Competitive conference balance just a rumor in NBA

	Tony Parker (left) and Tim Duncan haven't exactly been pushed in the NBA Finals. Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

In every major sport these days, the conferences are out of whack.

In the NFL, the AFC has produced six of the last seven Super Bowl winners and does better in cross-conference play.

In baseball, the AL has held the advantage in interleague play for the last three years, including a stunning 154-98 edge in 2006.

But when it comes to competitive imbalance, neither league compares to the NBA, as has been on display the past week.

The Finals are supposed to be a meeting of the two best teams, but you could argue that this will end up being San Antonio's easiest series of the postseason. San Antonio certainly got more of a challenge from Utah in the Western Conference finals and Phoenix in the semifinals. You could even argue that Denver pushed the Spurs more in their first-round series. Yet Carmelo (and Allen Iverson) get an early vacation while pal LeBron is in the Finals.

It's all because Denver is in the Wild West, while Cleveland comes from the Easy East.

Look at the Eastern Conference's playoff field. Three teams made the postseason with records of .500 or worse -- New Jersey, Washington and Orlando.

If you took the conference's top two seeds, Detroit and Cleveland, and moved them into the West, just based on this season's records the Pistons would have been the fourth seed and Cleveland would have been seventh.

But those seedings should probably be curved down, because Cleveland and Detroit fattened up their win totals in the comparatively weaker East, where limping gazelles are plentiful. It's hard to look at Cleveland, particularly, and say the Cavs are better than Denver or even Golden State. In the West, Cleveland would have battled to make the playoffs.

This is why the series could produce record-low ratings for a primetime Finals: By the end of the first half of Game 1, the suspicions of observant NBA fans had been borne out. The most anticipated series had happened weeks ago, when the Spurs and Suns played in the West semifinals. These Finals aren't the main course. They're dessert.

The low ratings don't tell you much about the country's appetite for basketball. They tell you that fans know an anticlimax when they see it.

This week I like

• The NFL giving Mike Nolan and Jack Del Rio permission to wear suits on the sideline for the entire 2007 season. Who says it's the No Fun League?

• The friendly folk of Redvers, a town of about 900 people on the Saskatchewan prairie in Canada. I ventured to Redvers last week to do some reporting for the magazine's upcoming Where Are They Now? issue. I spent an evening at their recreation center and the sense of community -- everyone knew everyone -- was about as good an advertisement for small-town life as I've seen.

• The turkey clubhouse sandwich at the Wagon Wheel in Winnipeg.

• The Sunday brunch at the Big Sky Grille in Erickson, Manitoba. Here's the lineup at the buffet: eggs ... bacon ... sausage ... chicken wings? Genius! And watermelon to cleanse the palette.

• Narrowly avoiding hitting that moose on a foggy road. Not the kind of encounter with Canadian wildlife I would have enjoyed.

• Those Canadian $5 bills. They've got hockey players on the back! (This was my first visit to Canada, if you can't tell.)

This week I don't like

• Donovan McNabb taking the field ahead of schedule earlier this week at Eagles practice -- just because it feels Culpepperish. How many knee injuries are made worse by the player coming back too soon?

• Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard's Playboy pictorial. Because the pictures just aren't that good. I would never criticize Beard's appearance -- or that of any other female competing athlete -- were she just an athlete. But since she's trying to be a model ... seriously, leave it to the pros.