As he took questions at his introductory press conference in Dallas on Monday, Jason Spezza, the newly minted member of the Stars, was asked for his take on the daunting state of the NHL’s Western Conference.

Spezza’s new team, after all, is possibly an ascendant NHL power. The Stars, after a short-order makeover by newish GM Jim Nill, made the playoffs this past season and came within an overtime goal of forcing a first-round Game 7 with the Anaheim Ducks. If their home address was on Bay St., the best of them might already be cast in bronze. But Spezza and his new teammates reside, sadly for them, not in hockey’s epicentre of entitlement but in its seemingly eternal Group of Death.

The West is home to the past two Stanley Cup champions, the L.A. Kings and Chicago Blackhawks, along with a handful of other teams that make the bulk of the East look woefully small and slow.

It’s been more than 20 years since the NHL renamed the Campbell and Wales Conferences for geographical regions to make the game more accessible to newbie fans. Maybe it’s time to scrap geography for accuracy: let’s just call them Division 1 and Division 2. Even the late adopters won’t need a hint about which would be which.

Spezza, the ex-Ottawa Senator who knows he just left life among hockey’s slingshot-lacking Davids to walk among its well-armed Goliaths, gave the only answer he could give.

He said the West’s high level of competition “makes you a better team” and “creates better habits.”

He also said: “Look how freaking lazy I got playing against the Maple Leafs all those years.” Actually, he didn’t say that last part. But I know Senators fans who will assume it was implicit in his comments.

In any event, Spezza’s sentiments were noble and even a bit macho. He was essentially riffing on an old sports saying: You’ve got to beat the best to be the best.

And maybe, ultimately, there’s real truth in that.

But here’s the flipside that should make Maple Leaf fans optimistic about the coming season: there is no best to beat if you reside in the East.

The West just extended its Stanley Cup winning streak to three seasons. In the nine campaigns since the season-killing lockout of 2004-05, only three Eastern franchises have managed to win a championship. The West’s win-loss record in the Stanley Cup final over that span is 33-22 — that’s a .600 winning percentage against the finest the East could offer.

When you consider that the West has to beat up on itself before it plays the East — well, that’s an impressive run of domination.

Meanwhile, the only Eastern team that’s recently been able to lay claim to elite status appears to be on the wane. The next time the playoffs roll around, Boston’s Zdeno Chara will be a high-mileage 38 years old. Jarome Iginla’s departure — to the West, of course — leaves the Bruins lacking an essential component. And even when they had it, they still managed a second-round exit to the smaller, less-seasoned Canadiens this past spring.

So maybe it makes some sense that Toronto, under the guidance of the mostly invisible hand of Brendan Shanahan, has only tweaked its roster with the comings and goings of role players. In the wake of the Leafs’ seventh playoff miss in eight seasons, CEO Tim Leiweke promised culture change — and clearly he was speaking of the plan to upgrade the yogurt in the post-workout smoothies. Otherwise, the Leafs would have us believe the assistant coaches were the problem and all else is well.

Heck, who’s to say they might not be right? In the East, after all, plenty of occasionally dysfunctional, not-so-well-stocked franchises have enjoyed healthy enough shares of success of late. It doesn’t take much.

The New York Rangers, for instance, are nobody’s juggernaut — it’s almost a given they’ll backslide into mediocrity in the coming seasons — and yet they’ll dine off their status as 2013-14 finalists for some time.

The East, if it has one thing, has its stars. Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby have combined to win five of the past eight Hart Trophies, but nobody fears the teams they lead. The best active player who’s never won the league MVP, Steven Stamkos, also resides in the East — and maybe it’s no surprise that Tampa Bay is a rare Eastern outfit that appears on the competitive rise. This thanks to a general manager, Steve Yzerman, who learned the trade with a then-Western powerhouse in Detroit.

The Eastern swoon, for reasons that aren’t easily explained, is a multi-league phenomenon. Baseball’s American League East, usually a murderer’s row of talent, is muddling through a rare season of underachievement that the Blue Jays appear bent on not benefitting from.

The NBA’s Eastern Conference is a collective wreck — a state of affairs that allowed the Raptors set a franchise record for victories this past season while the Western-based San Antonio Spurs romped to an easy win in the final.

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The CFL, in its never-ending effort to be a big-league entity, has even put its spin on the trend. The joke last week was that the Ottawa Redblacks were in first place in the CFL’s East with a 0-0 record. Sometimes you have to beat the best to be the best — they didn’t even have to play anyone. The Dallas Stars of the world can only dream of a path of such minimal resistance.

“We are in a tough, tough conference but that’s good,” Nill, the Dallas GM, assured his fan base on Monday. “That’s going to make us better.”

Either that or it’s going to make them bitter. Let’s check back in a few years and see how they feel about watching inferior Eastern team after inferior Eastern team make a run to the Stanley Cup final, this while their good-habited, stud-stacked roster laments the NHL’s geographical gulf over golf.