The Eastern Conference Non-Achievement Awards...

“It’s been 14 years of silence.  It’s been 14 years of pain.  It’s been 14 years that are gone forever and I’ll never have again.”

                                                                        Guns ‘n Roses - Use Your Illusion II

This long-forgotten song just popped into my head this week, while looking at the Eastern Conference standings in the NBA, which is an absolutely unbelievable sight.  The Lakers, who are the thirteenth team in the West, would be a half-game back of Atlanta for the third spot in the East.  Now that is amazing!
Just look at this.  

I’ve been following this league for much longer than 14 years and even I’ve never seen it this historically bad in the East.  Sure it’s still pretty early in the season so a lot of this ineptitude will even out (because after all, someone has to win these games,) but it’s really just more of the same trend we’ve seen year after year in the Leastern Conference.  Well, for the last 14 that is.

I’ve written many times on this blog before about how incredible it has been that the Eastern Conference has consistently been about half as good as the Western Conference for all of recent memory.  The playoffs for all of the last decade were never really fair, because usually about eight of the best ten teams in the league were in the West.  Every year multiple winning-teams would be left out of the playoffs in the west, while many times, multiple teams with losing records would qualify in the East.  So far this year the West is dominating in inter-conference play with an aggregate record of 67-31, which is a winning percentage of about 67%.  But over the course of the last decade the split has been 59% to 41%. That’s crazy!  And really regardless of the numbers, the eye test has left absolutely no doubt.   So in a professional league of equal footing amongst teams, how is this possible?  When I think about it, it all traces back to one event, 14 seasons ago.    

The Guy who owns the Bobcats

Coming out of the lock-out of 1998-99, the NBA looked very different from what it had looked like previously.  Of course the accelerated 50 game season that followed was the most (or least) entertaining aspect of the situation, later inspiring Phil Jackson to say that the San Antonio Spurs 1999 championship should have an asterisk next to it.  And of course the marketing of the league had to shift dramatically with the second retirement of Michael Jordan, and the end of the Chicago Bulls dynasty, but the true lasting affect of that lockout settlement was the massive changes made to the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the players and owners. 

The Exception-al Larry Bird 

The NBA has had a salary cap since the 1983-84 season, but until ‘99 it was a soft cap that allowed teams to exceed the cap up to any amount they wanted when re-signing their own players (via the “Larry Bird exception,”) so in many situations there wasn’t really a cap at all.  But in ‘99 the league capped the amount that could be offered by percentages each year (including the Bird exception,) and for the first time in any American Sports league history, the NBA actually capped the amount an individual player could make, period (based on how long each player had been in the league.)  In addition, the rookie salary scale system was created which even further reduced player salaries, and truly was an ingenious coup for the owners.  It’s not like any current player was going to vote against it, and all of the players it would eventually affect weren’t even in the league yet! (If I recall correctly the only player who voted against it was Kobe.  I love that.)  But regardless, the agreement went through, and the new rules for building teams were extensive and suddenly quite a bit more complicated.      

So what does all this mean?  It means that teams needed to get smarter; they couldn’t rely just on basketball intuition anymore, they needed number crunchers, and salary-cap experts.  They needed to be responsible in their spending.  They had to make smart decisions.  But since that day in ’99 the East has time and time again been the vastly inferior conference.  So can it be that for 14 years, the Eastern Conference teams’ management has just been considerably dumber?  The answer is a resounding yes.   

When teams are bad consistently, it really just means that team management and coaching staffs have been bad consistently, so it’s time to celebrate the east; the NBA’s dumbest conference.  It’s time for the 14-year Eastern Conference Non-Achievement Awards.  Lets happily rank the ineptitude, shall we?

For the sake of these awards we are going to exempt the five Eastern conference teams that have been decent or better over the last 14 years, Miami, Indiana, Detroit, Boston, and Chicago.  And really even the later two teams on this list were both historically awful for the first seven seasons after the lockout.  But this is the deal.  Here are your top ten Eastern Conference Ineptness Champions, and their respective 14-year win-loss totals.

10. Orlando Magic – 622-582 - Even despite the Grant Hill/Tracy McGrady debacle and the Dwightmare (and of course Shaq skipping town in 1996) the Magic have kept their head above water by making decent personnel decisions.  Even though the ridiculous contracts they inexplicably gave out to Rashard Lewis and Hedo Turkoglu alone, should have gotten General Manager Otis Smith fired five years before he was finally shown the door, on the whole the team has been a decent Eastern team. 

9.  Atlanta Hawks – 525-679 - The ultimate .500 team for the second half of this 14-year span, the first seven years were so bad that their over-all record is abysmal.  After making multiple disastrous mistakes in the draft, they’ve constantly put themselves behind the 8-ball.  Marvin Williams over Chris Paul and Deron Williams, when they needed a point guard, was the most egregious.  Sheldon Williams over Brandon Roy, Rudy Gay, and Rajon Rondo was bad too.  And top picks DeMarr Johnson and Acie Law were both mega-busts.  They have done almost nothing in the playoffs in the past five years despite having somewhat decent regular season records, because they’ve just never seemed to have any kind of identity.  The Hawk’s future actually looks bright at the moment, but then again, we’ve said that before. 

