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  • Payment Pending: NBA Draft Prospects to Watch in the NCAA Tournament

    Payment Pending: NBA Draft Prospects to Watch in the NCAA Tournament

    The Madness is upon us, and it’s the most wonderful time of the year to be a college basketball fan. Meanwhile, the apotheosis of the “amateur” season coincides with a relative lull in the NBA regular season. With about 70 games in the books for each squad, we know who the playoff teams are (at least the ones of any consequence), and the only remaining drama there is how the seeds will shake out. For most everyone else, tanking season is entering full bloom, and teams are engaging in more “load management” than an adult film star.

    This league-wide holding pattern gives us an opportunity to look ahead to the playoffs, but also to the NBA Draft. The league’s increasingly archaic talent dispersal event may not be for another three months, but March Madness — even with every small sample size caveat you could possibly think of being applied — does give us a chance to further evaluate prospects in high-leverage situations against elite competition. Today, we’ll take a look at six potential first-rounders from highly-ranked programs looking to make an impact in the Big Dance, starting with a guy of whom you may have heard.

    THE CHOSEN ONE

    Zion Williamson, Destroyer of Worlds, Duke: Look, I get it. A TON of digital ink has already been spilled over this guy, and we all know he’s going to be the no. 1 pick, so I won’t spend too much time on him. Williamson is generally considered to be the best prospect to hit the draft since Anthony Davis, and my only addition to the conversation is that I think the consensus still undersells his likely impact on the league. Barring injury, I have almost no doubt Zion is going to end up being an all-time great player. There simply are not players who combine his power, speed, length, footwork, anticipation, vision, and competitiveness, and certainly not ones who do it in the frame of an NFL defensive end. Combined with the right complementary star(s) and spacing around him, he is going to be absolutely devastating at the NBA level. It’s difficult to even project what he’ll be in five years as his outside shot and comfort as a primary playmaker improve. Are averages of 28/ 12/ 7/ 2/ 2 on 60% shooting in play? I don’t know, but I am so here for it.

    In one of those dumb, hypothetical “Who would you pick if you were starting a franchise today?” scenarios, I would choose Giannis first, and if I had the second pick, my front office and I would need to have a meeting about whether we were taking Luka Doncic or Zion. Everyone is high on Zion; I’m like mid-90’s Snoop Dogg-level high. He is going to be one of THE defining players of the post-LeBron era. It’s an undeniable treat to witness a not-yet-commoditized superhero learning to harness his powers, so enjoy watching him maraud through overwhelmed college defenses before the universe does its damnedest to beat him down and turn him into a villain.

    It would be fun to see him go to Atlanta in June. Even after semi-foolishly passing on Luka, adding Zion to the core of Trae Young/John Collins/Kevin Huerter would give the Hawks a sort of vague, proto-Warriors outline, minus all the annoying righteous indignation from fans and media. Pairing Zion with Doncic in Dallas is also a distinct possibility — particularly after the Mavs’ tank-tastic free fall down the standings since the All-Star Break has put them in decent position to retain the top-5 protected pick they owe to Atlanta from the Luka trade — but putting those two together almost feels too good to be true. The basketball gods do not permit us mere mortals to fly so close to the sun. The conspiracy theorists will shake their pitchforks if Zion ends up in certain LeBron-adjacent and/or big market destinations (Knicks, Lakers, Pelicans, Cavs), but he is going to be appointment viewing in any case. Buckle up.

    THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

    De’Andre Hunter, Forward, Virginia: A guy who will probably end up in the top-5 when it’s all said and done, especially if UVA avenges its, ahem, brief tournament run from last year. Hunter is not always flashy, but he is a prototype NBA small forward: 6’7″, 225 lbs with a 7’2″ wingspan and high-end athleticism. His numbers don’t pop off the screen (15.1/ 5.0/ 2.1 in 31 minutes a game), but his counting stats are suppressed to a degree by Virginia’s glacial pace, and his shooting splits (53/ 46/ 78) bode well for his adjustment to the wing at the pro level.

    The comps to Kawhi Leonard are perhaps a bit premature, but the physical profile is strikingly similar, and it’s not hard to envision a scenario where his career arc plays out along the same lines, with Hunter starting out as an off-ball, 3-and-D specialist before growing into a more primary role. Hopefully, Hunter will skip over Kahwi’s “hold the organization that helped sculpt him into a Finals MVP hostage for an entire year under the pretense of a mysterious injury in order to force a trade” phase. [It’s a topic for another time, but have we ever figured out why everyone just seems to ignore the fact Kawhi pulled such an unconscionable act of bullshit? It only took place a year ago, it was total nonsense, and we all pretend it never happened. Oh well, moving on.]

    Whereas the college game can’t do much to tamp down Zion’s greatness, it feels a bit like Hunter is being held back by the system in which he plays and the more cramped geometry of the college floor. Hunter’s all-around game and athleticism should flourish with additional pace and space, and he is big and strong enough to adjust to NBA physicality from Day One. It is certainly fair to question how high his ceiling is, but it would be hard to find a player with a higher floor. Short of a catastrophic injury, there is no bust potential with Hunter. The team who drafts him gets an All-NBA caliber defender — he was just named DPOY in the ACC, the best conference in America — with a decent chance of developing into a Kahwi/Paul George-type primary wing option on offense. Only one team will get Zion, but I suspect Hunter will turn out to be a pretty damn good consolation prize.

    [Bonus UVA draft tidbit: Point guard Ty Jerome — definitely the new captain of Bill Simmons’ “Reggie Cleveland All-Stars,” BTW — is one of those dudes who will almost certainly get drafted in the early- to mid-30’s, and then everyone will be surprised when he sticks in the league and plays for a decade because he’s big and knows what the hell he’s doing. Just remember we had this talk.]

    Jarrett Culver, Guard, Texas Tech: Like Hunter, Culver is a do-everything wing who has made major strides during his sophomore campaign, leading a mostly unheralded Texas Tech team to a share of the Big 12 title and a no. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament. He’s a lean 6’6″, but has a long wingspan and displays above-average strength and athleticism attacking the basket. He projects as an elite defender, showing good anticipation both around the hoop and in passing lanes.

    On offense, he reads the floor well and is a solid finisher in the paint, but he has several areas upon which to improve. He tends to be a straight-line driver, so he’ll need to be a bit more creative and improve his handle to get to his spots at the next level. His shooting stroke is mechanically sound, but the results will need to improve for him to reach his ceiling. He has shot only 33% from deep and 70% from the line this season, and teams considering burning a top-7 pick on him in June will want to see progress on that front during pre-draft workouts. His defense, basketball IQ, and ability to attack close-outs will be his calling cards early on in his career, but if his shooting improves as his body fills out, the potential is there for Culver to be a top-tier wing in a few years.

    Coby White, Guard, UNC: White was a McDonald’s All-American and North Carolina’s Mr. Basketball last year, so it’s not as if he came out of nowhere, but he was not considered to be on the same level as some of his fellow Tobacco Road recruits, including teammate Nassir Little. However, once the games began, White showed that his scoring prowess in high school — he is North Carolina’s all-time leading prep scorer — was no fluke, as he shot up draft boards and led UNC to a somewhat unexpected no. 1 seed in the tourney. He’s averaged a tidy 16.3/ 3.4/ 4.2 on 43/ 36/ 81 shooting splits in 28 minutes a night, in the process breaking UNC’s freshman scoring record, previously held by a guy you might be familiar with, one Michael Jordan.

    White has all the qualities you could want in a modern NBA lead guard. He’s a strong 6’4″ and can get buckets from every level of the floor. He has elite lateral quickness and speed to create separation and get to the cup, and displays the full bag of tricks to finish once he’s in the paint. He should have no issue translating his shot to the deeper 3-point line, and he is certainly not lacking in confidence. He can play on- or off-ball, and has the size to potentially defend either backcourt position. His motor runs hot at all times, and he navigates screens and jockeys for position with bigger players at a higher level than one would expect for a young pup.

    He is not the most natural playmaker for others, which can sometimes be a difficult skill to improve. Circumstances will play a role in this facet of his development; if he lands on a team where he can flank an established guard, he may be able to ease himself in as a scorer/secondary playmaker and then gradually take on more of a primary role as a creator. [Think Bradley Beal.] At the end of the day, athletic bucket-getters always transfix NBA GMs and tend to rise up draft boards, and I imagine White will be no exception.

    [Just a quick aside: don’t take this as a dig at White — I’ve always enjoyed the Sideshow Bob look on ballplayers — but I suspect if he cuts his hair short during the pre-draft process, his stock will actually rise by a few spots. Yes, it’s super-dumb, but that descriptor fits many NBA GMs whose teams frequently draft in the top-10. I also like White’s UNC teammate Cameron Johnson as a draft sleeper. Sweet-shooting, athletic 6’8″ guys with room to grow aren’t usually easy to come by in the late 1st/early 2nd round, even if he is a 23-year-old senior. Much like Jerome, Johnson is one of those dudes who, by March of next year, we’ll be asking ourselves, “Wait, why wasn’t he drafted earlier?”]

    TRUE VALUES

    Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Guard, Virginia Tech: I’ve had the good fortune to see this guy a lot this year, including a few times in person, and can tell you without reservation that he is going to be a quality NBA role player for many years to come, with the potential to be more as his body fills out. NAW is a versatile 6’5″ wing with arms for days, and much like Hunter and Culver, graduated from an overqualified role player as a freshman to a primary offensive hub as a sophomore, particularly after Tech’s starting point guard, Justin Robinson, went down with a midseason injury.

    Alexander-Walker’s jumper features a solid base and a picture-perfect release, and his percentages bode well for translating to the pro level. He is a strong and creative finisher around the hoop. His playmaking has grown by leaps and bounds as a sophomore, with his assist rate more than doubling from his freshman year. He sees passing angles as they develop and delivers the ball accurately with either hand. NAW displays solid defensive awareness and sports quick hands, which should help him carve out an early role in the NBA, though he could struggle with physicality.

    He isn’t going to wow scouts in any one area, but he is a smooth, smart, well-rounded player who takes very little off the table. Whoever scoops him up in the middle of the first round will be very happy they did.

    Tre Jones, Point Guard, Duke: Is anyone else spooked by how eerily similar Tre Jones is, in every conceivable way — appearance, game, career trajectory — to his older brother, Tyus? Chances are if Duke goes all the way this year, Tre won’t match his brother’s accomplishment of being named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player because, umm, have you SEEN Zion? [Meanwhile, in 2015 Tyus was busy dishing to the likes of Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow, so let’s just say their respective ecosystems were a bit apples and oranges.]

    Outside of the 285-lb elephant in the room, it’s hard not to see the similarities. They are both relatively small by NBA standards — which hurt Tyus’ draft stock and will invariably do the same to Tre — and while Tyus shot better than Tre has at Duke, Jones the Younger has been one of the nation’s very best defensive players at any size. He is a tenacious on-ball defender, with the rare gift of being able to mirror the ballhandler’s movements in real time.

    Jones will no doubt need to markedly improve his shot-making, but his All-NBA defensive potential coupled with his experience in picking his spots in support of elite offensive teammates could end up making him a more NBA-ready prospect than his brother. A team in need of a backup point guard late in the first round could do a lot worse.

    Top Photo Credit: https://twitter.com/DukeMBB

  • Anatomy of a Rebuild: Brooklyn Nets vs. LA Lakers

    Anatomy of a Rebuild: Brooklyn Nets vs. LA Lakers

    “Happens to everyone — time to time everyone goes bust. You’ll be back in the game before you know it.” — Joey Knish, Rounders

    Upon hearing Lakers’ owner Jeanie Buss say recently the team’s biggest challenge was “fake news” coming from the media, I couldn’t help but picture Brooklyn Nets’ GM Sean Marks flipping over a table in a fit of rage, and not because of the hackneyed phrasing.

    What had to make Marks’ blood boil — besides the patent falsity of the statement — was how quick Buss was to adopt a mentality of victimization, despite overseeing the NBA franchise with every conceivable advantage baked into the very core of its existence AND being one of the primary agents responsible for the current “challenges” in the first place. Marks can probably sympathize with the actual team-building challenges the Lakers have faced over the last several years, as to some degree they mirror his own, so it has to be frustrating to watch the league’s flagship team dismissing them in favor of banal nonsense.

