The NBA East’s lean years were considered as such because after the top two teams, the rest of the conference was nothing special. Every year it boiled down to whichever team LeBron James was on, and one potential challenger. For a few seasons, one of those two squads was the Miami Heat. We had to care about what they were doing because they had LeBron and were glory bound.
Now, though? Not so much. In fact, the roles in the East have been very much reversed: the Raptors are the team of note, the team due for some sort of glory (hopefully).