We want to get this out of the way now so that we won’t have to revisit it when everyone else weighs in with their turgid and superficial analyses of what is wrong with the new NBA season. Put simply, and to borrow a phrase from our Bakery Division, the Eastern Conference is made up almost entirely of warm, flaky ass. And it’s going to stay that way all year. Now that’s turgidity you can taste.
Now, we realize there have only been 108 games played so far over 11 days, which measures out to less than nine percent of the season. We know, too, that early projections do not necessarily indicate final results, as the gathering cadres of electoral fraud lawyers will make rancidly clear over the next several days. But the East has two teams, Cleveland and Boston, who are 15-1 and well worth your attention. The third best team at this moment by record is Brooklyn, which had to grind its gears audibly to hold off Memphis last night to get to 4-4. Memphis is also 4-4, a record that has more reasonably placed them in 10th place in the West.
None of this will surprise the hot air balloons who pass themselves as NBA pundits. Everyone loves or at least fears the Celtics for obvious reasons; everyone has liked or felt some mild respect for the Cavaliers. But other than the weirdo Knicks, who changed the nature of their team three weeks before the season started and are thus a deeply incomplete work, the remaining 12 teams in the conference all look like they will be battling for the final play-in spot. We know this is a mathematical impossibility—until you watch them.
Monday, you got a chance to look at them all, if that’s your idea of fun. The NBA held one of its infrequent jamborees in which all 30 teams play and 11 of the 15 games were intraconference classics like Nets-Grizz. The Western Conference team won eight of them, including Utah beating Chicago IN CHICAGO, FFS, for their first win of the season. On the season, the West is 21-9 against the East, and the only reason not to think that will continue is the concept of regression to the mean, or as we non-math majors like to call it, the Atlanta Hawks.
Indeed, the two teams most representative of this giant laundry hamper of suck are the Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers, because they too have aspirations but are choosing to aggressively not meet them. The Bucks, you learned about on Sunday in a story with the words “Milwaukee Butt” in its headline; the Sixers, whom you were treated to the day before that, are a barren misery farm dominated by the self-led load management stylings of Joel Embiid, who shoved an out-of-pocket Philadelphia typist as a promised prelude to more pointed discussion later. Embiid’s entire season so far has been a DNP-PD, for Players Decision, and the Sixers have won once in six tries.
Both the Bucks and Sixers believe they can challenge the Celtics and now Cavs for a conference title. They are also currently looking up at the Charlotte Hornets and Toronto Raptors. You be the judge.
Better yet, don’t be the judge. You should not have to bother yourself with this pool made entirely of cess; one unworthy team from this conference will scrape together 48 wins and be declared the surprise of the year; they will be touted as a difficult out right up to the moment that they get swept in the second round of the playoffs. It is the nature of the East since Michael Jordan retired (that is, went to play in Washington), and it only looks like it’s going to be worse than usual this year. It’ll be bad, but so is “the usual” in this case.
Again, you needn’t do anything about this. For one, there are no games today because the NBA wants you to vote for someone; you can also take this quiet time to practice for Adam Silver’s latest forgettable and sure-to-fail version of the All-Star Game format. For two, you’re doomed. Fretting won’t help, and neither will fulminating. We just told you this because you’re about to hear it from every other corner of the hoop diaspora, and you should be allowed to ignore that as you would Friday’s recap of the election returns. So consider it a weather report. This is only meant to let you know that the East is already up to its low-grade nonsense, and may end up being even harder on the eye than usual.
In other words, Go Pistons. What do you have to lose?