    The real challenge for both teams over the last half-decade has been how to recover from gambling big on fading stars, and losing in catastrophic fashion. For the Nets, the culprit was former GM Billy King’s 2013 trade for aging legends Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, a deal considered by many to be the most damaging trade in NBA history. King could have burned the Barclays Center to the ground and done less harm to the Nets than he did with his managerial incompetence. Preceding the KG/Pierce debacle, in which he gave up what amounted to FOUR unprotected first round picks, in 2012 he also traded Portland a top-3 protected first rounder for the desiccated remains of Gerald Wallace, a pick which would become Damian Lillard the following summer. The pick was top-3 protected because King explicitly stated at the time he didn’t believe there was anyone outside the top three worth selecting in that draft. Prior to that, he made the somewhat more defensible move of trading for Deron Williams in 2011, who was still a 26-year-old, All-NBA caliber player at the time, even though the trade essentially ended up costing them three first round picks. Unfortunately, King then doubled down on the move by re-signing D-Will to a 5-year/$99 million contract in 2012, Williams rapidly declined, and the contract became an albatross. Williams was waived in 2015 via the stretch provision, and his $5.5 million cap hit finally comes off Brooklyn’s books after next season. You’ll be shocked to learn that after starting the 2015-16 season 10-27 with a roster featuring none of the aforementioned players, King was mercifully removed from his post as GM and “reassigned within the organization.” There’s a Catholic priest joke in there somewhere, but let’s just quit while we’re ahead.

    The Lakers’ woes can be traced back to the 2012-13 season. In the summer of 2012, former GM Mitch Kupchak (sensing a theme?) completed what turned out to be disastrous trades for an aging Steve Nash and a recovering-from-back-surgery Dwight Howard. The season which followed was one of the NBA’s all-time terrible soap operas. Nash and Howard never meshed with Kobe, and a team with championship aspirations won only 45 games and was handily swept by the Spurs in the first round of the playoffs. Adding injury to insult, Kobe tore his Achilles’ tendon late in the regular season, ushering in the decline phase of his career and all of the ill-conceived, denial-tinged front office decisions that would follow.

    Nets’ GM Sean Marks/AP Photo

    Brooklyn would make the playoffs in both seasons following the KG/Pierce trade, but never became anything more than early round cannon fodder. After the 2014-15 season, the bottom fell out. Marks would be hired in February 2016 after the ouster of King, and he would immediately set to the task of unwinding the previous regime’s numerous mistakes. The challenge seemed insurmountable at the time. Marks inherited a mostly gutted yet still somehow capped-out roster, and his decision-making was inescapably handcuffed because there was no incentive to tank for draft picks, as they were all owed to Boston for the foreseeable future. Brooklyn’s night was truly dark and full of terrors.

    Nevertheless, he persisted. No NBA GM bats a thousand — see the Nets’ inexplicable infatuation with Allen Crabbe, for example — but Marks seems to have made lemonade despite not even having access to lemons, much less sugar and water. His tenure has been one shrewd move after the next to acquire picks and undervalued players, all with his eyes focused on the horizon rather than the end of his nose:

    • February 2016: within a week of being hired, waives roster flotsam Andrea Bargnani and Joe Johnson.
    • April 2016: hires Kenny Atkinson as head coach.
    • July 2016: trades Thaddeus Young to Indiana for the draft rights to Caris LeVert and a future 2nd-round pick.
    • July 2016: signs Joe Harris (AKA the NBA’s current leader in 3P% who also just beat Steph Freaking Curry in a shooting contest) to a 2-year minimum deal. [Harris has since re-upped on another team-friendly 2-year deal, this time for $16 million total.]
    • December 2016: signs Spencer Dinwiddie off the scrap heap.
    • February 2017: trades useful but superfluous wing Bojan Bogdanovic to the Wizards for what amounts to cap relief and a protected 1st round pick, which is used the following summer to select current starting center Jarrett Allen.
    • June 2017: trades Brook Lopez and draft rights to Kyle Kuzma to the Lakers for Timofey Mozgov’s millstone contract and D’Angelo Russell. [Put a bookmark in this one for a moment.]
    • July 2017: trades Justin Hamilton to Toronto in exchange for taking on DeMarre Carroll’s semi-onerous contract and 2018 first- and second-round picks. They would later select Dzanan Musa and Rodions Kurucs with the picks.
    • February 2018: a classic bit of NBA personnel ridiculousness — trades mostly useless center Tyler Zeller to Milwaukee for Rashad Vaughn and a 2018 2nd round pick. The pick would be used on hyper-athletic Kentucky wing Hamadou Diallo, who would then be moved to Charlotte, along with a future 2nd, cash, and the still-toxic contract of the aforementioned Mozgov for none other than Dwight Howard, who would be waived without ever playing for Brooklyn. In essence, Brooklyn paid two second-round picks and a few million bucks to rid themselves of the final year of Mozgov’s deal.
    • July 2018: Marks uses his cap space yet again to acquire Kenneth Faried and Darrell Arthur from Denver, gaining a 2019 first and a 2020 second as sweetener in exchange for easing the Nuggets’ luxury tax burden.
    • July 2018: signs Ed Davis with the midlevel exception.

    To recap: in three years, Marks took a roster with no high-end players and no first-round picks until 2019, and manufactured an entire team currently sitting 6th in the East out of nothing more than available cap space, Kyle Kuzma, and a few useful veterans who were never going to be part of their next good team anyway. He signed Harris and Dinwiddie off the street, acquired keepers LeVert, Allen, and Kurucs for nothing they will miss long-term, retained all of his future firsts while plucking an extra one from Denver, and snagged a distressed asset and 2019 All-Star (Russell) as the sweetener for absolving the Lakers of their Mozgov mistake, which Marks was then also able to trade away! Plus, they still have the cap space to sign a max free agent this summer! Absolute wizardry.

    Timofey Mozgov and D’Angelo Russell | Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images

    Speaking of the Lakers…

    Currently 31-37 (four games behind the Nets FWIW), 11th in the West, and on the verge of missing the playoffs for the 6th straight season, LA’s return to glory has been a bit more, let’s say, circuitous. This despite having the allure of Los Angeles, a revenue stream which dwarfs that of every other franchise, a metric shit-ton of lottery luck, and oh yeah, the best player since Jordan deciding to sign with them as a free agent. If Brooklyn is the self-made millionaire who overcame his hardscrabble upbringing, then LA is the trust fund kid who fucked around too much and never made anything of himself.

    I suppose one could argue the Lakers are victims of their own success, but it involves letting an awful lot of organizational incompetence slide. Jeanie Buss (and Mitch Kupchak, and Magic Johnson, and Rob Pelinka) should be taking a hard look in the mirror rather than trying to point the finger at the media for their struggles. There was inevitably going to be a transitional period as Kobe declined and retired, and his injury, coupled with Dwight’s inability to assume the mantle as the franchise’s next superstar, altered the nature and timeline of the transition. But even with this caveat, boy, the Lakers’ front office sure has made a mess of things:

    • July 2013: a year after being acquired in one of the most bizarrely impactful trades in NBA history, Dwight Howard leaves $30 million on the table to bolt the Lakers and sign with the Rockets in free agency. Sources at the time said Dwight did not want to play with Kobe or for head coach Mike D’Antoni anymore. The team has no means of replacing Dwight’s production, and with Kobe and Nash missing almost the entire ’13-’14 season with injuries and Pau Gasol gamely playing center surrounded by a rotating cast of misfits, the team craters, going 27-55.
    • November 2013: despite the catastrophic injury, Kobe signs a 2-year/$48.5 million extension through ’15-’16. Even at the time, the contract is rightly viewed as a well-above market golden parachute for the franchise icon.
    • April 2014: Mike D’Antoni resigns as head coach with a 67-87 record over less than two seasons. The Lakers pay him approximately $2M to go away. [In a hilarious bit of foreshadowing, Magic Johnson tweeted at the time, “Happy days are here again! Mike D’Antoni resigns as the Lakers coach. I couldn’t be happier!” Remember, kids: be careful what you say on social media; it may come back to bite you in the ass.]
    • June 2014: Lakers draft Julius Randle with the 7th overall pick and trade cash to the Wizards for the rights to second-round pick Jordan Clarkson. [OK, not terrible!]
    • July 2014: entering free agency with enough cap space to sign a max free agent, the Lakers miss out on all the big fish and instead end up doling out multiyear deals to Nick Young, Ed Davis (no disrespect, Easy Ed), Jordan Hill, and trading for the final year of Jeremy Lin’s poison pill contract from Houston in exchange for a 2015 first rounder, which turns out to be Larry Nance, Jr.
    • July 2014: Hire Byron Scott as head coach.
    • June 2015: After a 21-61 season in which a 36-year-old Kobe misses another 47 games and declines precipitously when he does play, the Lakers are rewarded with the 2nd overall pick in the draft. They select D’Angelo Russell.
    • April 2016: the Kobe Farewell Tour concludes with an unfathomable 17-65 record. Kobe averages 28 minutes and 17 FGA per game in his final campaign, effectively blocking Russell’s development in the process.
    • April 2016: Byron Scott is fired as head coach and Luke Walton is hired as his replacement. After three execrable seasons, the Lakers finally appear committed to a proper rebuild.
    • June 2016: The ping-pong balls again fall in LA’s favor, granting them the 2nd overall pick in the draft. They select Duke forward Brandon Ingram. They also snag big man Ivica Zubac with the 32nd overall pick. Nice!
    • July 2016: And here’s where it goes off the rails. Amid the historic cap spike, Kupchak essentially bids against himself to shower the trio of Timofey Mozgov, Luol Deng, and Jordan Clarkson with four-year contracts totaling $186 million. All three deals almost immediately become albatrosses and end up costing the team significant assets to get off their books.
    • February 2017: GM Mitch Kupchak is fired and replaced by Magic Johnson, who had joined the organization as a consultant just 19 days earlier. Nothing fishy there.
    • June 2017: after another lousy season — purposeful this time, at least — the lottery gods gift the Lakers yet another no. 2 overall pick. They select Lonzo Ball, along with his malignant narcissist of a father.
    • June 2017: the Mozgov/Russell for Lopez/Kuzma trade is completed.
    • July 2017: mostly keep their powder dry in free agency, signing Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and really no one else of consequence.
    • July 2017: Paul George is traded to OKC, despite persistent rumors he would be headed to the Lakers, either via trade or in 2018 free agency. [Add another extremely tampered-with bookmark.]
    • February 2018: trade Jordan Clarkson and Larry Nance, Jr. to the Cavs for the corpses of Channing Frye and Isaiah Thomas, along with a first-round pick, which would become Moe Wagner.
    • July 2018: sign LeBron James. [OK, hard to knock this one, though it’s fair to question whether the Lakers signed LeBron or vice versa.]
    • July 2018: rescind the qualifying offer for 23-year-old restricted free agent Julius Randle, making him an unrestricted free agent. He signs with New Orleans on an extremely team-friendly deal and is currently averaging 21/ 9/ 3 on 53% shooting for the Pels.
    • July 2018: do not make an offer to retain free agent Brook Lopez, who signs with the Bucks instead, where he becomes an integral part of a championship contender.
    • July 2018: fail to secure a meeting with free agent Paul George, who re-signs with OKC for the max. [Insert conspiracy theory here.]
    • July 2018: instead use the cap space earmarked for PG et al to sign Rajon Rondo, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, JaVale McGee, Lance Stephenson, and Michael Beasley as free agents.
    • September 2018: waive Luol Deng using the stretch provision. He will count against the Lakers’ cap through 2022.
    • November 2018: sign an aggressively washed Tyson Chandler after he is bought out by Phoenix.
    • January/February 2019: the failed attempt to strong-arm New Orleans into trading Anthony Davis. The soap opera includes numerous leaks from within the organization detailing exact trade discussions, causing a rift within the locker room.
    • February 2019: in search of shooting, they trade promising rookie shooter Svi Mykhailiuk and a 2021 second-rounder to Detroit for Reggie Bullock.
    • February 2019: in search of more shooting, they trade rare organizational success story Ivica Zubac and whatever the opposite of that is, Michael Beasley, to the Clippers for Mike Muscala. In nine games with the Lakers so far, the former Bucknell Bison is playing 8.4 minutes per night and shooting 27.8% from downtown. Zubac has started all 13 games he has played with the Clippers, and they are 9-4 since acquiring him.

