NEW YORK, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- The NBA has made format changes for the league's playoff structure for the next several seasons.
The new format ensures that a conference's top two teams do not play each other until the conference finals.
Last season, Dallas and San Antonio met in the second round after ending the regular season as the top two teams in the Western Conference.
In another change, the league's board of governors has cut down on timeouts. If a team has two 60-second timeouts remaining in the last two minutes of regulation or in overtime, one of those two timeouts will be shortened to 20 seconds.
"I obviously think the seeding change should have come long ago," Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote in an e-mail to the Dallas Morning News.
Finally, the league has decided to increase the playoff roster size from 13 to 15, with each team designating 12 active players and up to three inactive players before each game.