8.  Cleveland Cavaliers – 551-652 - The only reason they are this high on the list is because of LeBron James, and because he willed them to far more victories than they deserved over a five-year span ending in 2010.  A perfect example of front-office ineptness, GM Danny Ferry never decided on a strategy to surround James with any complimenting talent, and ended up panicking himself into absurd Hail-Mary attempts to appease the King, bringing in over-priced former all-stars that didn’t fit at all.  But most shamefully, Ferry let defensive minded (and offensively-allergic) coach Mike Brown stay around five years too long, squandering any chance of success.  Brown was just as much of an adversary to LeBron’s game as the Celtics and Lakers were.  It's no wonder LBJ left town that fateful summer, to go to competent organization.          

7.  Brooklyn Nets – 550-668 - This seems too high for the former Jersey Boys, who have been synonymous with horrible basketball for most of their history, but a couple of Finals appearances in ‘02 and ’03 help their case.  On the flip side, they were blown out in both of those Finals matchups, by vastly superior Lakers and Spurs teams, and since then have been completely pathetic.  The fact that they are this high on the list, proves that the east is an absolute cluster.   

6.  Milwaukee Bucks – 559-645 - Another decent regular season team, often derailed by injuries, but consistently lose in the first round of the playoffs.  They have also made numerous questionable decisions when acquiring players.  In recent years they’ve traded or signed multiple score-first point guards or under-sized shooting guards who all need the ball in their hands to be effective, which is a very questionable strategy.  They are thus the current owners of the worst record in the league at 5-17.  Don't worry about "fearing the deer."    

5.  Philadelphia 76ers – 598-607 - They went to the Finals in 2001, and have done nothing in the playoffs since.  Like, really, pretty much nothing.  A great city like Philadelphia deserves better.  There’s been some bad luck; Elton Brand and Andrew Bynum both basically stole millions from the team, but mostly it’s just been the familiar Eastern conference story, horrible management.  And of course, no accountability.  It took Billy King five or six years to get fired when it seemed like he was actively trying to make it happen, with his horrible decisions.  (And of course now he runs the Nets.  Why?  I don't know.  My guess is that it's because some NBA owners are morons.)           

4.  Washington Wizards – 472-740 - Same thing here.  Horrible management.  GM Ernie Grunfeld has made every possible mistake possible during his run in the nation’s capital.  Mis-managing the cap, signing over-priced vets, trading “bad contract” for “worse-contract.”  And he’s kept his job for 10 years.  Unbelievable.  Only in the East, folks.   

3.  Toronto Raptors – 521-679 – Of course Canada’s only team has disadvantages in luring free-agents and keeping valuable assets, so a lot of this losing can be understood.  But the Raptors have just been pretty awful since they’ve come into the league.  Nothing has worked. 

2.  Charlotte Bobcats – 260-484 – The only team that hasn’t been around for all of the 14 years, only ten of them, but they’ve done enough losing for 20 years worth.  Many head-scratching trade decisions, and horrible draft selections have placed the Jordan-Errs consistently at the bottom.    

New York's Un-Big-Three

1.  New York Knicks – 539-661 – And here’s the ultimate poster-child for the ineptitude of the NBA’s Eastern conference.  The Coup de grace of a basketball soul-crusher.  What on earth is to be said about the New York Knicks?  They should be a juggernaut.  With all the advantages of the New York area, the supposed great basketball history in the city, and unlimited financial resources of their owner, they should be the smartest organization and the most talented team in the entire league.  They should constantly contend for championships.  But they never do.  Why?  Because for the past 14 years the franchise has been suffering under the delusion that they cannot “rebuild.”  “New York won’t stand for it,” we heard, but then that means contrarily, that New York will stand for their team being the biggest organizational laughing-stock in the NBA?  Don’t rebuild, just repeatedly put out a horrible team of mismatched veterans, with no discernable system or hope to win.  Over the last 14 years the Knicks have been managed by idiots, coached by idiots, owned by idiot, and watched by idiots, (I know because I was one of those idiots,) and there’s really no other way to put it.  We could go into all of the atrocious mistakes made by the infamous Isiah Thomas regime, and the ones made before and after, but it’s really not necessary.  No other team even comes close to the abomination that is the Knicks, they've just been consistently terrible at basketball.  They are the anti-Spurs; the precise paint-by-numbers example of what not to do.  And it’s shown on the court.

        

And there you have it.  The real reason why the East is bad, once again.  Just like it's been for the last 14 years, the teams in the West are just smarter.  Much smarter.

So hopefully teams in the East have been taking notes, because there’s never been an opportunity like this, to snatch the third seed behind Indiana and Miami.  Somebody has to win some games, so c'mon random Eastern Conference team x, that could be you!

And while the Pacers and Heat will rest their starters for the home stretch of the season and coast to easy victories in the playoffs, the teams out West will slug it out like they always do.  Imagine if the league abolished the conferences and just seeded the playoffs 1-16.  It would be a whole other ballgame right?  How many teams would get in from the East?  Three?  Four?    

Because that’s the way things are in the NBA, and have been for the last 14 years.  

The Western Conference and the Leastern.       

   
Thanks for reading,
Underdogs Out!