    Ouch. When we put the two resumes side-by-side, a noticeable pattern emerges. One team was clear-eyed about the depths to which it had fallen and put a plan in place to rise from the ashes. They hired smart people early on — executives, coaches, scouts, etc. — and empowered them to do their jobs without being stabbed in the back or having their job security yanked around. They identified undervalued assets and took advantage of teams motivated to move them (cough, Lakers, cough). They embraced the stylistic changes in the league and acquired players with corresponding skill sets. They did not burn cap space simply to do so, and instead leveraged their inability to land elite free agents to their benefit. Less than four years removed from utter collapse, the Nets have created a fun, young team headed back to the playoffs, and perhaps more importantly, a positive organizational culture in which players feel invested.

    While Brooklyn has repeatedly turned chicken shit into chicken salad, the Lakers have mostly done the exact opposite. At nearly every turn, the front office has failed to properly gauge their position within the competitive cycle. They flushed three full seasons down the toilet attempting to surround a clearly diminished Kobe with a contending roster instead of preserving cap space and restocking the war chest, only to be bailed out of their lousy decisions time and time and time again by lottery luck. Then, when Kobe finally retired and it appeared they were ready to commit to a youth movement, they immediately got antsy and lit all their cap space on fire on washed-up veterans for no discernible reason. When that “strategy” predictably failed, they were forced to sell off real assets for pennies on the dollar to clean up the prior mistakes, including Russell (the overlap in this stupid Venn diagram), who, after his much-publicized professional growing pains, may wind up being the best player to come out of the whole mess.

    As if they hadn’t received enough good fortune, one of history’s greatest superstars decides to join their team at the tail end of his prime, for reasons which increasingly appear to not be about actual basketball. But instead of surrounding LeBron with the kinds of shooters who have proven successful over the years, the Lakers squandered their cap space again — along with one of LeBron’s last elite individual seasons — on the most ill-fitting cast of jagaloons imaginable. Then, when that “”strategy”” (I needed extra quotation marks for the amount of heavy lifting they are doing here) predictably failed and it was far too late, they sold off even more useful assets (Mykhailiuk and Zubac) to bring in the shooting they could have simply paid for (or developed) in the first place. Lakers’ brass committed organizational malpractice over and over and over again, and then still had the temerity to suggest the media was culpable for its handling of the AD debacle, WHEN THE CALLS WERE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!!! GTFOH!!!!!

    At this point, short of lucking into another top-4 pick in the draft — which will almost certainly happen because there is no damn justice in the world — the well may be too poisoned to complete a Davis trade over the summer. Even if a deal is still possible, it’s hard to fathom Magic and Rob will be able to negotiate and consummate it in a competent fashion anyway. And if the Lakers don’t get AD, they’ll be right back where they started: with an aging star, a new coach, cap space, and no needle-movers on whom to spend it. Unfortunately, by now we all know how that Hollywood story ends.

    Top Photo Credit: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images

  • The Utah Jazz Have Found Their Rhythm Again

    Second verse, same as the first.

    The West is a clusterfuck. Two of the top contenders (Denver and OKC) are trying to course correct through late-season swoons. Two prospective contenders coming into the year (the Lakers and Pelicans) have seen their respective seasons implode in spectacular fashion. The standings seem to spit out a totally different permutation every other day. Through it all, for the second straight season, the Utah Jazz have overcome a lousy first half of the year and put themselves in position to do some damage in the playoffs.

    One could be forgiven for thinking this group of Utah players enjoys digging itself out of holes of its own creation. In 2017-18, the Jazz fell as low as 19-28 in late January before flipping the switch and finishing a dominant 29-6 to climb all the way up to the 5-seed in the West. They finished 16th in the league in Offensive Rating, 2nd in Defensive Rating, and 4th in SRS (Simple Rating System, a single metric which accounts for both point differential and strength of schedule).

    This season is like the movie sequel that tries to run back all the plot points from the original. [It’s basically “The Hangover 2: Salt Lake City,” a title which contains almost as much cognitive dissonance as a basketball franchise called the Utah Jazz. But I digress.] Once again struggling out of the gate, Utah at one point fell as low as 14th in the West, and after a loss to Toronto on New Years’ Day, was sitting at 18-20 in a conference where it took 47 wins to crack the playoff field the previous year. Then — a little sooner this time — the switch flipped again. The Jazz have gone 18-7 since, and the numbers tell a familiar story: 18th in Offensive Rating, 3rd in Defensive Rating, and 6th in SRS.

    There are good reasons to believe the upward trend will continue. As of this writing, the Jazz have faced the league’s second-toughest schedule, but their remaining schedule rates as the easiest in the league with a bullet. Remaining opponents have only a .412 winning percentage, and the only teams currently sitting above .500 they will face are OKC, Sacramento, Denver, and the Clippers, three of which are home games. They would have to go at least 14-5 over the closing stretch after a puzzling loss to New Orleans at home on Monday, but 50 wins isn’t out of the question. Currently sitting at 6th in the West, their fortunes could swing quite a bit in either direction — they are only 3 games behind Portland/OKC for the 3-seed and one game ahead of San Antonio in 8th — but all signs point to things getting better before they get worse.

    The hardcore fans know this already, but just so everyone is on the same page: Rudy Gobert is a freaking STUD, and he absolutely should have been an All-Star this year. [Yes, I know to add someone you have to take someone away, and I would have been fine with him making it over any one of Klay Thompson, Karl-Anthony Towns, or LaMarcus Aldridge. If the NBA would just do the right thing and get rid of conference designations for picking All-Stars, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.] Gobert suffered among voters because he isn’t putting up the big scoring numbers of some other stars (15.3 ppg) and because the team started slowly, but in terms of impact, it is a joke he wasn’t in Charlotte this year. Look, I know the metrics can sometimes be misleading, but when you look at the sort of company he keeps statistically, it’s eye-popping:

    Field Goal Percentage: .648 (1st in NBA)

    Free Throw Attempts: 398 (9th in NBA)

    Rebounds Per Game: 12.9 (4th in NBA)

    Blocks Per Game: 2.2 (5th in NBA)

    Player Efficiency Rating: 24.3 (14th in NBA)

    True Shooting Percentage: .670 (2nd in NBA)

    Effective Field Goal Percentage: .648 (tied, 1st in NBA)

    Individual Offensive Rating: 132.1 (1st in NBA)

    Individual Defensive Rating: 100.9 (5th in NBA)

    Win Shares: 10.8 (3rd in NBA)

    Win Shares Per 48 Minutes: .261 (2nd in NBA)

    Box Plus/Minus: 7.0 (8th in NBA)

    Value Over Replacement Player: 4.5 (tied, 7th in NBA)

    I know, I’m as baffled by it as you are. It was perfectly reasonable for Gobert to get emotional when asked by reporters about the snub; it was an all-time screw job and the coaches (who vote for the reserves) should be ashamed of themselves. Setting aside the All-Star thing, Gobert continues to be phenomenal. He’s making a strong case to repeat as Defensive Player of the Year (even after only playing 56 games last season — take that for data), he improves and becomes more involved every year on the offensive end, and at 26, is just entering his prime. His lack of shooting and difficulty switching onto guards on the perimeter can make him problematic in certain playoff matchups (cough, Golden State, cough), but this roster doesn’t even sniff those types of matchups in the first place without all of the things he does incredibly well.

    Source: Gene Sweeney, Jr./Getty Images

    Joining Gobert among the ranks of the underrated is teammate Joe Ingles. The 31-year-old Aussie doesn’t stand out statistically (11.9/ 3.8/ 5.2 on 44/ 38/ 72 shooting splits in 31.6 minutes a night) or athletically (he looks like a 6’8″ version of a dude you’d play against in the local rec league), but he is integral to everything Utah does on both ends. He’s tremendously durable, playing 387 out of a possible 391 regular season games since entering the league. He’s a low usage offensive player, but an outstanding passer and decision-maker in the pick and roll. This allows coach Quin Snyder to play him as a point forward in lineups without a traditional point guard, a configuration which tends to give their other rotation players the best possible spacing and opportunities to thrive. [More on that later.] His outside shooting is down a tick this season, but he has proven himself to be one of the league’s preeminent marksmen (40.6% from deep for his career). And to be subjective for a moment, on defense, he just looks like a pain in the ass to play against. As something less than a top shelf athlete, he relies on his two most effective weapons defensively: agitation and anticipation. He doesn’t rate as elite in any specific category or metric, but the eye test shows a guy who makes his man work for absolutely everything. Even at the NBA level, effort and positioning matter at least as much to defensive success as does athleticism, and Ingles has them in spades.

    While Gobert and Ingles power the team’s defensive dominance (along with quietly outstanding role players Derrick Favors and Royce O’Neale), the offense only goes as far as second-year phenom Donovan Mitchell takes it. And to start the year, that wasn’t very far. At this point in his development, Mitchell profiles as something of an inefficient gunner, an archetype which has obviously become passe in the analytics community. He is the only Jazz player who can consistently create his own shot, and this ability sometimes results in him hunting for looks independently of Snyder’s advantage-based system, like a smaller, less efficient version of Kawhi Leonard in Toronto. When the shots don’t fall, it’s ugly. Mitchell struggled throughout November and December, averaging only 19.3 ppg and 3.1 apg on 40% shooting despite a 30.8 usage rate, which over the course of the season would rank 10th in the league. An offense can’t survive under those conditions, and the Jazz didn’t, going 14-16 during those two months while averaging only 105.9 ppg as a team (vs. 110.2 for the season).

    Since the calendar flipped to 2019, Mitchell has upped his usage even more, but the results have improved dramatically. Over the last 2+ months, he’s averaging 27.3/ 4.6/ 5.2 on 43/ 37/ 81 splits with a 33.6 usage rate, which if you squint hard enough, you could juuuust about mistake for a pre-Achilles’ tear Kobe season. In keeping with the deja vu theme, in the aggregate Mitchell’s sophomore season looks a lot like his freshman one, from both a statistical and narrative perspective. His playmaking has noticeably improved, however, and the game appears to have slowed down for him. He’ll need to be more efficient and consistent, but the 2019 version of Donovan Mitchell gives this team enough offensive punch to make them a formidable foe for anyone out West, non-Warriors division.

    Speaking of which, how the playoff matchups break could play a major role in how we view the success or failure of this Utah season. While Mitchell continuing to do his Baby Mamba impression is a prerequisite for any level of sustained postseason success, the presence of Gobert — and his specific strengths and weaknesses — will fundamentally always make this iteration of the Jazz somewhat matchup-dependent. Case in point: the Nuggets. As good as Denver has been for most of the year, they are the exact sort of team with whom Utah matches up well. Gobert’s size and strength allow him to neutralize Nikola Jokic, as he did in holding Jokic to 16 points on 5-of-15 shooting and 5 turnovers in Utah’s recent 111-104 road win. [This game was sandwiched in between home games against the Clippers and Bucks played over four nights. The Jazz won all three games, perhaps as impressive a short stretch as any team has had all year.] Utah is 2-1 against Denver so far, with one game to play, but Gobert’s ability to contain Jokic both inside and out, combined with guards who don’t typically take Rudy out of his defensive comfort zone, make the Nuggets a team Quin Snyder would probably be thrilled to see in the first (or God willing, second) round of the playoffs.

    No one in the West really has the luxury of trying to game the system in terms of playoff seeding, but keeping up their stellar play could end up putting Utah in a bad spot. Ultimately, they would want to either stay in the 6-seed or move up to the 3-seed, since either outcome would likely keep them on Denver’s side of the bracket and away from Golden State until the Conference Finals, both good outcomes. Getting to the 3-seed isn’t impossible, but there are a lot of moving parts involved, not the least of which is Utah likely having to finish out the year somewhere in the neighborhood of 16-3 or 17-2. OKC (who has the league’s most difficult remaining schedule) falling into the 4/5 side of the bracket would be best-case scenario for Utah, as they are 0-3 against the Zombie Sonics this year, with one game to go. They are 2-2 against both Portland and Houston, though I suspect if given the choice, they’d rather face Portland in lieu of human flamethrower James Harden and a suddenly healthy Rockets squad. In any case, the standings are going to shift substantively a dozen more times before the playoff matchups are set, so all Utah can really do is continue to play well and hope things break their way.

