This Year’s NBA Finals Will Be in the Eastern Conference

When LeBron James left the floor with thirty-nine seconds left on Saturday, in a double-digit Game 1 win over the Chicago Bulls, there weren’t any surprises. And then when the Orlando Magic held off a furious run by the Charlotte Bobcats to take the first game of their series, nobody fainted from shock.

Because let’s be honest, the Cavs and Magic are the two best teams in the NBA.

When these two powerhouses inevitably meet in the Eastern Conference Finals (watch that statement come back to bite me), it will likely be the de facto NBA Finals. There are more teams that are good in the West (now that Brandon Roy is out and the Utah Jazz are missing some key pieces, I count six teams that could legitimately represent the West in the Finals), but make no mistake—Cleveland and Orlando are the class of the NBA.

The ever-shifting balance of power in the league, centered firmly in the West just a few years ago, finds itself in the East this year. It was almost that way last year, too, if not for the NBA’s best team being called the Lakers. If Kevin Garnett had been able to keep his brittle, arthritic knees together then the East would have had three possible title contenders last year.

And this coming on the heels of the West being so good. Their zenith was 2007—the team with the best record in the East that year (the Detroit Pistons, with 53 wins) would only have mustered a 4 seed in the West (behind the 67-win Dallas Mavericks, the Phoenix Suns, and the San Antonio Spurs).

2008 saw the Boston Celtics win 42 more games than the year before, and the East has been rising ever since. The top couple teams, anyway; after that there’s quite the dropoff.

In fact, “balance of power” is probably a bad term to use—after the Cavs and Magic (and perhaps the Hawks) this year, it’s all the West. I hate to drive this kind of comparison into the ground, but the #8 seed in the West (the Oklahoma City Thunder) has the same win-loss record as the the #4 seed in the East (that’s the Boston Celtics).

Last year’s 2009 Playoffs gave us a decent Finals, even if the ending wasn’t a surprise. The Magic took one game and pushed another to overtime, but the verdict wasn’t in question for long. If we’d all gotten together and voted, or maybe if the NBA used a screwy, BCS-type system to choose the Finals contenders instead of a playoff, then we would have seen the media darling Finals of Kobe vs. LeBron. We can debate all day whether or not they were the two best teams, but they had the two best records.

The good news is that the NBA doesn’t use such a system and lets teams sort these things out on the court. But we’ve still got conferences and divisions, for what they mean, and such a structure means the two best teams can’t always meet in the Finals.

Like this year: the top two records in the league, belonging to the Cavs and Magic, are both in the East. Last year the stars didn’t align to get those two top teams—the Cavs and Lakers—into the Finals, but it was possible. Before that, the last time the two top teams in the league could have even possibly met in the Finals was 2006.

They didn’t that year, either.

It’s not a dramatic pick, but whoever wins the Cleveland-Orlando showdown is my pick to win the title. As much as I like the Phoenix Suns, the ambivalent Lakers, or the Denver Nuggets winning one for George, I’m not sure there’s a single team in the West that can hack a seven-game series with the East champion.

So, tune in to the NBA Finals when the Magic roll into Cleveland to start up a rematch of last year’s Eastern Conference championship.

And then feel free to watch while the winner takes on the West’s champ. In what they really call the NBA Finals.