QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Jan 18 2010, 01:32 PM)
There's a lot more travel involved, so I would imagine that they tend to cluster the west coast games a bit more rather than going back and forth from Chicago to the west coast. When the Bulls play someone like Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indiana or Detroit it's a lot easier to go back and forth since they are much shorter flights.
Teams that are out west wind up taking east coast trips also. We hear about the West Coast trips more because we're Bulls fans, and because we're often on the East Coast, because ESPN is an east coast network, and because lately, the center of power in the NBA has been the Western conference (i.e. if you take a swing playing the #1, #4, #5, #7, #8, and #10 team in the West, you play much better teams, especially on the lower seeds, than you do if you play those same teams from the East).
The Lakers, right now, are on an East Coast swing. Their next 8 games are:
@ Cleveland
@ NY
@ Toronto
@ Washington
@ Indiana
@ Philadelphia
@ Boston
@ Memphis
If the 4-10 teams in the East were as strong as they were in the West, that trip would scare more.