    Sporting News

    As rosy as things look for a well-run, small market franchise which lost one of its max contract stars for nothing in free agency just a year-and-a-half ago, it’s hard not to think the basketball gods could have shown a bit more mercy on the Jazz. They’ve done well late in the draft — Gobert at no. 27 in 2013, turning no. 24 and Trey Lyles into Mitchell last year — but the early picks they’ve lucked into have mostly come up snake eyes. Enes Kanter was a poor fit with their existing personnel (as he continues to be, several franchises later), but nothing has lowered the overall ceiling of their team more than the unfortunate saga of Dante Exum. The version of Exum they thought they were getting with the no. 5 pick in 2014 would just now be blossoming into the perfect complement for the core of Gobert, Mitchell, and Ingles. [Yes, I’m ignoring the Butterfly Effect of what a better, healthier Exum would have meant for their draft positioning, decision-making, etc. It’s also tempting to think about how their fortunes would be different had they drafted, say, Marcus Smart or Julius Randle (the players drafted immediately after Exum), or if Orlando had picked Exum at no. 4 and Utah ended up with Aaron Gordon instead, but all the downstream effects render it pointless speculation. I’m not going into the Spida-verse.] Instead, they’ve gotten an injury-plagued 4+ seasons, a tied-up roster spot, and a slightly overpriced second contract (3 years/$33 million with incentives) built on little more than hope and occasional flashes. Exum is unfathomably still just 23, and his per-minute numbers, when healthy, are honestly not much worse than incumbent starter/placeholder/assumed polygamist “Ravishing” Ricky Rubio. So I suppose there’s a world where he stays healthy and becomes a valuable asset, but he strikes me as a player dying for a change of scenery.

    Another guy who should be thriving outside the confines of Salt Lake City: Derrick Favors. The Gobert/Favors frontline combo has been untenable for several years now, but the front office keeps running it back for a simple reason — Favors is GOOD. He’s just forever playing out of position. Favors is a starting-caliber NBA center, but in Utah, he’s stuck in the wrong role as a non-floor spacing power forward next to Gobert, and manning the 5 with the backups while Rudy rests. He still has value in this role because, again, he’s good: 17.7 points, 11.4 rebounds, and 2.2 blocks per 36 minutes on 58% shooting, with a 21.1 PER, .203 WS/48, and an elite +3.1 Defensive BPM. The dude is SCREAMING for a bigger role, but the Jazz don’t have one to offer him, and apparently neither do any other teams. There were rumors Utah looked to move Favors at the trade deadline — as part of a potential Mike Conley deal, most notably — but there were no takers for his semi-prehistoric game coupled with his $16.9 million salary, even as it is non-guaranteed for next season. It speaks to the way positional value is defined in the modern NBA that if a wing had stats analogous to Favors’, he’d be getting paid Otto Porter money, whereas Derrick can’t even get two guaranteed years. If GM Dennis Lindsey waives Favors this summer, it could end up being addition by stylistic subtraction, but it will still feel like the Jazz squandered the prime years of a really useful, valuable player.

    Recent injuries to all of Utah’s point guards (Rubio, Exum, and Raul Neto) have forced Quin Snyder to roll out a more wing-heavy lineup with Ingles, Jae Crowder, and Royce O’Neale around Mitchell and Gobert (or Favors), unintentionally unlocking what may be the best version of this Jazz team in the process. Small sample size theater, but the version of the lineup with Gobert has a net rating of +27.3 per 100 possessions in 66 minutes of court time. [Shades of Chris Bosh moving to center out of necessity in Miami, an act of desperation which reverberates through the league to this day and, ironically enough, helps inform why Favors has so little trade/free agent value.] It has given Mitchell more room to create in the pick and roll and attack the basket, but the addition by subtraction throws into stark relief the degree to which Utah has mismanaged and/or been unlucky with its point guard situation over the last few years.

    Rubio is 28, and it made perfect sense to acquire him when and how they did. But it’s time to accept the idealized version of him we all had in our heads back in 2008 when he hung with the Redeem Team in Beijing is never going to come to fruition. He is what he is at this point in his career: a perfectly serviceable point guard on both ends who invariably raises the floor of a team just as much as he fails to raise its ceiling. He will be an unrestricted free agent this summer, and I would honestly be a bit surprised if Utah ends up re-signing him. If they let Rubio walk and waive Favors and 37-year-old Kyle Korver (both on non-guaranteed deals), Utah has a path to seriously meaningful cap space. A ton of other teams will also have free space, and Lindsey will need to take into account Utah’s historic inability to be a major player in free agency, but with Gobert, Mitchell, and Ingles all locked in through ’20-’21, the Jazz could for once be an attractive destination, market be damned. They won’t be able to reel in the biggest fish, but there are plenty of guys available in the lower tiers who could be needle-movers for a team with its core already in place. [Think along the lines of the Millsap-to-Denver signing.]

    One place Utah may look to mine talent from is Milwaukee, especially if the Bucks flame out in the playoffs. The Jazz could throw big offers at any combination of Khris Middleton, Malcolm Brogdon (restricted, so the Bucks could match any offer), and Nikola Mirotic, all of whom would be intriguing fits. The free agent market for point guards is not terribly robust this year, so there is a scenario where Utah goes into next season pinning its hopes on health and development from Exum. However, one suspects the front office has grander designs. They could keep their powder dry for another season, sign some one-year deals (or bring back Favors and Korver), and take another stab at it in the summer of ’20 before they need to fork over a (presumably) max extension to Mitchell and decide on Ingles’ future. Windows open and close quickly in the NBA, but the Jazz have put themselves in a strong position to be agile depending how the market shakes out.

    After starting out flat, the Jazz are once again in tune and playing all the right notes. All that’s left is to see if the coda sounds better this time around.

    Top Photo Credit: Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune

  • The New Adventures of Old LeBron

    It’s time to face a hard reality: LeBron James is no longer the best player in the NBA.

    Forget MVPs, titles, and All-Star Games for a moment. Say every year you asked a hundred basketball people, Family Feud-style, “Who is the best basketball player on Earth?” When is the last time the no. 1 answer would not have been LeBron? 2007-ish, maybe? That’s a hell of a run holding the belt.

    And this is the part where you say, “Well, what did you expect, Captain Obvious? He’s 34 years old and has over 55,000 minutes worth of wear on his tires, including playoffs.” You would be exactly right, but the fact we even have to acknowledge LeBron’s mortality speaks to the absurd standards to which we’ve always held him, and continue to do so. I am not writing this to take digs at LeBron or to attempt to minimize his greatness. His resume is unassailable and it speaks for itself. Even this deep into his career, he remains a capital-G Great player, with numbers that continue to look like a “typical” LeBron season.

    But something has changed about LBJ, and it isn’t just the uniform he’s wearing or the players around him. It’s time for an honest accounting of what he is and is not at this stage, one which cuts through the drama and history of him as an NBA institution and gets us close to what a reasonable set of expectations should be for his career going forward. Getting there starts with the explicit admission — even as the narrative lags behind the reality, often the case in these matters — that LeBron James is no longer Earth’s best basketball player, and employing him alone does not automatically make a team a title contender. Miami-era LeBron is not walking through that door.

    Sitting three games back of the 8-seed with twenty-two games to play, it is no longer just a remote possibility the Lakers will miss the postseason in LeBron’s first year with the team; it is exceedingly likely. ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI) estimates the Lakers have only a 3.1% chance of reaching the postseason after losing to the woeful Grizzlies on Monday night. Assuming they don’t suddenly stumble upon the Fountain of Chemistry, what does history tell us about a player like LeBron missing the playoffs? Is this normal?

    Source: Clutchpoints.com

    The unique nature of LeBron’s all-time great career makes it difficult to find direct historical parallels, but we can take a shot. A player has been selected to the All-Star team in his 16th NBA season or later 27 times in league history. [Here’s the list if you care to see it. Thanks to B-R’s Player Season Finder tool.] When filtered by points per game, a pretty clear top tier of “guys who were still elite late in their careers” emerges: Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Karl Malone. [Kobe and Kareem were both Lakers, and Malone’s career rates as the most “similar” by Win Shares to LeBron, so perhaps we’re onto something.]

    How did those other players fare as top options late in their respective careers? Kareem’s Lakers won the title in ’85 before famously losing in the Conference Finals to Houston in ’86, with Kareem leading the team in FGA per game in both seasons, but the comparison is difficult because of the presence of young superstars Magic Johnson and James Worthy on those squads. Kobe is a slightly more snug fit, as he and LeBron are relative contemporaries who also both came into the league straight out of high school, so their careers track as far as age vs. experience are concerned. In Kobe’s 16th season (2011-12), he averaged 27.9/ 5.4/ 4.6 for a 41-25 Lakers team. [This was the lockout-shortened season, during which, you may recall, LeBron’s Heat won the title.] The Lakers survived the post-Melo Nuggets in the first round of the playoffs before getting blown off the floor by the Durant/Westbrook/Harden Thunder in Round Two. That season was the last stand for the core which won two championships, as the front office would then make the disastrous Dwight Howard and Steve Nash trades during the 2012 offseason. A tumultuous ’12-’13 season ended with a 45-37 record and a dispiriting first round sweep at the hands of the eventual-Finalist Spurs. Based on the talent and experience levels of those rosters vis-a-vis the current Lakers, it’s probably fair to say those teams were at least as disappointing as this year’s edition.

    Interestingly, two other Kareem and Kobe seasons might be our closest apples-to-apples comparisons. The Lakers traded for a 28-year-old Kareem in 1975 but sacrificed a large part of their core in so doing, then proceeded to go 40-42 and miss the playoffs in ’75-’76 despite Kareem posting a Giannis-like 27.7/ 13.5/ 5.0 on 53% shooting. Kobe and the ’04-’05 Lakers might be our best comp, though. Fresh off shipping Shaq out of town to Miami, the Lakers roster featured a 26-year-old Kobe, 25-year-old Lamar Odom, 24-year-old Caron Butler, and just about the lamest, most useless supporting cast you could possibly imagine. With no chemistry and no depth of talent (sound familiar?), the team struggled to a 34-48 record, then qualified for the playoffs the next two years with similarly flawed rosters before losing in the first round to the “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns both times. Even though both Kobe and Kareem were more firmly planted in their respective primes during those seasons than is LeBron, the theme of commingling a generational superstar with a transitional roster jibes well with what we’re seeing in LA today.

    Like Kareem, Karl Malone came into the league as an older player than LeBron, so charting his decline in terms of age and experience doesn’t line up as neatly as it does for Kobe. The Mailman’s 16th season didn’t take place until he was 37 years old, and he certainly showed signs of gentle decline during that season and beyond. Even so, Malone did share a similar physique to LeBron as well as the same legendary commitment to physical fitness and maintenance. He also remained the primary offensive option in Utah all the way up to his 18th season at age 39, when he still led the team in minutes, field goal attempts, and scoring. Age aside, entering his 16th season (in ’00-’01), Malone had played a comparable number of minutes and endured a similar degree of physical punishment in his career as had LeBron entering 2018-19. [LeBron has played significantly more playoff minutes, but the regular season minutes and scoring averages are remarkably similar.]

    While Utah still won a very respectable 53 games in ’00-’01, the Jazz could not escape the first round of the playoffs, and would likewise fail to do so in Malone’s final two years in Salt Lake City. So best we can tell, the ceiling for a Western Conference team led by a gracefully declining Hall of Fame forward with a statuesque physique and a receding hairline is first round cannon fodder. Add in the competitive difference between the eras (the quality of play is FAR superior now to what it was at the turn of the millennium) and cut through all the melodramatic nonsense surrounding this version of the Lakers, and suddenly their struggles don’t seem so abnormal after all. LeBron is certainly still a championship-caliber player, and it’s possible he could yet be the best player on a legitimate contender, but he will need a lot of help to get there, a subtle but dramatic shift from the way the rest of his career has unfolded. That we didn’t see this Lakers’ season coming — even as LA’s front office chose to flank LeBron with nothing but unready young guys and veteran jabronies — is a testament to the level of respect LeBron’s achievements command. The King deserves his fair share of blame for the Lakers’ failures this season, but no one can will his team to 50+ wins on sheer individual greatness forever. It’s time to acknowledge we’ve reached that point with LeBron and adjust our expectations accordingly.

