The Eastern Conference Is Back, Baby

It’s been 129 long days since the New York Knicks broke a five-decade dry spell, kicking off one of the greatest summers the greatest city has ever seen with a hard-won NBA championship. It was a thrilling finale, full of dramatic comebacks and last-second tip-ins delicious enough to keep us fed through the off-season. But just when the absence of basketball was becoming untenable, we came back in a big way this week. The 2026-2027 NBA season has officially begun, and while it’s ridiculous at this early point in the year to promote any narratives about where things might go, when has that ever stopped us? Especially when, after a summer of insane trades and roster-shuffling, one particular take seems impossible to deny: the Eastern Conference is back, baby.

“There are maybe [only] two teams in the Eastern Conference that I can say have no chance of making the playoffs: the Milwaukee Bucks and the Brooklyn Nets,” All-NBA shooting guard-turned-NBC-studio-analyst Tracy McGrady told me on the eve of opening night. As for the other 13 teams, T-Mac says it could swing anyone’s way, because the East is “just that deep.”

For years, it’s been the opposite. Star power in the Eastern Conference was just as limited as depth—the post-season didn’t get interesting until around the semifinals, while the Western Conference regularly felt like a Battle Royale pitting established veteran stars against the new faces of the league. Now, the pendulum has swung in the other direction so thoroughly that West mainstays are willing to admit as much.

“I literally just had this conversation with Draymond Green and I asked, Is the East better?" says the beloved Prime broadcaster Taylor Rooks. “And he took a minute and was just like… 'Yes.'" Rooks, a former sideline reporter for the NBA on TNT, continued: "There's just real star power in a way that's so exciting. The conclusion we ultimately came to was, it's not just that the East is better, it is so much deeper. The gauntlet of what it will take to get through the East is different than an obviously top-heavy Western Conference.”

Of course, the headline trade of the offseason was LeBron James taking his talents and his six blade to the Philadelphia 76ers, where he joins Jaylen Brown, touching down from Boston. Another seemingly endless question of the off-season was finally answered when Giannis Antetokounmpo departed Milwaukee for South Beach to link up with Mr. 83 himself, Bam Adebayo. And of course, the aforementioned Knicks now find themselves in the unprecedented position of having a target on their backs. But in the East, there’s energy, excitement and promise whichever way you look.

“So many Eastern Conference teams have great stories this season, which is ultimately what makes people care about sports generally, but definitely about the NBA. So many of the teams' ceilings are high if their on-paper manifests on court,” Rooks explains, speaking shortly after the new Superteam Sixers’ surprise defeat of the defending champs. “I felt strongly about the Knicks winning tonight. If I was a Sixers fan, I would be so encouraged by what just happened.”

T-Mac, for his part, cautions against getting too swept up in the appeal of the Sixers’ narrative; he expects ebbs and flows for that team in particular throughout the regular season. “Philly can be one of those five or four-seed teams,” says McGrady, who’s not convinced the patchwork squad will “run things in the Eastern Conference” from the jump. “They are a playoff team, that's what they're built for. But they'll probably have spells in the regular season where they look like they're not as strong. There’s a lot predicated on Joel Embiid's health, and I can't see LeBron, who’s turning 42 in December, playing 65 games.”

But while all eyes are on James and his new team, which features three other All-Stars in Embiid, Brown, and Tyrese Maxey, Rooks thinks we should all be looking north at another Los Angeles ex-pat. “I think that Kawhi [Leonard] going to Toronto is a big deal in that same way. I feel like [people] don't include the Raptors in that same tier of conversation, and I actually think we should. The fact that Kawhi, Scottie Barnes and RJ Barrett are all going to be on the same team…”

Beyond high-value trades, there are all the comebacks—Tyrese Haliburton in particular, who touched the court Wednesday night for the first time since going down with a brutally-timed Achilles tear early in the Pacers’ game seven finals face-off against the Thunder two seasons ago. “I want to see an incredible Tyrese Haliburton takeover,” Rooks says, pointing to Haliburton’s recent comments about the Pacers’ having to open the season on the road, against the Pelicans, in a game not televised nationally. “I saw him talking about how wild that is. I think he’s absolutely right.”

