I agree that it'll be hard to keep up with the flock of bad eastern teams, which is kind of a strange situation. We normally expect the leastern conference to be bad, but it used to extend to the top, e.g., whether the Kings or Lakers made it to the finals, everyone knew the Nets were toast. Now it seems like there are two teams with an excellent shot at the championship, four more who have a chance, six who will have a bit of fun in the postseason, six who will fight for a chance at a first round exit, and twelve who have nothing to look forward to but the lottery. Those who have things going their way are now pretty evenly divided between east and west, but the gulf between the have and have-not teams is huge.
The west has more that are middling and the east more that are worse, but the fact that a .477 team would be in 8th in either conference, tells me that the bigger inequality is the concentration of star power in a handful of franchises. By way of contrast, no team from either conference has made the playoffs with a losing record since the Nets did it with .466 five years ago. The last western conference team to do it was the '96-7 Clippers. Last time it happened in both conferences at once was '87-8, when we picked Kenny Smith over Kevin Johnson, Reggie Miller and Horace Grant. With a league as top heavy as we now have, a small market, have-not team really must draft well to even rise to the level of mediocrity, so I'm basically hoping for the Kings to win the lottery the next few years in a row.
Sorry for the digression, but it's historically a very peculiar situation, and I thought it deserved mention.