    And remember: when LeBron has played this year, he’s been terrific. His counting stats, shooting splits, and advanced metrics are all right in line with his career averages (particularly when compared to previous inaugural seasons with a new team), and the Lakers were on a 48-win pace at the time he was injured against Golden State on Christmas Day. His effort obviously waxes and wanes, especially on defense, but part of me has to be impressed by a guy who has so much mastery over the game he can coast through large stretches of season and still be one of the best players in the world by any measure. This may not be enough to compete when coupled with a flawed roster and a loaded conference, but it’s not as though LeBron is suddenly some sort of bum.

    And yet…there are signs, both statistical and subjective, that LeBron is a diminished player. The groin injury he suffered against Golden State, which cost him the ensuing seventeen games, was a red flag. Of course random injuries happen in basketball, but here’s the thing: they don’t happen to LeBron. He has never missed as many games in a season as he has this year. It was genuinely destabilizing to watch the Warriors’ game and realize, “Yeah, he’s actually injured. This never happens.” We’ve seen him get hurt, time and again, and always get back up and keep playing, like a damn cyborg. This time looked and felt different. It was immediately clear something was really wrong, and his subsequent absence bore it out. Sure, it might have just been random bad luck, but when the luck strikes for the first and only time just shy of a player’s 34th birthday, it’s easy to think it might be more than a coincidence. [Kobe had never suffered a major injury either until his Achilles’ tendon snapped in April of 2013, when he was — you guessed it — 34 years old. He was never the same again.]

    Whether due to the injury, age, apathy, or some combination thereof, LeBron simply appears less explosive this year. [Again, this is relative to his historical baseline of “one of the most transcendent physical specimens of all time,” so take it for what it’s worth.] Oddly enough, this change stood out to me the most in an unexpected setting: the All-Star Game. In past years, when thrown into the pool with his peers at the top of the league, LeBron had still looked like a qualitatively different kind of athlete. He was always the biggest, fastest roller coaster in an amusement park full of them. He was THE attraction. And while he pulled out a few turn-back-the-clock moments in this year’s game, by and large he just looked like another really good player out there. Sure, he got his numbers and he helped orchestrate his team’s comeback, but it never looked like he tried to take the game over or ‘son’ any of the younger guys. I know I’m nitpicking, but on a floor full of special players, for the first time, he didn’t look that special.

    [Statistically, he remains an elite attacker off the dribble. His free throw rate is up from his last few years in Cleveland and he continues to be one of the top finishers in the league in the restricted area, but there are causes for concern. His shot distribution has shifted slightly away from layups/dunks and towards threes (though this could just be in accordance with league-wide trends), and even so, he is getting his shot blocked at a higher rate per attempt than at any point in his career.]

    This is going to sound counter-intuitive because it’s not exactly a new phenomenon, but LeBron’s indifference towards defensive activity may be a canary in the coal mine. We’ve become accustomed to LeBron coasting through sections of games and seasons on the defensive end, with the knowledge he would invariably turn up the intensity when it mattered. But here’s the thing: for a team currently on the outside of the playoff field, THESE ARE THE GAMES THAT MATTER. Conserving energy for some indeterminate fourth quarter in late May doesn’t have much value if the Lakers are going fishing in mid-April. There’s no way to roll back his odometer, so if he can’t — or won’t — summon up whatever is necessary to yet again drag his team over the finish line this season, what reason would we have to believe he’ll be able to do so in future seasons, even if his supporting cast improves?

    Source: Harry How/Getty Images

    Which brings us to the elephant in the room of this entire conversation: is there a path for LeBron to age gracefully and still compete for championships (a la Kareem) with this iteration of the Lakers? The semi-baffling free agent signings, the Anthony Davis fiasco, and all of the ensuing chemistry-related shenanigans — many of his own creation, of course — have got to have LeBron questioning whether he hitched his wagon to the right organization. If Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka strike out again on AD over the summer, what on Earth are they going to do? The top tier of upcoming free agents (Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving) are likely out of their reach, in part because those guys won’t want to play second fiddle to LeBron’s Golden Years, which is in itself a slightly damning indictment of James’ current position within the league’s hierarchy.

    Beyond them, is there anyone LA could conceivably get who moves the needle toward contention in a significant way? Kemba Walker, Jimmy Butler, or Boogie Cousins are all intriguing fits, but backing up the Brinks’ truck for any of those dudes represents a massive risk coupled with a very uncertain reward. On the other hand, what’s the alternative? LeBron clearly has some noticeable angst regarding the state of the roster this season, even as everyone around the team preached patience before the year began, mind you. How is he going to react if the front office whiffs on AD and the free agent market, leaving him with a similarly deficient supporting cast and another wasted season at the tail end of his extended prime in ’19-’20? It’s an exceptionally difficult needle to thread, and while history is replete with examples of LA turning chicken shit into chicken salad, since the passing of Dr. Jerry Buss, the Lakers’ brass has not exactly displayed a level of organizational competence which inspires much blind faith. This situation could get ugly, and quick.

    Further complicating matters was LeBron’s recent invective about whether his teammates were committed enough, which played as more than a bit hypocritical, given his various off-court business entanglements. It’s a long season and everyone needs to let off steam now and then, but he knows better. It certainly didn’t make the best sales pitch for a free agent sitting on the fence. Is the allure of LA and the Lakers worth the likelihood of getting thrown under the bus every time there’s a hint of adversity?

    It all points to a serious need for a shift in the way the organization interfaces with LeBron, and vice versa. LeBron is still great, but history says this is the best version of him we’re going to get from now on, and it isn’t enough anymore. Creating a championship roster will be borderline impossible if both parties refuse to accept these facts and make decisions with them in mind.  As we discussed earlier, there’s no real historical precedent to use as a blueprint beyond “do what it takes to get AD to LA” (he’s the Magic to LeBron’s Kareem in the best-case scenario). [Jordan’s career is also not a useful guide, as he ghosted what would have been his “gentle decline” phase via his second retirement. Alas.]

    The last LeBron-led team to rank lower than 8th in Offensive Rating was the ’07-’08 Cavs. He’s had help at stops along the way, but it’s fair to say The King has essentially been an offense unto himself for an entire decade. This year’s Lakers rank 22nd. Yes, he’s missed time, but the contrast is stark nonetheless. Building a roster around LeBron’s talents has always been an intractable problem any franchise would die to have. Instead, the Lakers are now stuck having to ask themselves whether the juice is still worth the squeeze. That shift in mindset, more than any other factor, may be the clearest indicator we’ve entered the twilight of LeBron’s magnificent career. It remains to be seen whether the intoxicating combination of Lakers Exceptionalism and LeBron Exceptionalism will cause LA to drag its feet on embracing this new paradigm, making the potential fallout worse in the process.

    Naturally, we haven’t heard the last of the NBA’s biggest star since Jordan, but it’s time to start reorienting our perception of his stardom in the context of his basketball mortality, even if he and his team can’t or won’t yet. LeBron James isn’t perfect, and time is going to render him even less so, but we can still enjoy his greatness through a different lens while he’s here.

    Top Photo Credit: Brad Penner — USA Today Sports

  • The East’s Stretch Run Could Be a Battle for the NBA’s Future

    How much does playoff seeding really matter?

    Sure, it determines home court, and the home team nearly always wins Game 7’s, and the eventual champion, almost without fail, is a top-3 seed. But to a large extent, those are all knock-on effects of a team garnering those advantages because they are better than their opponents to begin with, and then capitalizing on that delta. It’s essentially nature running its course in most cases.

    But what if you have a bunch of teams of roughly equal quality, most of whom have a lot to lose — in terms of both the current moment and the trajectories of their respective franchises — from the results of the playoffs? In that case, how each team finishes the regular season, and the resulting playoff matchups, could be exceedingly important in charting the course of the league going forward.

    Welcome to the Eastern Conference Arms Race of 2019.

    Top to bottom, the East is a weird place this year. LeBron’s exodus to LA left a gaping power vacuum. The void has been filled by three distinct strata of teams: a cadre of five elite contenders at the top (Milwaukee, Toronto, Indiana, Philly, and Boston); a sad, mostly punch-less middle class pillow-fighting each other for the honor of being thrashed in the first round by the clubs listed above; and the poor, unfortunate dregs at the bottom looking towards ping-pong balls and the future, AKA the “Not Tryin’ for Zion” tier.

    Today we’ll only concern ourselves with the first group, the wheat to the rest of the conference’s chaff. The dynamics of this group are fascinating. With five teams in the mix, followed by a bunch of also-rans (apologies to the Nets, who have been a fun story), the three teams who finish at the top will effectively get a bye into the conference semis, while the ones finishing fourth and fifth will have to play each other in the opening round. Not only will one of the teams not even get out of the first round, but the 4/5 winner then has to take on the no. 1 seed in the following round, whereas the teams sitting second and third get to fatten up on relative cupcakes before tangling with each other in round two. So while the difference in quality between the 3-seed and 4-seed is likely to be nearly nonexistent, the difference in difficulty between their respective paths to (at least) the Conference Finals has the potential to be gargantuan.

    And the matchups matter, which is what makes this final stretch of regular season games so vital. Here are the standings as they look today, post-All Star break.

    Let’s break down what’s at stake, team-by-team:

    MILWAUKEE BUCKS: The Bucks are obviously in a strong position, in terms of the amount of games they have remaining, their record, and how good they’ve looked achieving it. They also fortified their roster at the trade deadline, scooping up marksman Nikola Mirotic for what amounted to Thon Maker (whose minutes had already been commandeered by impressive second-year man D.J. Wilson anyway) and a pile of second-round picks they had lying around. We’ve yet to see Mirotic suit up for the Bucks, but he feels like the snuggest of fits for their style of play, allowing them to toggle their frontcourt lineups in a variety of ways to play virtually any kind of game the opponent throws at them, while maintaining the vast chasms of space around Giannis which have helped enable his marauding rim runs. While the Raptors and Sixers made big moves at the deadline as well — picking up Marc Gasol and Tobias Harris, respectively — the combination of the standings, the Bucks’ remaining schedule (one of the league’s easiest, though Toronto also rates highly here), and their “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” play to this point makes me think it would take a pretty major curveball to knock Milwaukee out of the top spot.

    So what would be the best way for the standings to shake out below them? First, it’s important to note regular season head-to-head records are not always particularly predictive of how a playoff series will unfold. The hay isn’t completely in the barn yet, either: the Bucks have completed their season series with Toronto (besting them 3-1 and thus holding a potentially critical tie-breaker), but still have a game each against Boston and Indiana and two against Philly. They are currently 1-1 vs. Boston, 2-1 vs. Indy, and 1-0 vs. Philly, so while there is still work to be done in locking up tie-breakers with their non-Canadian rivals, there also doesn’t look to be any team (non-Warriors division) of whom they should be afraid. Stylistically, perhaps Philly could be the closest thing to Milwaukee Kryptonite, as their new-look starting five may be big and versatile enough to throw different looks at Giannis while also being able to contest the Bucks’ waves of three-point shooters. Indiana, sans Victor Oladipo, probably can’t score enough on Milwaukee’s top-ranked defense to be a real threat, so Milwaukee may have some interest in seeing the Sixers and Pacers swap spots in the standings, which feels realistic given the changes those respective rosters have recently undergone.

    What do they stand to lose if they flop early? A second-round loss would be ugly for a team chasing sixty wins, but probably not as catastrophic as it would be for some of the competition. First-time All-Star Khris Middleton and resurgent bulldog point guard Eric Bledsoe are both set to be unrestricted free agents at season’s end, and Middleton in particular is about to get P-A-I-D for the first time in his career. [Middleton has a player option in his contract which he will undoubtedly decline.] While it’s theoretically possible a humbling defeat could make their eyes wander (Bledsoe, fair or not, does carry the stigma of being seen as something less than the most loyal soldier after the hair salon affair in Phoenix), the Bucks’ front office holds two massive trump cards in the negotiations with their complementary stars: Bird Rights (meaning they can throw in some additional financial security for two guys who probably believe they’ve been underpaid their whole careers), and the opportunity to play alongside the best friggin’ player in the league, who is only 24 years old by the way, for the prime years of his career. Ownership is probably going to have to feel some luxury tax pain — Brook Lopez and Malcolm Brogdon will also both be due for hefty raises, though they will likely save some cash by waiving George Hill’s non-guaranteed deal over the summer — but it’s a pill they’ll just have to swallow to keep the core intact. There are paths where things could go sideways for them, but barring an unforeseen pre-agency debacle (which we’ve seen no evidence The Freak has any inkling to initiate), Giannis remains the rising tide that lifts all boats in Milwaukee, and should continue to be even if the playoffs don’t break their way this year.

