The NBA's Eastern Conference is better than you think — here's what that means for the playoffs

A narrative has taken hold of the NBA this season: the injury-depleted and talent-poor Eastern Conference is a mess, while the West is thriving with great teams and excitement.

Indeed, the Western playoff picture is full of intriguing storylines, from the Oklahoma City Thunder‘s quest to repeat as champions, to Victor Wembanyama‘s rise for the ahead-of-schedule San Antonio Spurs, to veteran-laden contenders struggling for consistency in Denver, Minnesota, Houston and Los Angeles.

But with four strong teams, as well as a set of intriguing up-and-comers, the East has its own narrative hooks, contradicting the adage that the East is least, West is best.

Let’s explore this narrative, why the Eastern Conference has underrated strength this season and how that surprising development could shape the upcoming playoffs.

Traditional Western dominance

After the East dominated interconference play for most of the 20th century, the West has flipped the script for most of the 21st. From 1999-00 through 2024-25, the East had a better record in just three out of 26 seasons, and those three victories were narrow, while the West frequently won the interconference battle by wide margins.

There are plenty of illustrative examples of the extreme imbalance between the two conferences this century. In the 2002-03 season, the Detroit Pistons landed the East’s No. 1 seed with a 50-32 record, while six Western teams won at least 50 games. In 2003-04, only four Eastern teams had winning records. In 2006-07, all five players on the All-NBA first team came from the West. In 2013-14, the Phoenix Suns‘ 48-34 record would have tied the Suns for third place in the East, but in the West, they were ninth and missed the playoffs in the pre-play-in era.

That imbalance held not only for teams, but also for the NBA’s top individual talents. In the 21st century, 63% of All-NBA players have come from the West. In fact, the 2024-25 season was the first this century with more All-NBA players from the East (eight) than West (seven).

Western teams have even enjoyed more lottery luck across the years, with elite prospects Cooper Flagg and Victor Wembanyama landing with Western squads. The five No. 1 picks in the 21st century with the worst career box plus/minus ratings were all drafted by Eastern Conference teams: Anthony Bennett, Zaccharie Risacher, Kwame Brown, Andrea Bargnani and Markelle Fultz.

This long-standing trend seemed set to continue, if not grow, this season, especially with two of the best teams in the East (the Boston Celtics and Indiana Pacers) losing their best players to Achilles tears. An analysis of preseason over-unders from Basketball-Reference suggests that Vegas expected Western teams to win 54% of their interconference games, in line with recent history, and five of the top-seven teams in preseason championship odds came from the West.

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A flipped script in 2025-26

Contrary to expectations, the East has kept pace in the conference race this season. Through Monday’s games, Western teams are just 161-157 against their Eastern counterparts, for a 50.6% win rate. That’s evidence of parity, not lopsided dominance.

That balance is especially relevant at the top of the standings: Eastern Conference teams rank second (Celtics), third (Pistons), fifth (New York Knicks) and eighth (Cleveland Cavaliers) in net rating, while Western Conference teams take the first, fourth, sixth and seventh spots. Four teams from the East are projected to win 50-plus games, versus five from the West, according to ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI).

A natural counterargument might be that the best Eastern teams are fattening up against worse opponents. But the bottom of the West is just as bad as the bottom of the East, if not worse; the teams 11 through 15 in the East standings are on a 26.3-win average pace, versus an average 25.6-win pace in the West. And by Basketball-Reference’s Simple Rating System, which ranks teams by point differential and strength of schedule, Eastern teams are second (Pistons), third (Celtics), fifth (Knicks) and seventh (Cavaliers) overall.

Moreover, we can examine how teams have performed exclusively against Western Conference opponents, to adjust for strength-of-schedule differences. By this metric, 10 teams have a net rating higher than plus-3: five in the West (the top five teams in the standings) and five in the East (the top four plus the Charlotte Hornets).

This hidden conference parity appears not just when assessing how teams have performed thus far, but also when projecting how they’ll perform for the rest of the season. By the playoff version of BPI, four of the top six teams play in the East. The so-called lesser conference looks even better by the full-strength version of estimated plus-minus, from analytical site Dunks & Threes, boasting four of the top five teams.

Playoff BPI for Top-Six Seeds

Every Eastern Conference contender has an obvious weakness that could thwart its Finals hopes. The Pistons rank 28th in 3-pointers and haven’t won a playoff series since the George W. Bush administration. The Cavaliers are incorporating an injured James Harden into their rotation and might look like paper tigers after consecutive playoff flameouts. The Celtics are in a sort of limbo as they await Jayson Tatum‘s return from an Achilles tear. And the Knicks haven’t jelled this season. A team led by Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns will face big defensive questions in the postseason.

Yet, the same could be said about all the Western Conference contenders chasing the Thunder, who are the defending champions. San Antonio is inexperienced. The Denver Nuggets, weighed down by major injury concerns, rank 21st in defensive rating. The Houston Rockets are 18th in offensive rating since Steven Adams‘ season-ending left ankle injury, while the Minnesota Timberwolves are one of the least consistent teams in the league. And the Los Angeles Lakers have the worst defense for any team with a winning record, while overperforming its point differential by the widest margin of any team in the league.

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Playoff implications

Despite that evidence of conference balance, the West should still hold a few advantages heading into April. First, more top-tier superstars play in the West. With Tatum still recovering and Giannis Antetokounmpo‘s Milwaukee Bucks unlikely to qualify for the playoffs, arguably the top five players in the 2025-26 postseason will all battle it out in the West: Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Doncic, Wembanyama and Anthony Edwards.

Second, the West has one overwhelmingly great team without any obvious weaknesses. Even after an injury-induced relative slump, the Thunder still dominate every advanced metric of team strength. BPI gives them about a 50-50 chance to win the title and become the first repeat champions since the 2017-18 Warriors; if the Thunder navigate the Western playoff bracket to reach the Finals, BPI projects they’ll beat their Eastern Conference opponent 78% of the time. (However, the main Eastern Conference contenders would have a coin flip’s chance or better against any Finals opponent other than Oklahoma City.)

And third, the West has better depth beyond its top four teams, which should produce more compelling first-round matchups. The fifth-, sixth- and seventh-ranked teams have better records in the West than the East, and the star power for the Lakers, Golden State Warriors (granted a healthy Stephen Curry) and LA Clippers means those teams profile as more dangerous playoff spoilers than their Eastern counterparts.

In contrast, the East’s first round could lack many upsets — although a healthy version of the Philadelphia 76ers and the red-hot Charlotte Hornets could give a top seed quite a scare, if they continue pushing into the playoffs. A Hornets-Pistons first-round series after last month’s brawl would be must-watch TV.

Detroit, Boston, New York and Cleveland will likely finish in the top four in the East in some order; according to BPI, there’s only a 5% chance that any of them falls. However, that structure could produce a pair of conference semifinal matchups just as enticing as what’s on offer in the West.

The most likely second-round matchups in either conference, per BPI, are Pistons-Cavaliers and Celtics-Knicks. Playoff BPI rates all four teams nearly identically, at between five and six points above average. All four teams have at least a 20% chance to reach the Finals, per BPI’s reckoning.

But a wide-open race doesn’t mean an inferior one. This four-way tussle tantalizes, featuring young stars and veterans seeking to erase dour playoff narratives, and former champions and proud franchises starved for postseason success.

And this high-level competition means there won’t be any easy paths to the Finals, as was the case in several previous years when the East lagged far behind the West. Barring unforeseen playoff upsets, whichever team emerges as the Eastern Conference champion will have had to defeat two high-caliber opponents en route. Whichever Eastern team claims a Finals berth will have to truly earn it.