by Tom Spurgeon
Although none of its teams are likely to lose a game to an Israeli club squad anytime soon, the Western Conference of the NBA remains the junior circuit of the two because of history and mythology. A team in Sacramento not only sounds less interesting than one in Kansas City or Cincinnati, it is less interesting — there’s no connection to regional college passions, or the great Midwestern industrial league teams. The Clippers won titles in Buffalo, collected injured legends in San Diego and became synonymous with massive incompetence in Los Angeles. The Western Conference’s most emblematic franchise isn’t the Lakers but the Phoenix Suns, the pride of a city where one can imagine having season tickets for 10 years and never seeing anyone else you know at a game, spreads of houses connected to other spreads, each of which boasts 32 sports bars and 1,700 Dan Majerle look-alikes.
When I think of the Western Conference I think of Ralph Sampson, power forward, Mark Eaton, All-Star, and the 1979 Seattle SuperSonics, last great champions of the NBA’s recreational cocaine use/random sucker punch era. I have no love for basketball in the West; these are players that embrace Oakland and reject Vancouver; these are fans that describe Scottie Pippen as handsome and who feel Chris Mullin was a better player than Isiah Thomas. You could lop the league in half and I’d happily move to the other side of the Mississippi to celebrate.
Then again, the West has most of the good teams. What follows are my thoughts on the Western Conference basketball squads, in order of projected finish. My projected finish will be in the exact same order as last year’s actual finish, because I like cut and paste only to a certain point and last year proved forever I have no idea what I’m talking about when I put my own order forward.