Personally I would think this would be a great time to split the conferences in a similar way to football (maybe rethink that alignment as well). You would have 7 teams in each division so you would have 6 teams you would play home/away, making that 12 games. Then you would play the 7 teams from the other division giving you a 19 game conference season and everyone in each division a very similar strength of schedule (within the conference and not taking into account any home/away differences in those 7 games). The only imbalance, would possibly come from one division being better than the other but it would be a lot better than the current random scheduling. Then you have the BTT set up with two sides split by the divisions, and the top team from each division gets the first round bye.
Or you could even go with how the tournament is set now and rank the teams 1-14 as it is now.