Context Matters: The Eastern and Western Conference
The top 100 series is about ranking players, but it’s also about the history of the NBA. Digging through the history of the league gives us further explanation for why players are remembered as they are. There are so many inflection points - small situations on the court, big decisions off of it - that have affected the legacies of teams and players in massive ways. I’m still waiting for some sort of book or deep dive YouTube video breaking down how Durant’s signing with the Warriors affected the league in the years to come.
Although we seem to be reaching a more level playing field in the past couple years, the great “asterisk” looming over every player of the past 20 years is the imbalance of the Eastern and Western Conference. Throughout the 80s the East was full of powerhouses like the Celtics, Pistons, and Bulls, while solid teams like the Atlanta Hawks and Cleveland Cavaliers toiled away in (relative) mediocrity. The 90s, of course, were dominated by the Bulls. But the pendulum swung hard around the time the Lakers and Spurs ascended, and doesn’t seem to be swinging back any time soon. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see a disparity, but until I dove into the numbers, I didn’t realize just how dire it’s been. My intense basketball fandom began around the end of the Heatles era; it was bad then, but at the time I thought it was a relatively new phenomenon. Turns out I was incredibly wrong. Our Context Matters series will provide a greater understanding to statistics, awards, and legacies of the league affected by situations outside of actual gameplay.
There are multiple ways to measure a team’s skill beyond their record. We all know that strength of schedule matters. Win percentage can be helpful — the West has won 52.5% of the NBA’s games since 2000–01 — but it doesn’t do the West justice, as they play each other more often than not, thereby cannibalizing each others records.
Fortunately, a metric has been created to more accurately assess a good team versus a bad one. Or, a good team versus a fraudulent one. There are plenty of teams over the years who have caught good teams on bad nights, won the games they needed to against bad teams, and hit some lucky shots late in games to squeak out wins. They may stumble into 45 wins and they are remembered fondly, but in reality, may have never actually been all that good.
That is where Team SRS comes in. Team SRS (simple rating system) is a team evaluation rating that takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule. The SRS rating is measured by points above/below average, where zero is average. It is not perfect, as garbage time minutes muddy the waters, but it has been fairly accurate at evaluating which teams are legitimately good in a given year. Here is a more in depth explanation, if you are curious. The SRS of a team can be found on their main page for each respective season on BasketballReference.com.
If you examine the SRS of playoff teams in each conference since 2000–01, the disparity becomes very clear. Playoff teams in the West have averaged an SRS of 4.19 over the past 20 seasons, while East playoff teams have averaged 1.99. A 1.99 SRS in the East is (as you might expect), good enough for a 4 seed. But it barely gets you into the Western Conference playoffs. A 7 seed in the East is perfectly average, which tracks. 14th-ish place in the league should be league average. But the average SRS of a WC 7th seed is anything but mediocre. It is 2.37, good enough for a 3–4 seed in the East, an outside contender.
You might be saying to yourself that, though the competition is deep in the West, the East is still impressive — with teams like the Pistons, Heat, Cavs, 2019 Raptors, the Bucks and Nets, being just as good as any contender. That is true to some degree, those teams are legitimate. But is it not less impressive that they’ve only had to face true contending competition in the Conference Finals, and sometimes Finals? The bottom five worst SRS scores of teams in the Eastern Conference Finals averages out to 3.43. As you can see from the above table, that is about a 5 seed in the West. Meanwhile the worst five WCF SRS scores averages to 5.24, easily good enough for top two seed in almost any East year. This makes sense when you look back on certain conference Finals.
If you look at the teams who lost the Conference Finals; in the West, the 2019 Blazers and the 2009 Nuggets are certainly remembered as perhaps not the strongest conference finalist. Maybe the T-Wolves as well (though their SRS wouldn’t indicate as much). On the other side of the bracket, the East is littered with less than impressive series. Both Celts teams at the top were memorably weak. The 2017 Kyrie-less Celts were led by Al Horford, Jae Crowder, and rookie Jayson Tatum. The 2001 Bucks were led by Ray Allen, and took the 76ers to seven games. Ray Allen is great, but he should never have been that close to “best player on a Finals team” status. LeBron’s first Finals run as a 22 year old was impressive, but his team was lackluster, to put it lightly. Our top 100 list reflects these realities. Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, as well as Allen Iverson and Jason Kidd, do not rank as highly as other “best player on conference finals team” guys. This top five encapsulates things well, but you could keep going down the list if you wanted to. The 2016 Cavs who won the NBA championship were a good, but not excellent regular season team. Even though they were taken to six games, the Raptors team they faced was not a true contender. As LeBron would say after Game 5, he was never worried.
The point of this article is not to denigrate LeBron’s eight straight Finals appearances, or anyone else who’s made it out of the East. Making a Finals run is hard no matter what. It’s to lend credence to the argument that we do have to look at players careers differently depending on where they played. Just giving a blanket statement on Chris Paul never making a Conference Finals shows a level of glibness that can’t be reasoned with. There should be much more nuance to player’s legacies. And there should be more credit given to the teams that have come out of the West in multiple years, who battle against good teams on a nightly basis. And to give credit to teams that weren’t able to get out of the West, and may be remembered better if they had a Finals appearance, or even Conference Finals appearance, in the East. The post-Duncan Spurs, the Grit and Grind Grizzlies, the CP3 Clippers, the CP3 Hornets, the Jazz at almost any point.
The West isn’t getting any easier. The East has improved at the top and middle, but still contains the the bulk of the NBA’s worst teams. The importance of contextualizing good teams bounced early in the West playoffs does not seem to be going away any time soon.