    Credit: Brad Penner/USA Today Sports

    TORONTO RAPTORS: Though they have two more losses in the bank, do not hold the aforementioned tie-breaker, and are still in active “load management” mode with Kawhi Leonard, overtaking Milwaukee for the top spot in the Conference is certainly not out of the question. Their remaining schedule rates as even easier than the Bucks’, they won six in a row heading into the break, and the addition of Gasol provides them with another dimension of defense and playmaking they didn’t possess with Jonas Valanciunas. [The sample size isn’t large enough yet to definitively say one way or the other, but my gut tells me the Gasol-Siakam pairing is going to be magical.]

    Even if they don’t surpass Milwaukee, it’s hard to see them dropping below the 2-seed. Coughing up a  4.5 (to 5.5) game lead in the standings this late in the proceedings would take a pretty big confluence of circumstances, and if that happens, Toronto likely has far bigger problems than its seeding. So who would be the ideal 3-seed for them to face? Look, the easy answer to this question for everyone is Indiana, given how tough it will be for them to overcome the season-ending injury to Oladipo. Indy has rebounded of late, winning six of seven going into the break, but Toronto took two out of three off the Pacers in their season series, as well as three out of four against the Sixers. The Raptors have one game left against Boston (Feb 26th in Toronto), with the Celtics winning two out of three tilts so far. Adding Gasol may not do much to address this troublesome matchup, as the Celtics’ offense is designed to exploit lumbering big men without giving up a mismatch at the other end. The schedule at least sets up ideally for Toronto, as they are finished playing the teams they would rather see ascend in the standings and still have a head-to-head matchup with the team they might prefer stay in the 4/5 side of the bracket.

    A premature playoff exit for Toronto has the potential to be devastating. No matter what happens, we simply have no idea what Kawhi Leonard will do this summer. He has been characteristically tight-lipped about his intentions in free agency, and it’s not as though he should get much benefit of the doubt. Because he is so reserved and so many other pre-agency shenanigans have transpired since, we tend to gloss over the fact this guy held what is perhaps the best organization in American sports hostage for an entire year AND THEN demanded a trade. All the Raptors can do is put their best foot forward and hope, but pretending to know what a player with his track record will do and what truly matters to him is galactically foolish. He has a title under his belt already, so even if the Raptors make a deep run and look like a strong contender going forward, Kawhi might be happy to take less money and a more comfortable situation to play where he wants anyway. It has to be maddening, but GM Masai Ujiri and the Raptors were well aware of the gamble they were taking by trading for such an inscrutable superstar.

    INDIANA PACERS: This is where things get interesting. We should never count out a group of smart, tough players who defend like their collective hair is on fire, but holding on to the 3-seed is going to be exceedingly difficult for the Pacers, especially with Philly acquiring Harris. Indiana brought in buyout guy Wes Matthews to fill some of Oladipo’s minutes (and perhaps to keep him away from the Sixers, who reportedly also expressed interest in signing Matthews), but the move amounts to slapping a Band-Aid over a compound fracture. Their recent six-game win streak (prior to a loss to the Bucks heading into the break) came in a home-heavy stretch against a weak set of opponents, and the schedule is not kind the rest of the way. Their slate from March 7th onward features road games at Milwaukee, Golden State, Philly, and Portland, as well as two games each against Denver, Boston and OKC. That accounts for ten out of their remaining 24 games, so even if they can manage to split those heavyweight matchups — a tall order — they’ll still need to avoid any slip-ups against the lesser opponents to keep pace with Philly and Boston, both of whom could be primed for a strong sprint to the finish line.

    The good news? Relatively speaking, playoff expectations are low in the wake of Oladipo’s injury. They also don’t have any real franchise-altering free agents coming due this summer, so the stakes are not nearly as high for them should they bow out in the first or second round this spring. Bojan Bogdanovic will be a free agent and may have earned himself a healthy raise with his tremendous play of late, and Sixth Man of the Year candidate Domantas Sabonis will be due for a massive extension. Even so, Indy’s cap sheet is clean as can be going forward, giving them both a nice, young core and the flexibility to improve the roster in a number of ways.  While they may be the easiest out among the East’s contenders this season, that is unlikely to be a lasting state of affairs.

    PHILADELPHIA 76ERS: Our biggest wild card. On paper (and in the small sample of games we’ve seen so far), their new Big Four (Five?) starting lineup looks like a monster, with the acquisition of borderline All-Star Tobias Harris adding shooting, length, and versatility to a team needing those exact elements. If it all jells over a larger number of minutes and is enough to overcome their depth issues, the upside is there to challenge Toronto for the 2-seed. Regardless of the seed, what really matters, whether they will admit it or not, is ending up on the opposite side of the bracket from Boston. The Sixers are 0-3 (with one more game to go, March 20th in Boston) against the Celtics, and the combination of Al Horford and Aron Baynes has frustrated Joel Embiid to no end. Getting the 3-seed feels more urgent for Philly than for the other teams, since it likely gets them away from Boston and Milwaukee for both of the first two rounds. A potential Brooklyn-Toronto path to the ECF is no picnic — they’re 1-3 vs. the Raps — but it’s far more palatable than the possibility of Boston and then, if the Sixers survive, Milwaukee.

    It’s hard to know what the ramifications of a quick playoff exit would be, but they probably aren’t pretty. Even if Philly makes a deep run and GM Elton Brand convinces the notoriously fickle Jimmy Butler, Tobias Harris — and let’s be honest, himself — to keep the band together, this core gets EXTREMELY expensive in short order. Butler and Harris will be looking for max deals (or close to it), and Ben Simmons will be eligible for a max extension this fall, which the Sixers will rightly grant him at the first possible moment. So they could be on the hook for FOUR max contracts (including Embiid) starting in ’20-’21, which will push them deeeeep into the luxury tax once they fill out the remainder of the roster. If they are competing for titles, then it’s probably worth it to ownership. If they flame out in the playoffs this year, management may decide to let Butler walk (rather than pay $189 million for an injury-prone star who would be 34 by the contract’s expiration) and pitch Harris as his replacement rather than as his complement. [It’s entirely possible the trade for Harris was this exact sort of hedge in the first place, and after being traded four times in eight years, Tobias may jump at the opportunity to finally feel like he has a long-term NBA “home.”]

    In any case, “The Process” is dead and buried, and it’s time for this all-in roster to put up or shut up. The next seven weeks will be a good indicator of which one it will be.

    Getty Images

    BOSTON CELTICS: Boston rooked me — and many others — into thinking they would be a juggernaut, so sitting tied for fifth in the East this late in the campaign has to qualify as an unmitigated disappointment. With that said, there is still an elite team lurking within this talented-but-inconsistent roster. The Celtics were basically M.I.A. for most of November, going 4-8 over a three-week span, but outside of that stretch, have racked up a 33-13 record and been one of the best teams in the league. By Simple Rating System (a measure accounting for point differential and strength of schedule), the C’s are the NBA’s third-best team, behind Milwaukee and Golden State, unsurprisingly. They play the other elite teams tough, and as previously mentioned, have manhandled the Sixers. The schedule is rough down the stretch (.526 remaining opponents’ win percentage, with 14 of 24 games on the road), but they will have a big hand in determining playoff seeding, with two games still to go against Indiana and one each against Milwaukee, Toronto, and Philly.

    Three of the five teams we’ve discussed won’t make it to the Eastern Conference Finals, and no one has more riding on NOT being one of those three than the Celtics. For Boston, an early dismissal from the postseason could be borderline apocalyptic. As Kyrie Irving has continued to open his mouth and consequently make his commitment to the franchise appear less and less ironclad (along with all the other bread crumbs turning up connecting him to the Knicks and/or Kevin Durant), the fortunes of a franchise which has spent the better part of the decade building up its war chest through shrewd personnel moves now feel increasingly dependent on the results of a handful of playoff games in which its best player may already have one foot out the door. If things go south and Kyrie bolts for less-green pastures (literally and probably figuratively), Danny Ainge would then need to rethink whether or not it makes sense to throw the kitchen sink (read: Jayson Tatum plus their glut of extra draft picks) at a potential Anthony Davis deal if he has no superstar with which to pair The Brow. [That last sentence probably reads like porn to Lakers’ fans.]

    Selling Kyrie on sticking around long-term (and everything which could flow from his decision) starts with a deep postseason run this year, and blowing out these next seven weeks would go a long way to setting them up for success. All the numbers say they have it in them, but can they consistently harness it?

    Top Photo Credit: Sporting News

  • Tale of the All-Time Tape: Dwyane Wade vs. Dirk Nowitzki

    This week, two all-timers will get their unofficial send-offs at the All-Star Game in Charlotte. Legends Dirk Nowitzki and Dwyane Wade were selected as special additions to the rosters as a swan song and an homage to their respective Hall of Fame careers. [Note: Dirk has not officially announced he will retire at season’s end, but all signs point to this being his final campaign in the league. Wade has maintained this will be his final season, despite semi-persistent rumors he could change his mind.]

    Since the league is going out of its way to celebrate these two hoops luminaries, I thought it might be fun to take a break from the 24/7 madness of the NBA news cycle to look back at two careers which continue to be inextricably linked in spite of the vastly different backgrounds and playing styles of the two men. Both Dirk and D-Wade are no-brainer first-ballot Hall of Famers — so we’ll be mentioning them again in the same breath three years from now — but which superstar will history remember more fondly? Let’s break it down.

    [All stats are courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted, and are current through Monday’s games.]

    HISTORICAL ACCOLADES:

    The stuff they engrave on the plaque in Springfield; the absolute tip-top lines on the resume.

    • NBA Titles:
      • Dirk – 1 (1-1 in NBA Finals)
      • Wade – 3 (3-2 in NBA Finals)
    • Regular Season MVPs:
      • Dirk – 1
      • Wade – 0
    • Finals MVPs:
      • Dirk – 1
      • Wade – 1
    • MVP Top-5 Finishes:
      • Dirk – 3
      • Wade – 2
    • All-NBA Selections:
      • Dirk – 12 (4 First Team)
      • Wade – 8 (2 First Team)
    • All-Defense Selections:
      • Dirk – 0
      • Wade – 3
    • All-Star Selections (includes this season):
      • Dirk – 14
      • Wade – 13

    CAREER STATS, REGULAR SEASON:

    • Games:
      • Dirk – 1,495 (4th All-Time)
      • Wade – 1,026
    • Minutes:
      • Dirk – 50,832 (3rd All-Time)
      • Wade – 35,013 (70th All-Time)
    • Points:
      • Dirk – 31,292 (7th All-Time)
      • Wade – 22,695 (30th All-Time)
    • Rebounds:
      • Dirk – 11,374 (27th All-Time)
      • Wade – 4,818
    • Assists:
      • Dirk – 3,623
      • Wade – 5,593 (46th All-Time)
    • Steals:
      • Dirk – 1,204 (84th All-Time)
      • Wade – 1,589 (33rd All-Time)
    • Blocks:
      • Dirk – 1,271 (51st All-Time)
      • Wade – 868 (123rd All-Time, 2nd All-Time among guards)
    • Player Efficiency Rating (PER):
      • Dirk – 22.6 (28th All-Time)
      • Wade – 23.6 (19th All-Time)
    • Win Shares:
      • Dirk – 206.2 (8th All-Time)
      • Wade – 119.8 (45th All- Time)
    • Win Shares per 48 Minutes:
      • Dirk – .195 (24th All-Time)
      • Wade – .164 (67th All-Time)
    • Value Over Replacement Player (VORP):
      • Dirk – 66.8 (18th All-Time)
      • Wade – 58.1 (25th All-Time)
    • Win/Loss Record:
      • Dirk – 909-586 (60.8%)
      • Wade – 597-429 (58.2%)

    CAREER STATS, PLAYOFFS:

    • Games:
      • Dirk – 148
      • Wade – 177
    • Minutes:
      • Dirk – 5,895
      • Wade – 6,697
    • Points Per Game:
      • Dirk – 25.3
      • Wade – 22.3
    • Rebounds Per Game:
      • Dirk – 10.0
      • Wade – 5.2
    • Assists Per Game:
      • Dirk – 2.5
      • Wade – 3.9
    • Win Shares:
      • Dirk – 23.1
      • Wade – 21.6
    • Win Shares Per 48 Minutes:
      • Dirk – .188
      • Wade – .155
    • Win/Loss Record:
      • Dirk – 69-76 (47.6%)
      • Wade – 105-72 (59.3%)

    OK, that’s a lot to digest, but let’s see what conclusions we can draw from the numbers, and then get into the more touchy-feely and/or subjective aspects.

