If you follow the NBA closely, the Western Conference teams of the NBA always seem to be battling till the very end of the season for playoff spots. The competitiveness between the West and the East is not even close and while the East nearly always tends to have clear segregation between top teams, average teams, and the losing teams, the West rarely seems to have a clear favorite.
If you look at the Western Conference right now apart from the OKC Thunder who are the best team in the NBA currently (at least for the regular season), we are still not sure about who will end up as the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, or the 8th seed, even as we approach the final stretch of the regular season.
As LeBron James called it, the Western Conference can be best described as the “Wild, Wild West,” because there never seems to be a sure-fire team in the West, that we can sit and say will advance to the NBA finals. Whereas in the East, you can clearly say which teams will most likely come out and this year it’s either the Boston Celtics, the Cleveland Cavaliers, or maybe just maybe the New York Knicks if things go extremely right for them. So the question to be asked is, what makes the West so much more competitive than the East? Let’s find out.
This is not to knock the players in the Eastern Conference as there are clearly some of the most elite talents in the East too. However, the West clearly has more talent in more teams. First off, the best player in the World is sitting in the West currently with Nikola Jokic, and even though Denver has struggled at times, have you seen what Jokic’s put up recently? 30-20-20 game? That’s ridiculous. Secondly, the top two MVP frontrunners are also from the West with Shai Gilgeous Alexander and Jokic.
If you look at the two conferences and see who has more All-Star level talent, the West has significantly more talent than the East. How do we know that? We just took a look at all the teams in the West and East and counted at least one all-star level talent in the respective conferences and found out that out of the 15 teams in the West, 13 teams have at least one All-Star caliber player compared to the East which has 10.
That number alone tells us why the West is so much more competitive than the East as more the talent is spread out, more the competition will be.
Historically, if we look at Western conference teams, they have history of tanking to get the best players available in the draft. While we are not accusing any of the teams specifically, just take a look at some of the great players that were drafted in the recent years. Zion Williamson to the Pelicans, Wemby to the Spurs, Minnesota drafting Anthony Edwards are the number one pick and so on. Not only do the teams tank more in the Western conference, they also tend to have more success compared to the East when it comes to picking the right players in the draft.
The best example for this would be the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Houston Rockets. Both these teams traded their best players away and within a matter of just a few seasons, they are now back in the playoff picture and can potentially win it all. When OKC let go of historically great players such as KD, Russ, and Harden, we all thought it would take a long time to rebuild. However, the Thunder acquired SGA for Paul George a couple of years ago and now they are the top team in the West. Similarly the Rockets traded away Harden to the Nets and they quickly rebuilt their team adding Sengun, Jalen Green, Thompson, Jabari Smith, veteran VanVleet and so on.
On the other hand, the Eastern conference teams have taken years, if not decades, to rebuild. If you look at the Knicks while they had Carmelo Anthony, they were still unsuccessful in the playoffs and just recently built a solid team. The Knicks fans will tell you how long they’ve waited for this to happen.
The Western Conference teams usually get some of the toughest schedules in the NBA, and when every team is pretty much facing the best competition day-in and day-out, the standings will remain close no matter the talent level.
Meanwhile the Eastern conference teams are usually playing mid-tier competition and as a result, the top heavy teams are bound to coast into the playoffs without any kind of difficulty. Since 1998, the West has won 17 NBA finals compared to the East’s 9, still showing its competitive depth over the East.
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