Never mind microphones on coaches and cameras in locker rooms. Of bigger concern to the NBA might be the widening disparity between the league’s two conferences.
This is no mere talent gap. It’s more like the Grand Canyon with five weeks left in the regular season, and that doesn’t bode well for the playoffs or what is sure to be another brief NBA Finals.
Yes, the West appears best–by a mile.
The Mavericks received a visit from the East-leading Indiana Pacers on Tuesday, and it was a bittersweet moment for the home team. If they were in the East, the Mavericks would still be very much in the playoff hunt.
As it is, the Mavericks are playing out the string yet again in the West, buried by an avalanche of talent among the top eight teams that shows no sign of lifting anytime in, oh, the next decade.
Talk about depressing. If you’re the Mavericks, Denver Nuggets, Golden State Warriors or Vancouver Grizzlies, the future looks bleak simply because there is little room for advancement.
The Los Angeles Lakers are the West’s resident 800-pound gorilla–and a baby one, at that–with Kobe Bryant, 21, and Shaquille O’Neal, who’s just getting started at 28.
Portland has the league’s deepest lineup and owner Paul Allen’s seemingly bottomless pocketbook. Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle and Minnesota all boast young, superstar-laden lineups that are only getting better. Warhorses Utah and San Antonio keep postponing their obituaries.
“The teams in the West have just done a better job building their teams and maintaining them,” Phoenix owner Jerry Colangelo said. “With a couple of exceptions, it’s where the superstars are, and it’s where they want to play.”
The East-West gap has been building for years, although it stayed below radar while Michael Jordan and the Bulls rampaged through the 1990s with six world titles in an eight-year span.
The disparity finally started to show itself last year in the wake of Jordan’s retirement, and the Spurs made it obvious with a relatively easy five-game dispatching of the New York Knicks in the Finals.
This season, though, has bordered on the ridiculous. Consider that just one team in the East, the surging Toronto Raptors, owns a winning record on the road. Not even the Pacers are above water away from the new Conseco Fieldhouse.
Contrast that with the West, where six teams have winning road marks, including the Lakers at a lopsided 24-7 and Portland at 24-10. More than half the clubs in the league don’t even have home records that good.
Not only that, but if the playoffs had started Friday, Sacramento would have been the No. 5 seed in the East–almost good enough for home-court advantage in the first round. As it is, the Kings own the eighth and final seed in the stacked West.
Perhaps most embarrassing for the league, Detroit, Orlando and Milwaukee all are firmly in the playoff hunt, which means two East teams might make the postseason with a losing record. That hasn’t happened in either conference since 1988, when Washington and New York each qualified at 38-44.
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It might be a sign of things to come in the East, where only the Vince Carter-led Raptors, New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers appear set for the long haul.
Indiana is aging and is ready for a roster overhaul in the next two years, Miami has been eliminated in the first round three of the past four seasons, and the rest of the conference has noticeable talent holes.
Many of the East’s wounds are self-inflicted. Washington, Cleveland, Boston and New Jersey are just a handful of East teams in a bind with huge contracts that haven’t worked out but will strangle them under the salary cap for years to come.
That’s why NBA Commissioner David Stern has little sympathy for the East and doesn’t seem all that eager to do something about it.
“These teams managed themselves into it, and it’s up to them to manage themselves out of it,” Stern said during his annual state-of-the-league address last month.
That’s a lot easier said than done, considering the NBA’s new ultra-restrictive collective-bargaining agreement. In the meantime, the gaudy won-lost records, the awards and the championship trophies will continue to go west, young man.