    From a pure volume standpoint, it’s no contest. Dirk’s longevity and durability (4th in games, 3rd in minutes All-Time) have led to an accumulation of stats almost no one in league history can touch. He missed more than nine games only once in his first eighteen seasons in the league, an incredible feat for a seven-footer. By contrast, Wade has just played so much less total basketball over the years, as his physical, attacking style of play and high-wire athleticism have made him prone to picking up significant injuries throughout his career. It’s fair to argue Wade’s style took much more of a toll on his body than did Dirk’s — and resulted in a decline in productivity at a much younger age — but the best ability is availability, and when you can pencil one guy in for 76 games a year and another for only 66, it matters.

    Things get trickier when we start to look at their production on a per-game or per-minute basis. It’s somewhat subjective because it depends how you prefer to consume greatness: a longer, slower burn (Dirk) or a flame that burns brightly but goes out more quickly (Wade). It’s difficult to quantify when exactly Dirk’s apex was because he was consistently great for so long. Most fans’ gut reaction would probably be to say his MVP season in 2006-07 at age-28, but beside the fact he eclipsed 50/40/90 shooting splits that season for the only time in his career (he came close several other times as well) and his team racking up 67 wins, it doesn’t stand out statistically from almost any of his other seasons during the 2000’s. He was equally deserving of the MVP in both ’04-’05 and ’05-’06, when his basketball soulmate Steve Nash took home the trophies. After ’07, LeBron, Kobe, and Wade became the faces of the league, but Dirk kept quietly cranking out quality seasons for another five years, including the title run in ’10-’11, which we’ll get to shortly.

    Wade, on the other hand, has spent the entirety of his career as either a “pretty good” player, or a holy fucking terror, with nothing in between. Flash was MVP-worthy for most of his seven-year peak (roughly from ’04 through ’11), and despite his legendary run to Finals MVP in ’06, was often overshadowed by the ascendance of LeBron. The King casts his long shadow over every big picture aspect of the NBA for the last fifteen years, but no one will feel his historical impact more — for better and worse — than D-Wade. His absolute apex and corresponding “MVP window” were the ’08-’09 (30.2/ 5.0/ 7.5) and ’09-’10 (26.6/ 4.8/ 6.5) seasons, which just so happened to coincide with the first two of LeBron’s four MVP awards. Of course, LeBron would pay off his debt to D-Wade’s legacy over the ensuing four years, but that’s a separate topic.

    We’ve been watching the kinda-sorta broken-down version of Wade for so long now, we tend to forget how the young, athletic version of Wade was an absolute MONSTER. Outside of his tendency to play Robin to LeBron’s Batman, he came along at the perfect time for his game. The hand-check ban and Defensive Three Second rules were just being implemented as he was rising to prominence, opening up his dribble-drive game, and he starred in the the era prior to the three-point revolution, which made his reliance on the midrange and lack of a consistent outside shot much less problematic than they would have been only a few years later.

    Perhaps my favorite version of Wade was the all-court, hyper-athletic game-wrecker he was for the ’08 Redeem Team in Beijing. When stripped of his primary NBA responsibility as a shot creator — which, don’t get me wrong, he was also GREAT at — and unburdened from a heavy minutes load and an 82-game schedule, Wade was freed to go balls-to-the-wall on every possession, unleashing the apex predator he was at that moment in time. The other countries — who, to be fair, actually provided good competition that year — had no choice but to gameplan for USA’s primary offensive options, Kobe and LeBron, and Wade made them pay with play after play after play in the passing lanes, as a cutter, and in transition. Behold, one of the most incredible basketball plays I’ve ever seen:

    I’ll never forget that play as long as I live. It was peak Wade distilled down to his essence: the disruption, the awareness, the athleticism, and the flair coming together in one quick flash of transcendence. He was basically the Redeem Team’s answer to Dream Team Charles Barkley — you knew he wasn’t the team’s best player, but you also knew there wasn’t anyone playing better than him.

    [A quick aside about that ’08 Olympic team, because I’m a giant Team USA nerd: easily the best, most talented Olympic squad we’ve had, non-Dream Team division. It was a near-perfect roster: peak Kobe flanked by young-but-seasoned versions of LeBron, Wade, Bosh, CP3, Deron Williams, Melo, and Dwight Howard. Old Jason Kidd was there as a mentor and sage veteran, and the other three guys at the bottom of the roster (Tayshaun Prince, Michael Redd, and Carlos Boozer) weren’t good enough to where the coaches felt like they had to get minutes at the expense of the other guys. The Gold Medal Game vs. Spain was one of the most riveting basketball games I’ve ever watched. It was one of the only times I can remember Team USA not simply grinding down its opponent with superior talent, but rather having to out-duel a worthy adversary, and doing it. I’ve probably never questioned my patriotism more than when Rudy Fernandez posterized Dwight Howard. Aside to the aside: in addition to Wade, I also loved the Olympics version of Bosh that year. He decided (or the coaches told him) he was going to be the team’s defense/rebounding/energy guy, and he played the role like a fiddle. He was absolutely everywhere on the court, like someone took 2019 Montrezl Harrell, made him six-foot-eleven, and turned all the ability sliders up about 20%. Combined with his Miami tenure, let it never be said Chris Bosh was not an incredibly adaptable basketball player. OK, let’s move on.]

    Point is, setting aside accomplishments for a moment (we’ll get there, I promise), if you needed one version of one player for one moment in time (the “Aliens play us for the planet” hypothetical), you would probably choose that vintage of Wade over any version of Dirk. The breadth of Dirk’s career as a player was certainly more impressive, but Wade had the higher peak, and in the calculus of many people, that distinction matters a lot.

    Now, naturally the analysis would be incomplete if we didn’t discuss the playoffs, and as a consequence, RINGZZZ. This portion of the proceedings is going to be triggering for some people, so I will do my best to approach it with the appropriate level of care and sensitivity. Wade’s career stacks up pretty favorably with Dirk’s when we remove regular season volume and accolades from the equation, but we also have to consider the mitigating circumstances. Dirk played the entirety of his career in the much-tougher Western Conference, making it more difficult to a) crack the playoff field in the first place, and b) make a deep run once there. Even so, from Dirk’s age-22 season through his age-37 season, the Mavs only missed the playoffs once: 2012-13, a year in which Nowitzki sat the first 27 games due to injury. [The team went 12-15 in Dirk’s absence before rallying to finish the year at an even .500, trailing the 8th-seeded Rockets by four games.]

    His track record in the playoffs is a mixed bag, no doubt. The run to the 2011 title is unassailable: they beat a 48-win Blazers team, Kobe’s Lakers, the Durant/Westbrook/Harden Thunder, and the Big Three Heatles. At the same time, Dirk accepting his 2007 MVP Award in a suit after his 67-win juggernaut got bounced in the first round by the 8th-seeded, “We Believe” Warriors is an indelible image. Had those 2011 Finals broken the other way, we would view Dirk’s career through a very different lens, but even so, his presence alone guaranteed a baseline of contention for fifteen solid years, a claim exceedingly few players can credibly make.

    Wade has enjoyed somewhat more playoff success, but he’s played in the East his entire career, and  — to put it mildly — he’s had some help. He was comfortably the best player on the ’06 title team, but Shaq was still Shaq, even if he was no longer the apex, destroyer-of-worlds Shaq from a half-decade earlier. [Quick aside: what a weird roster for a championship team. That squad would be the 6-seed in the East this year, right? The mid-aughts were a strange time in NBA history.] The ’04-’05 Heat reached the Conference Finals in a year where a convincing argument could still be made for either Wade or Shaq as the team’s alpha dog. So outside of ’06, a team with Dwyane Wade as its unquestioned best player has never made it beyond the second round of the playoffs.

    Which of course brings us to LeBron. Those two extra titles bolster Wade’s case any way you look at it; always better to win championships than not. But it’s hard to ignore the fact he won them as a wingman (albeit an insanely high-end one) for one of history’s greatest players at the absolute peak of his powers. His tip-out offensive rebound to a LeBron three late in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals (which we’ll eventually end up remembering as one of the five or so greatest games in NBA history) was one of the ten-plus insane things that all had to go in Miami’s favor for that game to end the way it did, and he put up a 23-and-10 in the ensuing Game 7 win as well. So Wade was obviously an integral part of the success of the Big Three era in Miami, but in many people’s minds, the original sin of how the team came together and the failings of the first year (hi, Dirk!) stain everything that came after. Consider this: in thirty years, what will most people remember about those four seasons? The Decision. “Not one, not two, not three…” Ray Allen and Game Six. And choking against the Mavs in 2011. That’s about it, and fair or not, none of those things reflect particularly well on Dwyane Wade.

    Again, on balance, having more rings is never going to be a debit on the historical ledger, and the marriage of LeBron and D-Wade did give us plenty of magical moments, such as:

    But when compared to a legend like Dirk, who carried his team as the undisputed alpha for as long as he did and never enjoyed the benefit of playing with anyone in remotely the same stratosphere as LeBron, it’s hard to give D-Wade more than partial credit for those extra chips.

    Wade gets some benefit from positional scarcity, being (at minimum) the fourth-best shooting guard of all time, depending on how you feel about Jerry West. Amid the shift to “position-less” basketball (a phrase I dislike but is useful for our purposes here) in the modern era, Wade stands out as a player who has always occupied a very specific, concrete position. He’s about as ‘shooting guard’ as it gets. Dirk is tougher to pigeonhole into a position because his game was so evolutionary for a player of his size. In the end, he probably gets remembered as a power forward, which results in him getting lumped in with a group of other legends whose games couldn’t have been more different, like Barkley, Malone, Duncan (not actually a power forward but don’t get me started), Garnett, and others. It’s easier to definitively say “this is how good Dwyane Wade was” because we have a historical frame of reference for him, whereas Dirk redefined the very notion of what a big man can be and how he generates value. And while Dirk will always be a unique animal because the pressure his shooting put on a defense was just so devastating, he has to get some credit for the way the arc of NBA history is now bending in his direction, with every team under the sun attempting to draft and develop stretch bigs and find the “next Dirk.” [Here’s a hint: stop looking. There isn’t one.]

    In the long run, I suspect history will end up looking at Dirk a bit more fondly than Wade. The stylistic uniqueness, the sheer statistical volume, the signature move, and his longevity as an undisputed team leader and #1 option for a contender give him the edge. And fair or not, history will probably give more weight to him taking down Wade (and LeBron and Bosh) in 2011 than it will to Wade besting him in 2006. But there is no real loser here, and we’ll get to relive it all again when these rivals’ paths cross one more time in 2022 as they are enshrined in Springfield together. In the meantime, let’s just enjoy one last ride this weekend with these two legends and champions. Auf wiedersehen and farewell.

  • Let’s Go Shopping: Trade Deadline Targets

    Before we begin, a quick disclaimer — this is NOT going to be about Anthony Davis. In fact, I’m only mentioning him to say I’m not going to talk about him. If you require additional content about the ongoing, totally-not-collusion-between-LeBron-AD-and-their-mutual-agent trade saga, just find the nearest expired feline, spin it around your head like a helicopter, and you should be good to go.

    No, today is not about the biggest fish in the sea. With Thursday’s trade deadline rapidly approaching, it’s time to take a look at which teams may be willing to make key pieces available, who those pieces are, and what sort of interest they might draw around the league. With so many teams still in contention, this year’s deadline has a chance to be a true seller’s market. Here are the top players teams in the hunt could be looking to pry away, non-Brow division.

