East takes it to the next level (down)

Oh yeah, them.

If you play your cards right, you can ignore the fact that there is an Eastern Conference ... as most of the nation has.

TNT, showing most of the first-round West games, was close to last spring’s land-office numbers.

ESPN showed mostly East games and laid an egg that could hatch a T-Rex.

These days, the East isn’t just the junior varsity but the methodical, b-o-r-i-n-g conference with only one of the top nine offenses.

How come the East never gets the memo?

For years, Western powers such as the Lakers and the Spurs were huge. Eastern teams coped by putting off the day of reckoning, saying they didn’t have to worry about it until the Finals.

Now the new rules favor perimeter players ... and the East has been left behind again as the impact of the Suns and the Warriors spreads through the West.

The West has high-scoring series with story lines (Golden State slaying Dallas, Mark Cuban versus Don Nelson, blood streaming down Steve Nash’s face, the Baron Davis-Deron Williams duel, the moving story of Derek Fisher’s infant daughter).

The East has pratfalls.

Anyone remember when Miami was the defending champion?

The Heat was such a house of cards, no one even seemed surprised by the Bulls’ 4-0 sweep.

Miami Coach Pat Riley went to great lengths to protect Shaquille O’Neal, talking about anything else, even zinging Dwyane Wade’s defense and telling him to stop talking about his shoulder injury and undermining morale.

After the Heat was eliminated, however, Riley put it on Shaq.

“He knows his influence on his teammates,” Riley said. “He’s going to have to lead by real example. If he wants to give back $10 million and play half a season, then fine.”

That was such a slap, Riley had to announce he’s not trading O’Neal. Not that Shaq would be easy to move at 35 with three years and $60 million on his contract.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if O’Neal gets in shape for a last hurrah, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if his last hurrah was last spring.

If the Chicago-Miami series flopped, it was appointment TV compared with Chicago and Detroit.

The gritty little Bulls won the season series, 3-1, convincing them they had a matchup edge over the lethargic Pistons, as they did over creaky Miami.

Unfortunately for the Bulls, the Pistons were finally awake and beat them by a combined 47 points in Games 1 and 2.

As if to show how ready the Bulls were for this level, their supposed leader, Ben Wallace, joked that none of his former teammates “took me out to eat or nothing. None of them showed up.”

Back in Chicago, Wallace showed up late for Game 3, in which the Bulls blew a 19-point lead and lost. “I don’t have to explain myself to nobody,” he said afterward.

So much for the suggestion that signing Wallace, who’ll be 33 in the fall and will get $15 million annually for three more seasons, wasn’t a disaster.

With Pistons Coach Flip Saunders leaving Wallace open, Ben’s defender zones off the middle, smothering the Bulls’ drive-and-kick game.

Now 7-0 this postseason, the Pistons are the one Eastern team that would have a chance at crashing the top four in the West.

They’re now preening at a compliment from ... Phil Jackson?

Amazing as it may be, Jackson compared the Pistons to his ‘70s Knicks teams to the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith.

Smith had the good taste not to compare power forwards Rasheed Wallace and Dave DeBusschere but did suggest that Chris Webber “has a little Willis [Reed] in him,” perhaps on the basis that both are human beings.

It wasn’t always thus. Actually, until recently it was the other way around.

Eastern teams once won 17 of 20 Finals, between 1955 and 1974. In 1998, when Michael Jordan’s Bulls won the last of their six titles, it was East 32, West 20.

The East was bigger, tougher and deeper. When the Lakers won five titles in the ‘80s, they had the advantage of ruling the West while the Celtics, 76ers and Pistons mauled one another.

O’Neal’s move to the West and Tim Duncan’s arrival in the ‘90s began to change everything, and the pendulum has never swung back.

For years everyone in the West geared up to deal with the Lakers and Spurs. Now the big teams have to play in the open court to keep up with Phoenix and Golden State. The formerly grind-it-out Jazz is now averaging 116 points in its series with the Warriors.

The real problem is that Eastern teams stopped caring. The mantra became, “You don’t have to be that good to win the East, and anything can happen in the Finals.”

There’s an obvious solution -- seeding the final four -- but it’s been obvious, and officially derided, for years.

Commissioner David Stern last week spiked a question about seeding all 16 playoff teams, saying the schedule would be “impossible.”

Of course, seeding only four would be easy and would achieve the same result, with no downside.

If Stern can make teams wait three days between games, it’s hardly “impossible.” Travel problems would be solved with the Finals’ 2-3-2 format.

The two best teams would make the Finals, whether both are from the East or West. Eastern teams would have to face the fact that they have more to worry about than each other.

Until then, I can hardly wait to see if LeBron James can take out the Pistons by himself.

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mark.heisler@latimes.com