's a fun little small market division.

PACIFIC COAST
Clippers
Lakers
Warriors
Sonics
Blazers

COMMENTS: The Pacific coast becomes one big line of basketball hate. There's so much NBA history here--past glory (Warriors), past, present and future glory (Lakers), one of the all-time worst franchises in sports history (the Clippers) and one of the rare enduring NBA rivalries (Portland and Seattle.) I would love this division.

There you have it, the conferences bisect the United States with an imaginary diagonal line that goes from Washington to the northen border of Florida. I don't know how to do the playoffs, maybe the six division winners and the top ten teams after that in an NCAA-like cross-nation bracket. It would work for me.