The NBA’s Western Conference isn’t what it used to be but it might be more fun this way

Howdy, folks. Welcome back to Layup Lines. It’s Sykes, once again, here to talk hoops with you. Let’s talk about the Western Conference.

The West just isn’t quite what it used to be, is it? Once upon a time — not too long ago, honestly — the conference was an absolute powerhouse.

High 50 and 60-win teams at the lofty top of the conference looking down upon teams that needed to win 48 games to sniff the playoffs. That’s the West everyone remembers. That certainly isn’t this West, though.

The top two teams in the Nuggets and Grizzlies are certainly on 60-win paces with their respective records. But their point differentials of 4.5 and 4.2  pale in comparison to what we saw from those peak Warriors teams or even, say, the best of James Harden’s Rockets.

Meanwhile, throughout the entire conference, there are only currently 6 teams above .500. Many of them are just making the cut — the Pelicans’ are the conference’s 4 seed with a 26-23 record.

So the question is what happened? How’d the West fall so far from grace? The answers are pretty simple. The teams that were dominating the conference have mostly broken up.

The Warriors lost Kevin Durant to the Nets in the East. The Rockets lost James Harden to the same team. Kawhi Leonard left the Spurs for the Rockets and then came back to the West to play with the Clippers, but he hasn’t been healthy.

That’s the other factor here: Health. The Clippers’ two best players in Paul George and Kawhi Leonard, for example, have only played 20 games together. Chris Paul and Devin Booker have been in and out of the Suns’ rotation because of injury. Same with Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram in the West. The only two teams that haven’t had many injury troubles are the Nuggets and the Grizzlies, and they’re at the top of the standings.

So, yes, the conference is a bit worse because of it. But it’s not the end of the world. In fact, things might actually be a bit more fun this way.

Think about it. Only 3 games separate the Pelicans from the 13-seeded Lakers. That could easily change by next week. That’s where we are at the end of January — who knows what things could look like by the time we get to April?

The standings are going to come down to the wire this year and for a league struggling to bring meaning to a sometimes drab regular season, this is an absolute gift.

Maybe we won’t need that mid-season tournament after all.

We finally got our first look at the NBA’s All-Star Starters on Thursday and I don’t have too many complaints. But if you’re curious at all about how the fan voting separated from the media voting and player voting for the starters, FTW’s Bryan Kalbrosky has a thorough breakdown of who voted for what.

Here’s how he broke it down. You can check out the results here.

The league office releases exactly how many votes each player received from the fans, other players, and select media.

For The Win separated the publicly-available data and isolated how every player in the league performed in each category using the exact number of votes received rather than rank, then sorted the results to determine where individuals tended to perform better than they did in other categories.

What stuck out to me was how much love Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic got from the players. They had the biggest discrepancy from the player vote to fan vote, which isn’t all that surprising. But it’s pleasant to see the players taking this stuff seriously.

Read the article to check out more.

This is going to be a fun one. The playoff series between the Wolves and Grizzlies was pretty incredible. Everyone isn’t healthy for this one with both Karl Anthony-Towns and Steven Adams sitting this one out. Still, there will be lots of energy between these two sides and lots of scoring. The Grizzlies are on a 4 game losing streak and I think it continues tonight behind the brilliant play of Anthony Edwards. I’m taking the Wolves +3.5.

— Here’s what the last All-Star game without LeBron James was like.

— Everyone has questions about Zion Williamson making the All-Star game over Anthony Davis

—It’s still unbelievable that Joel Embiid isn’t an All-Star starter

—Speaking of Joel Embiid, here are the biggest snubs from the All-Star game.

That’s all, folks. Enjoy the weekend!