The Eastern Conference stinks

I read this very well written piece by John Hollinger on the disparity between the quality of teams in the East and the West. He illustrates how bad the Eastern Conference stinks with numbers and other general trends in teams in the East.

The highlights:

The West has also won six of the eight championships in that time (since Jordan retired in 1998), and one could make a case it would be eight of eight if not for the fact that the East automatically gets one team into the Finals regardless of how bad it is.

Through Wednesday's games, there had been 64 interconference battles, and the Eastern side managed a win in just 18 of them — a piddling .281 winning percentage.

At the moment, only three teams in the East have a winning record.

...for one good example take a look at the "predictor" rankings used by USA Today computer guru Jeff Sagarin. In those, 10 of the top 11 teams are from the Western Conference, while nine of the bottom are from the East.
If that holds up for the entire season, two teams from the West will end up in the lottery despite being better than all but one team in the East. And three teams from the East will make the playoffs despite being worse than all but one team in the West.

there's a recurring numbers theme — namely, the Eastern teams have a strange inability to put talented players around their superstars. James, Wade, Johnson,Gilbert Arenas, Allen Iverson, and the Nets' "Big Three" all suffer from a glaring lack of competent help at the end of the starting lineup or off the bench.