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.

Hollinger looks at early season trends

John Hollinger, the father of the Player Efficiency Rating (PER) has analyzed early trends this season in his article in the nysun. He does a good job of putting the early season statistics in perspective.

The highlights:

- Phoenix's Boris Diaw, for instance, is obviously not in basketball shape (in the spirit of seeing the glass half-full, let's just say he's "bulked up").That's going to be an issue for the Suns all season, not just in their 1–3 start.

- Rockets fans are bothered byTracy McGrady's early-season struggles, but check out his career stats and you'll notice a pattern here. The guy struggles every November, so seeing him get out of the gate so slowly this year shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

- Similarly, the strong starts by Portland's Zach Randolph and Seattle's Ray Allen shouldn't come as a big shock to those in the know — we've seen this movie before.

- I use a measure called "Pace Factor" to track how many possessions each team uses in a 48-minute game. Last year, the average was 92.94; this year it's all the way up to 95.83.

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