It wasn’t too long ago when the NBA was ruled by the Western Conference. It was understood that the Western Conference Championship game was pretty much going to be the NBA Championship game and the East was simply there because it was required to be. My how things have changed.
The rebuilding of the East’s reputation started in 2004, when the Detroit Pistons shocked the nation and brought home the NBA Championship to the Motor City. It continued the following year, the then defending champion Detroit Pistons pushed the highly favored San Antonio Spurs, the Western Conference powerhouse, to the very limits. The series went to the very end, game seven, and had the Pistons not blown the lead they had with eight minutes left, they might be known now as a dynasty and the East would have been looked at very differently, right away.
There is another reason to believe the East can hang with the West. When 2006 came, it brought with it another NBA Championship game that favored the Western Conference representative, the Dallas Mavericks. Well, no one told the Miami Heat, the Eastern Conference representative, that they weren’t supposed to win, and Miami walked up to the favored Mavericks team and punched them in the mouth. It was the third time, in as many years that the East was highly competitive in the championship game, with the East winning two of those respective three championship series'.
So, welcome to 2008, and welcome to another exciting year in NBA basketball. Can the East be competitive again, after its being swept from the finals last year? If you look at how the Celtics have been rolling over Western Conference teams, and how the Pistons continue to excel, the answer is simple, absolutely.
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