With Jimmy Butler trade, 76ers are next pretenders to Warriors' throne

We had to know this was coming sooner or later, but the Eastern Conference finally has become the cool part of NBA Town.
 
The Warriors must be thrilled.
 
The Minnesota Timberwolves finally have acknowledged the pile of burning tires in their locker room and are sending Jimmy Butler to Philadelphia for Robert Covington, Dario Saric and Jerryd Bayless. This makes the Wolves more tranquil, the 76ers more dynamic, and the battle to see who gets to the NBA Finals against (we presume) Golden State more convoluted.
 
The last straw for Minnesota might have been Butler’s interview with Sam Amick of The Athletic on Friday night, in which he complained about the high number of minutes he has been asked to play lately, including 41 in a loss to Sacramento, and said, “This s--- has to stop.” Or it might have been the aftermath of their fifth consecutive loss, in which they have been beaten by an average of nearly 15 points.
 
Or it might have been the accumulation of toxicity in the room since Butler first made his trade demand clear. Either way, the East, which looked like it had already assembled enough Finals candidates in the Boston Celtics, Toronto Raptors and Milwaukee Bucks, just added a fourth, and one with a fascinating set of weapons.
 
Put another way, Toronto has been revivified by Kawhi Leonard, Boston already is a tough out for anyone, Milwaukee just interrogator-slapped the Warriors Thursday, and now this.
 
Frankly, and we are prepared for the backlash here, LeBron James and the New Lakers aren’t quite so hot a daily topic after all.
 
Oh, the Lakers generate their own noise simply by being the perpetual focus of all diffused attention in the league. The notion that “The NBA is better when the Lakers are good” always has been an article of faith, even though the evidence of the last six years suggests this is not actually true.
 
But now we will see just how much less an afterthought the East will be with four teams capable of doing something never before achieved -- winning 60 games simultaneously.
 
Three teams in the same conference winning 60 has happened just twice, in 1981 (Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee) and 1998 (the Lakers, Seattle and Utah), so the degree of difficulty here is considerable.
 
But the East, which merely has been the final rung in the ladder for the Western Conference winner since Michael Jordan left Chicago, now has four teams who can irk the Warriors in different ways.
 
Well, wait, maybe we should back up here. Toronto hasn’t done that yet and in any event is just 12 games old with Leonard, and Philadelphia with Butler has only existed for a few hours. Chemistry matters, as the Warriors have proven time and again, and the Timberwolves just showed in the negative.
 
But after the decade-long tyranny of LeBron’s Eastern Conference, the new symphony of disorder in the northeast corner of the nation and Dairy Country creates many things upon which to chew between now and June.
 
The Celtics have battled the Warriors almost evenly in the Curry Era, and Kyrie Irving has not only melded well with the Brad Stevens mythos but it with him. The Bucks have been the only non-LeBron team from the East to beat the Warriors three times since Steve Kerr reset Golden State’s fortunes, and we have just gotten a fresh glimpse of the difficulties the Warriors are presented by Giannis Antetokounmpo in a ball-movement-with-threes offense.
 
The Raptors and Sixers, though, complicate matters greatly, especially Philadelphia. The matter of whether Butler will try to alpha-male a new room comes immediately to the forefront, as does the reverse in which he teaches a young and largely precocious roster how to add grit to their diet.
 
In any event, there now are four full attractions from The Other Conference for the committed basketball fan, and that means four full attractions for the committed Warriors fan who now is well accustomed to looking ahead to June while still in early November.
 
And LeBron’s Lakers? In truth, he has plenty to do redefining a weird and limited team while trying not to look like he is assuming his usual roles as coach and assistant general manager. The NBA punditocracy figures the Lakers are not yet ready for center stage with the Warriors even though everyone in that subset desperately wants it to be so for the sake of preseason narratives and the heroin-like Laker fixation they all share.
 
In other words, the East has risen with an enjoyable vengeance. We will have to wait another eight months to see how high, and if the Warriors have to do anything about it except wait, but it is finally clear that the conference finally has shed itself of its LeBronnic dependency and raced headlong to fill, sand, paint and polish the void.