5 reasons why the East has been worse than the West since 1998

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The gap between the Eastern and Western Conferences in the NBA has been glaring for some time

As things stand now, or even as they stood in the 2000s, the NBA's Eastern Conference has been vastly inferior to its Western Conference. Since Michael Jordan's last title with the Bulls in 1998, Eastern Conference teams have only won the NBA title on 6 occasions. Western Conference teams have won it more than twice as often (13 times) as the Eastern Conference teams. Aside from a few years here and there, the West has pretty much owned the East for the better part of the last two decades.

Most NBA fans are unanimous in the 'West is better than the East" proclamation. However, the reasons behind this are not very well known. What actually happened? Why did a conference, which not very long ago featured Michael Jordan & the Chicago Bulls, Patrick Ewing & the New York Knicks, Reggie Miller & the Indiana Pacers and Shaquille O'Neal and the Orlando Magic, turn into the 'Leastern Conference'?

Here's why.

# 5 The 1996 NBA draft

Kobe Bryant was the best player to come out of the 1996 NBA Draft

The 50th draft of the NBA, the 1996 NBA Draft, along with 1984 and 2003, is considered to be one of the 3 best NBA draft classes of all time. Just one look at some names of this draft class is enough to tell you why. Here's a list of the players from this draft, who made the All-Star team at least once in their career:

1. Allen Iverson (1st pick, Philadelphia 76ers)
2. Shareef Abdur-Rahim (3rd pick, Vancouver Grizzlies)
3. Stephon Marbury (4th pick, Milwaukee Bucks)
4. Ray Allen (5th pick, Minnesota Timberwolves)
5. Antoine Walker (6th pick, Boston Celtics)
6. Kobe Bryant (13th pick, Charlotte Hornets)
7. Peja Stojakovic (14th pick, Sacramento Kings)
8. Steve Nash (15th pick, Phoenix Suns)
9. Jermaine O' Neal (17th pick, Portland Trailblazers)
10. Zydrunas Ilgauskas (20th pick, Cleveland Cavaliers)

That's a staggering amount of All-Stars from a single draft and you can clearly see that most of these names went on to define the NBA in the years to come. In other words, the NBA of the 2000s and beyond was pretty much defined by the way the careers of these players panned out.

If you divide these players as per their conferences, you can see that it stands at 5-5. However, because of trades and free agent moves in the subsequent years, only 3 of these 10 players played a major part of their career's primes in the East. This was the true beginning of the disparity between the East and the West. The bad draft and trade choices over the next 20 years are explained next.

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