Why this weekend reminds us that the West is superior
Even during a weekend where fans have been treated to five Game 7's and the conclusion to the best first round the NBA has ever seen, the Western Conference's superiority remains a talking point.
It's hard not to think about it on a night when the Pacers dispatched the 38-win Hawks while the Thunder and Clippers had to send fringe contenders packing. At the conclusion of Pacers/Hawks, no one was sad to see the Hawks go, with all due respect to Atlanta. With a healthy Al Horford, the Hawks are solid, and they have the flexibility to continue their run of consecutive playoff appearances next season, but they were a losing team without their best player that ended up with a beneficial first round matchup. There's not much more to it than that, so as the fourth quarter of Game 7 in Indiana ticked away and it became obvious that the Hawks were done, few tears were shed.
Out West, the Grizzlies stood little chance in a Game 7 in Oklahoma City without Zach Randolph and with a hobbled Mike Conley, but as the Thunder pulled away in the second half and all but sealed the series, there was a definite feeling of Memphis deserving better. Here's a team that survived a rough start to the season and a quarter of the season without their franchise player in one of the toughest Conferences the league has ever seen. The Grizzlies were one of the best teams following Marc Gasol's return to the lineup, won 50 games and pushed one of the championship favorites to the brink. Something about it all made it seem wrong that they were going home in early May after a first round loss.
In L.A., the Bogut-less Warriors nearly stole another playoff series, taking the Clippers down to the wire and the final seconds of Game 7. Again, this was a 50-plus-win team (51, to be exact) without one of its most important players matching up with one of the top three or four teams in the league, and nearly beating them. That's the Western Conference.
And that Western superiority will remain a storyline today, as after the 48-win Raptors and 44-win Nets battle to become one of the last eight teams standing in 2013-14, the 62-win Spurs and 49-win Mavericks will tip-off in San Antonio. Think about that for a second. The top-seeded, league-best Spurs got a more difficult first round draw - at least from a win/loss perspective - than the Nets did.
The East got better as the season went on - the Raptors and Nets are two perfect examples of that - and in the middle of a great weekend for the NBA, no one wants to dwell on the negatives. But it's hard not to dwell on the Western Conference's superiority and the Eastern Conference's inferiority again when the weekend's Game 7 matchups practically slap us in the face with it.