I know the two conferences have been pretty unbalanced for several years now, but has it ever been as bad (or even close to it) as this year?

Currently, in the East you only have 2 teams with winning records and 1 at .500. While in the West you have 10 teams with winning records and 2 more at .500. The 12th team in the West has the same winning % as the 3rd team on the East. That is just unreal.

The way it's going, the West just dominates inter-conference games. Considering each team plays games against the other conference opponents 30 times out of 82 games, it's conceivable that there could be only 3 teams in the East with winning records in the playoffs.

It's certainly possible for things to change enough by the end of the season so that it's not quite as dramatic, but if things continue as is, would the league commissioners have no choice but do something to adjust the conferences or the way playoff teams are selected?

There was a good article from Zach Lowe on Grantland which touched on this recently. It's mostly about why we should get rid of divisions, but about halfway through he goes into a broader discussion about the decade-long disparity between the two conferences.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/83569/abolish-useless-nba-divisions-step-1-of-a-radical-plan

quote:

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Of course, the ineptitude of the Atlantic Division brings another long-term trend into stark relief: The Western Conference is so much better than the Eastern Conference that it is, to use the word again, embarrassing. The league really, really needs the Nets and Knicks to get their **** together in order to shrink the interconference quality gap to a less laughable size.

This isn’t new, of course. The no. 8 seed in the Western Conference has had a better record than the no. 8 seed in the East every single season since the lockout-shortened 1998-99 campaign. Every one! The last seed in the West has been 5.5 games better than its Eastern counterpart on average during that span. Each season has seen an average of 3.5 Western Conference lottery teams finish with better records than the last Eastern Conference playoff team.

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I don't really think anything can (or should) be done to try to "fix" this.

The east was absolutely heinous from 02-07

I like how the comeback from EC fans is that the EC has produced as many titles as the WC over the last X years. Yeah, the top 1-3 is usually pretty even. It's the other 25 teams in the league that are the problem. Set up a 1 v 1, 2 v 2... 15 v 15 tournament and see what the result is. Probably something like 12-3 in favor of the West. You can mess around with it however you want, the fact is the top 2-6 teams (varying from year to year) in the league are evenly divided between the conferences, then most of the next 8-10 best teams are in the west.

To be a contender, you need the perfect combination of players, coaches, and management. That would be fairly random, and those contenders indeed appear to be evenly divided between the conferences.

Virtually all of the teams who aren't true title contenders but are still pretty good are in the western conference. Virtually all of the annually horrific teams are in the eastern conference. The fact that this has been the state of affairs for 10-15 years makes me think there is something bigger at work than luck of the draw, and that some real change may need to be made if there is going to be conference parity. It's not right that the playoffs in the EC include what might as well be a first round bye, whereas the West routinely has legitimate 50 win teams in the 5-8 seeds.

[This message has been edited by Ulrich (edited 12/3/2013 3:52p).]

It is completely unfair and it needs to be fixed. IMO, take the division leaders, then rank the teams by record regardless of conference, and take the best remaining teams.

Still doesn't quite fix the problem, but it helps. Although I guess that would create a problem of no more Western and Eastern Conference finals.