NBA: Does the East or West have more star power now?
Top 30 Player Rankings
Now for a more subjective comparison. I compiled my personal top-30 ranking for the NBA, which is a simple way to identify a “star” player. The name-value of players in the NBA likely extends past 30, while the list of players who can lead a contending team is shorter. We’ll strike for a happy medium.
The Eastern Conference now has 16 of my top 30 players, from Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Durant at the top to Jaylen Brown and Malcolm Brogdon at the bottom edge. The Western Conference dominates the top 10, with seven players to the East’s three. Yet from 11 to 28 the Eastern Conference boasts 13 of 18.
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This is certainly subjective; if you’re lower on Brogdon, Brown and Pascal Siakam and higher on Brandon Ingram, Zion Williamson and Kristaps Porzingis, the math swaps based on our arbitrary cutoff line. The bottom line is that it’s close. Based on the past two decades of Western Conference star power, this is in-and-of-itself a sea change in the NBA.
We should emphasize here that the West still dominates any look at the elite players in the league. Antetokounmpo, Durant and Harden are the East’s only representatives in my top 10; players such as Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic and Damian Lillard fill out the last few slots ahead of the East’s second-tier stars.
Any cutoff will feel arbitrary, but any cutoff larger than top-10 balances the two conferences about evenly.
Verdict: Tie