NBA: Go West young ballplayers
Western Conference keeps adding to its cluster of standouts
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — As star after star headed West this summer either in free agency or via trade, Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers became more and more bewildered. “I think Gordon Hayward’s the smartest one. He got out of town,” Rivers said, referring to the All-Star’s move from Utah to Boston. “He went to the East. I really don’t understand the logic of this. It is what it is. It’s just going to be a harder conference, if that’s possible.”
Paul George, Jimmy Butler and Paul Millsap were all All-Stars in the Eastern Conference last season who will play in the West next season. Chris Paul chose to leave the Clippers, but stayed in the West to join James Harden in Houston, and important role players like Jeff Teague, P.J. Tucker and Patrick Patterson all left teams in the East to come West for a run at the Golden State Warriors.
Rather than running from the Warriors, who burned
down the league last season and seemed poised to dominate for the near future with four AllStars all in their prime, most teams in the West are running right into the fire.
“The other way, that’s a defeatist attitude,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “How long can you wait? I don’t know if Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Klay and those guys are going anywhere for a while. You just can’t go into hibernation, wake up and say, ‘OK, it’s our time.’ We compete.”
One of the most common measurements of a single player’s impact on a team’s overall success is win shares — an analytic that estimates the number of wins a player produces for his team. Using that as a guide, calculated by the research site basketball-reference.com, the Western Conference has added 174.5 win shares to its roster this summer. That number takes into account free agent signings, like Millsap leaving Atlanta for Denver, the major trades of George from Indiana to Oklahoma City and Butler to Minnesota, and the re-signings of players including Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant with Golden State.
The Eastern Conference, by contrast, added 127.6 win shares by Friday afternoon. Hayward was the lone bankable star to move from the West to the East, while Kyle Lowry re-signed with Toronto and Otto Porter stayed with Washington on a new four-year, $110 million deal.
For more than two decades the Western Conference has lorded over the East in terms of talent disparity. Next year figures to be a bigger gap than ever before.
“You would think with all the picks that the East has had over the last 15 years, but they draft a great guy and he comes West,” Rivers said. “So I don’t know what’s going on. Growing up it was the exact opposite. It was the East and the Lakers when I was a kid. Now it’s the West and a couple of teams. It’s just a period we’re going through I guess. I hope it stops.”
Rockets GM Daryl Morey joked on Twitter that his front office full of deep thinkers were combing the Collective Bargaining Agreement for a clause that would allow them to relocate to the Eastern Conference. But rather than lament their geography, the Rockets, Timberwolves, Nuggets and Thunder all made major moves to try to catch the Warriors.
“It’s a weapons race in the NBA and you’re either in the weapons race or on the sidelines,” Morey said in June after acquiring Paul from the Clippers.
The East is not barren, of course. The best player in the world still resides in Cleveland. Hayward joins a talented Celtics team that made the Eastern Conference finals last season and also added No. 3 overall pick Jayson Tatum in the draft, Toronto returns its proud core for another run, Washington has one of the best backcourts in the league with John Wall and Bradley Beal, and Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo gets better every season.
“The East has definitely changed a lot since the end of the season,” Sixers president of basketball operations Bryan Colangelo said. “I think what’s on the horizon is a lot of unknowns right now. There’s still some player movement that needs to happen. But things are wide open.”