RealGM

Rank the Western Confernce from best to worst by era by competition

Like most competition within the conference?

Least
80s - Probably at the bottom, Lakers were great, but the conference was bad as a whole, very uncompetitive.
60s - Conference was bad from top to bottom (worst decade by a conference ever imo), but the Lakers did kind of dominate.
50s - A dominant Lakers half decade, but Rochester was probably the 2nd best team over the period, whole conference fell off together after that, leading into the crappy 60s.
10s - Has a clear headline team (GS), but plenty of other teams to mention (OKC/SA/HOU), overall a very strong decade.
00s - SA/LA going back and forth feels a bit more balanced than in the 10s, great depth and other notable teams
90s - No dominant top team, but plenty of contenders every season it seemed like.
70s - An era of parity overall, LAL/MIL pretty dominant to start the decade off.
20s - No repeat finalists yet, could drop some if OKC/DEN/MIN dominate the next couple of seasons.
Most

I could see any of 70s/90s/20s as the most competitive. Other eras seemed to have a consistent top team.

If you meant when the Western conference was at its best, then I'd go:
1. 00s
2. 10s
3. 20s - room to move up, would be surprised by a drop
4. 70s
5. 90s
6. 50s
7. 80s
8. 60s

The East really ran the league prior to the 00s.

1. 2000s
2. 2010s

2000s and 2010s are close but the three best teams are Shaqobe Spurs, prime Duncan/Manu/Parker Spurs and Curry Warriors and 2000s have 2 of them

3. 1950s
4. 1970s
5. 2020s

20s is not bad but has a lot of parity with usually one great West team a year, so I give 50s and 70s the edge which had some big peaks like Mikan dynasty or 70s Lakers/Bucks competing in the same years.

6. 1980s
7. 1990s

Depth vs the best team, the non Lakers competition gets pathetic at some points in the 80s, but there is a few credible teams here and there like 86 Rockets or defending champion Sonics.

8. 1960s

0 title decade says it all, as poor non Lakers competition as the 80s while being worse than them.

2000s easily. An entire decade of both elite teams at the top (spurs/lakers) and also elite depth (mavs, suns, nuggets, blazers and kings)

2010s was on track to match or surpass the 2000s in the first 5-6 years but loses a ton of depth in the second half of the decade once mavs/thunder/spurs all fall off. Rockets were able to muster one elite year in 2018 but that was it

The 2000s Western Conference was absolutely brutal. You had the Spurs being great every year. The Mavs were great pretty much every year too. With a brief interlude for a few years in the middle of the decade, the Lakers were great. And then you had teams that were really strong for shorter periods. The Suns were really strong in the latter half of the decade. The Kings and Blazers were very strong in the first few years of the decade.

All of those teams were championship-level teams for multiple years. They didn’t all overlap, but at any given time you usually had like 4 championship-level teams in the Western Conference. Some years it was only 3, but even that is pretty brutal.

And that didn’t mean that there weren’t other teams that were tough opponents, even if not championship-level ones. The Jazz won 50+ games five times in the decade. The Timberwolves actually were good for a short period with Garnett. The Rockets had lots of injuries but were very talented for a while. The late-2000s Nuggets won 50+ games three years in a row. Not to mention that the conference was usually deep with pretty good teams, such that even bottom seeded teams were often like 2-4 SRS teams.

In order to get through the Western Conference in that era, even as a high seed you’d generally need to beat a 2-4 SRS team in the first round, and then beat genuine contenders in the next two rounds. This was especially true in the first ~8 years of the decade. I think there’s been years in other decades that were like that, but not so consistently as the 2000s.

00s and 10s West are tied at the top. The West had a roughly 56-57% win % over the East in that time period. Then you got the 70s and 20s Western Conference which had a 52-53% over the East in those two decades. You then have the 90s West which was nearly 50/50 with the Eastern Conference.

1994-95 was a strong season for the west. Spurs won 62 games. Jazz won 60. Suns won 59. Sonics won 57. And the Rockets won the title in a sweep.

Shows clearly how the East was absolute rubbish during Lebron's career. How such lopsidedness in the conferences happens is absurd.