This was supposed to be the year that the East caught up with the West. Remember when we thought that, back in the halcyon days of three weeks ago? How foolish we were. With the season not even a month old, it already appears the West’s enormous advantage over the East will drag on for at least another year, as its teams have demonstrated a palpable superiority to their counterparts from the East.

This is most notable simply by checking out the disparity in head-to-head competition, where the West has already raced out to a nine-game advantage; smart alecks in the audience will note the West’s advantage may grow by the day until the end of the Nets’ current road trip. More important, if present trends continue the West will end up winning almost exactly as many games as it did a year ago — in fact, they’re on pace to slightly extend their advantage by adding six games to the conference’s victory total.

How could this be, one wonders, when so many prominent players shifted from West to East in the off-season? Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen departed from Minnesota and Seattle, respectively, to Boston, immediately transforming what had been the worst team in the East into one of its best. Orlando picked up Rashard Lewis, also from Seattle, and similarly vaulted to the top of the Eastern pile. Meanwhile other prominent Western players like Zach Randolph (Blazers to Knicks), Jason Richardson (Warriors to Bobcats), and Ricky Davis (T’wolves to Heat) made the leap across conferences, without any commensurate swaps in the opposite direction.

Yet the end result of all this defies expectations — the West remains as good as it has ever been, while the East is just as bad. Only four Eastern teams entered play on Tuesday night with a record above .500, and one of them was a Charlotte team that has played the league’s easiest schedule and already has lost by more than 30 points twice.

Conversely, you could make a convincing argument that of the 10 best teams in the early part of the season, eight of them hail from the West. In addition to the usual powerhouses in San Antonio, Dallas, and Phoenix, the West has an impressive second tier of contenders. The Jazz, Nuggets, and Rockets all expected to be in the mix and indeed are, while the surprising Lakers and Hornets have played far beyond expectations in the early going.

Equally surprising is what’s going on at the bottom of the conference. The West was supposed to make up for its strength at the top by being extremely weak at the bottom, but a number of its bottom feeders have surprised. For instance, Sacramento and the Clippers both were supposed to be horrible; entering Tuesday, they combined for a rather respectable 9–10 mark — even with the Kings missing Ron Artest for seven games and Mike Bibby for all 10.

But of all the reasons for the East to be taking another year of beatings at the hands of the West, perhaps one best summarizes the situation: mismanagement. You don’t have to roam far from The New York Sun headquarters to find it. Up the road at MSG, the Knicks were supposed to be better with the arrival of Zach Randolph; if anything they’ve been even worse thanks to the Isiah Thomas-Stephon Marbury fiasco, not to mention their general inattention to defense.

Across the river, the Nets also have disappointed. While they may be better later in the year with a full cast of characters, as I opined yesterday, they’ve been disastrous so far, thanks mainly to Rod Thorn’s inability to build a quality bench.

Then there are the Bulls. Chicago was supposed to be one of the best teams in the East; in fact, I picked them to finish first. Instead, they’ve been arguably the worst. The sudden and inexplicable inability of Kirk Hinrich and Ben Wallace to offer anything approaching last year’s production has been a major problem, but perhaps the biggest problem has been contentment.

Because the Bulls viewed themselves as good enough to contend with their current roster, they passed on a golden opportunity to upgrade last season. The Bulls had a chance to acquire Pau Gasol from Memphis, giving the team a low-post option it desperately needed. Instead, the Bulls are misfiring on one jumper after another en route to the league’s least productive offense in the early going. Seven-foot post talents don’t grow on trees, and it may be a while before such an option again becomes available.

Chicago’s situation illustrates one of the most nefarious elements of the West’s dominance: It may be self-sustaining. The Bulls didn’t pull the trigger on Gasol in part because they thought being a 50-win team was good enough to give them a chance in the East, so they saw no point in taking the risk. In the West, they very well may have adopted the opposite approach, knowing darn well that their roster had no chance against the Spurs and Mavericks of the world.

I think this problem goes far beyond the Bulls. Nobody thinks they can contend in the West unless they build a 60-win team, so that’s the goal at the start of the season; the teams that don’t see a chance to get there immediately make moves to try to get there down the road. Meanwhile pretty much everyone in the East thinks they can get into the race, which results in the opposite effect: Middling teams like the Nets and Pacers try to stick it out when they really should be rebuilding.

But if the East can take solace in one thing it’s this: At least it appears to have two teams that can give elite clubs from the West a game: Boston and Orlando are a combined 18–3 thus far. Last year, that number was zero, resulting in a lopsided and anticlimactic NBA Finals. If this year is different, maybe it’s the first step in fixing the overwhelming disparity between the conferences.

Here’s how it works: If Boston and Orlando are good enough to remove the we-can-contend fantasy from the Bulls, Nets, and Pacers of the league, it would force those teams to make the tough decision they’ve been blowing off for so long. No longer would the formula for success be to build a 44-win team and hope to get lucky from there; instead it would require a more concrete vision for building a truly excellent team.

Let’s hope the Celtics and Magic can pull it off. I’m starting to suspect that only when a couple of dominant, 60-win type teams emerge from this conference will Eastern teams stop their vicious cycle of bad management decisions in search of the quick fix for a team that can kinda sorta maybe win 50 games.

If not? The decade-long dominance of the West in the post-Jordan era may continue indefinitely. If the East couldn’t gain ground even with this off-season’s massive influx of talent, one suspects that only a massive rethink in how teams operate will do the trick.

jhollinger@nysun.com