Then there are the teams enacting notable resets, like the Chicago Bulls and their fourth-overall draft pick Caleb Wilson. Rooks even thinks the Washington Wizards, who last year boasted the worst record in the league, could be primed to pull off a “feisty upset as the season progresses” now that they’re armed with Anthony Davis, Trae Young and number-one overall draft pick AJ Dybantsa.

According to McGrady, AD and Trae have chips on their shoulders that could lead to chips on the mantle. “AD has something to prove because honestly, bro, you got traded for some cash,” says T-Mac explains, almost as if he’s trying to Draymond-Green-gif charge Davis from afar. “The Lakers traded you to Dallas, Dallas traded you to Washington, like you’re an expendable piece. But that in itself should motivate AD, and I think it will, based on some of the comments he's been putting out there.” Trae Young has something to prove, too. “He was once one of the premier point guards in the NBA, an All-Star, led his team to the Eastern Conference Finals. I think he wants to get back to that level.”

Last season, the Pistons boasted the best record in the conference only to go out sad in the semifinals. Will this be the season that Cade Cunningham and company finally go as far as their past buzz suggests? McGrady isn’t sure if recent personnel changes will work in their favor, bringing up the losses of Tobias Harris and Isaiah Stewart. “You lose Isaiah, who was your beast, your brute. I was looking for them to add a secondary ball handler [and] scorer so you don’t have to rely on Cade so much and they didn't really address that,” he explains. “When you look at Jalen Duren, he was limited in what he could do in the playoffs because teams just put a guy in the corner and when he tried to roll to the basket, they cut that water off and he was ineffective.” Duren made headlines when he held out for a big payday, but McGrady allows that if he spent that time improving his game, specifically his mid-range, he could be the problem the Pistons need him to be.

The Orlando Magic is another post-season team McGrady feels is in a make-or-break situation. “Orlando was one of those teams that had the pieces, the coach, the talent to be able to get over the hump... They just didn't do it.” He does, however, have faith in rookie head coach Sean Sweeney, who the Magic hired away from the Spurs. “He is going to be a phenomenal coach and change the culture in terms of how those guys feel about the system and how they want to play for the coach. I just see them being that team that, if it doesn't work this year, you're going to have to move some pieces to try to make that team better.

But for all this prognosticating, are we just staring down the barrel of a Knicks repeat? Earlier this summer, Karl-Anthony Towns told me that he was “hungrier than ever” to get a second championship ring: “If I was willing to do whatever it took to get the first one, what do you think I’m going to do for the second one?” It’s a sentiment Jordan Clarkson recently echoed describing winning as “an addiction” and a high that the Knicks want to experience again. “We want to be the last ones standing,” Clarkson said.

Game one didn’t quite go that way, with the Knicks championship ring ceremony failing to inspire one of their patented fourth quarter comebacks against Philly. But there were very promising signs, like Andre Drummond, whose emergence should ease Knicks fans who might've been worried about losing Mitchell Robinson to the Celtics.

T-Mac doesn’t see a repeat in the cards, but not because they’re not good. “I just think it's too hard in today's game to run it back-to-back. I don't see anyone doing it,” explains McGrady, who pointed to three recent championship teams—the Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Denver Nuggets—that seemed primed to repeat and then fell notably short. The Knicks, he said, are “going to be good because they have a starting five with chemistry that I haven't seen in a long time. But I think the teams around them in the Eastern Conference have gotten better. Their path is going to be a little bit tougher.”

Conventional wisdom says none of these narratives can even begin to cohere until the All-Star break. But then Rooks remembers the still fairly new competition that early-season games are built around: the NBA cup. “I’m not just saying that because it’s Amazon,” she laughs.

"If you think about last year’s NBA Cup, who was it? The Knicks and the Spurs. And not just that: three out of the four teams we had were in their conference finals. It was the Magic, Thunder, Knicks, and Spurs,” Rooks continued. “Seeing what those teams played like when something was on the line was very informative for me. None of us were surprised [by the Finals] because of what we saw from the Knicks when they needed to win.”

Regardless, whether it’s play-in, post-season, Cups or conference finals, everyone seems to agree on one thing: the NBA now runs through the East.