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推 Stockton:nobody thinks the Jazz are ready to win NBA champions 03/11 08:51
Young stars will help East surpass West soon
Michael Rosenberg / Special to FOXSports.com
Posted: 17 hours ago
The NBA's Eastern Conference will rise again. And sooner than you think.
I know it seems impossible today, with the East somewhere between unwatchable
and irrelevant. The best team in the East (at least, the top team in the
standings) is the Pistons, who are a few games behind the Utah Jazz. Nothing
against the Jazz. We love the Jazz. Deron Williams is already one of my
all-time favorite chunky point guards. But nobody thinks the Jazz are ready
to win the NBA championship.
If the East were a college football conference, it might not produce its
quota of bowl-eligible teams.
If the East were a bottle of wine, you'd send it back.
If the East kept calling you, you'd change your number.
If the East ... hold on. Where was I again?
Ah, yes: the East will rise again.
It's true. If you look past the records, and, you know, the results of the
games, and the general ugliness in the East ─ you might want to get some
high-tech binoculars ─ you will see the seeds of the East becoming the
dominant conference.
Consider this cast of young stars:
Cleveland's LeBron James, Miami's Dwyane Wade, Orlando's Dwight Howard,
Toronto's Chris Bosh, Boston's Greg Oden and Charlotte's Kevin Durant and
Emeka Okafor.
OK, so we're cheating and sending Oden and Durant to the East, which is
unfair to the Memphis Grizzlies, who have been horrible enough to deserve
either Oden or Durant. So what? The East has five teams with a winning
percentage under .400. The West has one. So the East is a virtual lock to
get at least one of the two lottery studs ─ and stands a good chance at
grabbing both.
Even if Oden or Durant ends up in Memphis, the East will have a much better
collection of under-25 talent than the West. It won't even be close. Put it
this way: If you had to pick five players most likely to dominate for the
next decade, wouldn't at least three picks come from the East?
Now throw in Washington's 27-year-old Gilbert Arenas, Toronto's Andrea
Bargnani and T.J. Ford and Chicago's Baby Bulls. And remember that Detroit
has one of the best general managers in sports, Joe Dumars, and Indiana and
New Jersey have pretty good management track records, even though those teams
have struggled lately.
Three years from now, I bet the East will be better than the West and here is
why. When we get down to it, the NBA is about one thing: groupies. No, I'm
kidding. The NBA is about stars.
The East is loaded with talent. It happens to be really young talent, and
really young talent rarely wins in the NBA. Michael Jordan took seven years
to make the NBA Finals. David Robinson and Hakeem Olajuwon each took a decade
to win a championship. The players who win a title when they are young (Tim
Duncan, Magic Johnson, Wade) are usually fortunate enough to have an older
Hall of Famer on the roster (Robinson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal).
The East has actually won two of the last three NBA titles and came within 12
minutes of winning a third. But let's not kid ourselves ─ the West has been
better, deeper and more fun to watch. And the league champion is highly
likely to come from the West this year.
But these things are cyclical. From 1989 to 1998, the East won eight of a
possible 10 championships.
Does anybody really think that Wade, James, Bosh and Howard will toil on
pretty-good-but-not-great teams for the next decade?
I know James has seemed to coast through parts of this season, and his
defense does not remind anybody of Michael Cooper, and he needs to improve
his play down the stretch. The man is 22 years old and still seems like a
combination of Jordan and Magic.
Give him a little time.
Someday, these criticisms will seem silly.
Someday, we will wonder when the NBA's Western Conference will ever catch up
to the mighty East.
http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/6550294?CMP=OTC-K9B140813162&ATT=73
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