For a long time, the Western Conference has been the superior half of the NBA. While the list of NBA champions has been fairly well-distributed between the two sides, the West consistently boasts more perceived top-tier teams and a generally deeper field of potential playoff teams. Ahead of the 2025-26 campaign, there was some optimism that the landscape could at least slightly shift toward the East, but the early results do not paint that picture.
This season, the West is best.
The top of the West is still loaded
As of Nov. 20, the top six teams in the Western Conference standings are 24-4 combined against the Eastern Conference. None of those six teams — Oklahoma City, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio, Minnesota — have more than one loss to an East squad, and that group is also 7-3 combined against the current top six in the East. Obviously, that is not the entirety of the evalution in an East vs. West battle, but it's been a dominant start.
To be fair, there are East teams having success against West teams, including a 12-1 combined record from Detroit, New York, and Atlanta. Still, There are six teams with ten wins or more in the West against only three in the East, and arguably the three worst teams in the Association (Brooklyn, Indiana, Washington) live in the Eastern Conference.
What about the championship race?
The Oklahoma City Thunder currently occupy a tier of their own in NBA circles. Oklahoma City is, of course, the reigning NBA champion out of the Western Conference, but the team's performance in 2025-26 would be worthy of awe, even if ignoring previous success.
The Thunder are 15-1 with an utterly dominant plus-15.3 net rating this season. That has sparked conversation about whether Oklahoma City could challenge for 70 victories and, at present, the Thunder have the best defensive rating (102.7) in the NBA by nearly seven points per 100 possessions. For good measure, the Thunder are doing this without their second-best player, Jalen Williams, and with less than perfect health for the team's deep cast of role players. This preposterous early-season pace may not be sustainable, but an East vs. West discussion is impacted by the mere presence of the Thunder on one side.
Elsewhere, four of the top five and six of the top eight teams in the current NBA championship betting market come from the Western Conference. That is not the end-all, be-all of team evaluation, but the betting market does provide one of the best publicly available metrics for projecting teams, and only the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks crack one of the top two tiers of projected title odds.
The emergence of the 13-2 Detroit Pistons could be beneficial to the perception of the East, and teams like Toronto and Atlanta are playing at a higher level than in previous seasons. Still, the perception of the conference divide isn't shrinking and, at this early juncture, the results still point to Western Conference supremacy in the NBA world.