    Marc Gasol and Mike Conley, Memphis Grizzlies: Grit ‘n’ Grind has been dying a slow death for years now, but with the Grizz fading (to put it generously) over the last month-plus — Memphis is 3-17 since December 29th, to be exact — we’ve now reached the point of reading the era its last rites. The front office has made it clear franchise tent-poles Gasol and Conley are both very much available, though the markets could be quite different for the two stars. Gasol has a player option in his contract for $25.6 million next season, which he will almost certainly decline to seek one last long-term deal. This makes him little more than a rental, unless some team is interested in committing multiple years and assets to a 34-year-old seven-footer whose performance has declined drastically of late after a hot start to the year. The market for centers, even ones who offer a theoretical level of floor spacing AND rim protection, is likely to be tepid — this is going to become a theme, so prepare yourselves — meaning there’s a good chance on Thursday afternoon we’ll be scratching our heads, saying “Wait…they got Gasol for WHAT?”

    It’s hard to find many teams for whom Gasol would represent an upgrade and would simultaneously be willing to shell out any real assets in search of a playoff push. Boston could make a little sense, if they thought a Gasol-Horford pairing was tenable. Charlotte is another option, though if I were MJ (to be extremely clear, I am not), I’d be reticent to start throwing around picks just to get up to the sixth seed and get wrecked in the first round by Philly or Boston, given how uncertain their future is regarding soon-to-be free agent Kemba Walker. None of the teams in the mix out West make a ton of sense, with the exception of perhaps the Clippers, who we’ll get to shortly. Memphis knows they are going to lose him for nothing at the end of the year, in which case they would at least free up cap space, so they may be hesitant to take on long-term money in any exchange, unless it comes with significant draft pick sweeteners attached. It’s tough to construct a deal which is good for everyone involved, but if a contending team has a low first round pick they are willing to part with and the right combination of contracts, I suspect Big Spain could be pried away at a shockingly low cost.

    [Update: Shams Charania of The Athletic is now reporting Memphis is engaged in advanced talks with Charlotte on a Gasol trade. Stay tuned.]

    On the other side of the coin, Mike Conley could draw significant interest from a few teams, which would have seemed impossible two years ago when he signed what was, at the time, the largest contract in NBA history. While the deal is never going to look like a bargain, with Conley returning largely to health this season and the expectation the salary cap will continue to rise over the next few years, suddenly he looks a lot more enticing to teams in need of a final piece to their puzzle, even with another $67 million on the books beyond this season. Indiana would have made a lot of sense (Conley is from Indiana originally, and I’m always a fan of the “hometown guy” narrative) until Victor Oladipo’s knee exploded, making it much more likely the Pacers will go full Champ Kind and sit the next few plays out. The scuttlebutt suggests the other likely destination is Utah, who have engaged with Memphis in talks surrounding “Ravishing” Ricky Rubio, whose contract is expiring, and Derrick Favors, whose $16.9 million salary for next season is unguaranteed and continues to be a poor fit next to reigning DPOY Rudy Gobert. Conley would certainly make Utah’s offense more dynamic — even amid questions of backcourt fit with the once-again-scorching Donovan Mitchell — while also forcing coach Quin Snyder to abandon the Gobert-Favors pairing, which could provide unintended benefits as well.

    I can envision a world where San Antonio makes a play for Conley, but Pop seems pretty happy with his current point guard situation going forward, so the Spurs are unlikely to overpay on the off chance a bidding war breaks out.

    Dewayne Dedmon and Kent Bazemore, Atlanta Hawks: The Hawks have looked shockingly competent in the second trimester of the season (12-12 since December 18th) with the emergence of John Collins as a nightly 20-and-10 threat, Kevin “Red Velvet” Huerter earning “young Klay Thompson” comps, and Trae Young, for all the criticism he’s endured, showing legitimate flashes. That being said, competence was not the plan this year, so the front office will likely be looking to shed veteran contributors for future assets, and the two obvious guys other teams might have interest in are Dedmon and Bazemore. Dedmon is probably the bigger prize, having added the three-ball to his arsenal (37.4% from deep this year on 3.2 attempts per game) and sporting a contract which is both affordable ($7.2 million) and expiring. Teams in need of frontline depth but without the assets or intestinal fortitude to make a big splash could come calling, but with this being a clear rental situation, the return is unlikely to end up as more than a couple second rounders, at best.

    Bazemore is a useful, athletic wing, but he comes with the downside of a $19.3 million player option on his contract next season, and I’ve never been more of sure of anything than I am that Bazemore will pick up said option. The 4-year/$70 million deal was rotten before the ink on it was even dry — thanks again, summer of 2016! — and nothing has changed. A team like Sacramento, who has the only meaningful cap space remaining in the league and could use a guy who can guard big wings, might dip their toes in the water on Bazemore, but I suspect Atlanta is probably stuck with him for the time being.

    Jrue Holiday, E’Twaun Moore, Nikola Mirotic, and Julius Randle, New Orleans Pelicans: The Pels are 3-9 in their last twelve games amid a rash of injuries (including the last eight without He Who Shall Not Be Named) and have fallen to 13th in the West at 23-31. Whether HWSNBN gets traded before Thursday, shut down, or returns to play in a lame duck capacity, it appears unlikely things will get better for New Orleans anytime soon, leading to rampant speculation they may just try to clean house before the deadline and jump start the rebuild which is inevitably forthcoming.

    Randle and Mirotic are both excellent PFs on ostensibly expiring contracts — Randle has a player option for next season he is likely to decline based on how well he’s played this year — and Moore is a proficient 3-and-D wing on an affordable deal through next season. Any opportunistic GM worth his salt should absolutely be sniffing around these guys. Mirotic would be a snug fit in places like Philly, Portland, or Utah. While Randle doesn’t bring the same floor spacing ability — making his integration into existing lineups a bit less seamless — his athleticism, playmaking, and interior scoring ability could draw interest from smaller market teams looking to use the trade market as de facto free agency. Moore is exactly the type of role player who should be getting 15-20 minutes a game for a contending team. He is overextended in his current role as a big minutes starter often forced to play out of position and guard bigger wings, but he would have real value in a better ecosystem and could be had on the cheap.

    It will be fascinating to see whether or not GM Dell Demps makes Holiday available, either prior to the deadline or over the summer. Jrue is 28, playing some of the best ball of his career (21.0/ 5.1/ 8.0 averages per game), and remains a tenacious, active defender despite how precipitously the team’s overall defensive performance has fallen off (24th in Defensive Rating after climbing up to 14th last season). He has expressed dismay with the Davis situation, and is still owed a truckload of money (approximately $79 million over the next three seasons, though the ’21-’22 season is a player option, albeit one most point guards on the wrong side of 30 would happily pick up). He can play on- or off-ball and defend multiple positions, making him a fit in virtually any lineup. However, much like Conley, we know definitively he can’t be the second-best player on a team with championship aspirations, which makes his contractual situation problematic even amid a rising cap. A guy in his 10th season is clearly not going to align with New Orleans’ timetable for contention going forward — if there is such a thing, and on the assumption pro basketball in New Orleans even has a post-Brow future — but would the return for a player with his contract and robust injury history justify tearing the building down to its foundation? The same teams eyeing Conley might look at Holiday as well, potentially further eroding the Pelicans’ leverage in any negotiations.

    Suffice it to say, things are bleak right now in New Orleans, and we probably aren’t close to the bottom yet.


    Source: Christian Petersen/Getty Images North America

    Nikola Vucevic, Terrence Ross, and Aaron Gordon, Orlando Magic: Sensing a trend yet? Another team sinking in the standings (10-19 after a 12-12 start which was clearly fool’s gold) with the “opportunity” to jettison veteran contributors and finally position themselves for a proper youth movement. Look, I love Vooch. He has been lights-out on offense, and is a deserving first-time All-Star. With that said, his contract is going to expire, and Orlando is going to be left with nothing in return for him, unless they think their cap space is really worth something at this juncture, which I would argue it is not. Vucevic has made himself into a perimeter threat (37.8% from deep on a non-fluky number of attempts), and he rates out defensively much better than his reputation would suggest. As with Gasol and Dedmon, the lack of true demand for centers — even ones as undeniably skilled as Vooch — among contending teams may depress the return, but I find it hard to believe it would be worse than doing nothing. Boston, the Lakers (if that other thing falls through, as it is increasingly appearing it might), Milwaukee, Charlotte, Brooklyn (potentially about to get Caris LeVert back to augment the stellar run they’ve been on), Miami, or even (ugh) the Wizards could all be possible destinations for Vooch where his talents would be put to better use.

    Ross is in a similar situation to Moore: a capable role player on the wing who is stretched a bit too far on a bad team but would be a useful contributor for a contender. He’s having his best season as a pro, and probably wouldn’t cost much to acquire based on his expiring contract. A number of teams who could use spacing and depth (Philly, I’m looking in your direction) should be lighting up GM Jeff Weltman’s phone. Ross isn’t going to move the needle that much for anyone on his own, but when the playoffs roll around, having another capable athlete who can knock down shots in a limited role can’t hurt.

    Aaron Gordon is a trickier case. Although still only 23 years old, his game has noticeably plateaued over the last three seasons at a point where his physical profile and pedigree dictate he should be ascending to stardom. Some of that can be chalked up to playing out of position (for Christ’s sake, he’s a power forward), injuries, and being employed by an organization which never seems to have any sort of coherent plan, but at some point we need to see something to suggest there is a star-caliber player waiting to emerge. On top of the relative lack of production, the extension he signed with Orlando includes an unusual descending salary structure over the course of the deal, from $21.6 million this season all the way down to $16.4 million in ’21-’22, leading to speculation the deal was signed with the specific intent of using him as a trade chip. The rub, as it pertains to this particular trade deadline, is the structure of the deal potentially makes Gordon a MORE valuable trade chip the longer they wait to deal him. He almost certainly needs a change of scenery (and role) to reach his ceiling, but with a salary which only becomes more palatable over time for a player approaching his theoretical peak, Gordon’s value paradoxically increases (especially relative to a rising salary cap) as the deal gets closer to its expiration.

    The situation raises so many questions. Did Gordon want out of Orlando and agree to the contract specifically thinking it would facilitate a trade? If it works, does this portend another new avenue of player control over their professional destinies? Or did the Magic snooker him into it, thinking along the lines I laid out above? It’s hard to imagine the Orlando Magic, who have been a complete and utter farce of an organization for most of the decade, are somehow now playing 3-D chess in contract negotiations, but the NBA is a weird league.

    In any case, if I were a rival GM, he is a player I would be actively pursuing. Again, Philly comes to mind as an intriguing destination, along with Utah, Indiana, and Portland. While Orlando’s front office should hit the eject button on Vucevic and Ross simply as an act of self-preservation (and because it’s the sensible thing to do), what they eventually do with Gordon will act as a signpost for where the organization goes from here. It’s highly unlikely Gordon ever reaches his potential alongside young big men Mo Bamba and Jonathan Isaac; at what point does the team begin to harm both Gordon’s career prospects and their own ability to extract the maximum return for him by actively keeping him from reaching it? Do we really believe their decision-makers are competent enough to thread that needle?

    Tobias Harris and Lou Williams, Los Angeles Clippers: 

    [Note: The section below was written prior to the bombshell overnight announcement of the Clippers-Sixers trade featuring Tobias Harris. I’m going to run it anyway for the sake of posterity, but clearly the “sellers vs. buyers” question is now pretty definitively answered. I will have additional analysis of the trade itself shortly. I am mad at myself for not getting this column posted sooner, in part because it would have been way cooler and made me look more knowledgeable than I really am. Oh well. As Sean Connery’s character in ‘The Rock’ said, “You musht never heshitate.”]
    The Clips are perhaps our most interesting deadline team because one could make a compelling argument for them as either a buyer or a seller. They are currently 8th in the West, and only a game back of Utah for 7th, so it’s easy to say they should keep pushing for a somewhat unexpected playoff berth. At the same time, upstart Sacramento and the Lakers — who obviously have a wide range of potential outcomes going forward, but at least should have a functional LeBron for the remainder of the season, “load management” be damned — are nipping at their heels. And while they’ll never admit it, the Clippers have a nefarious incentive to miss the playoffs. LA owes its first round pick this year to the Celtics (courtesy of the one and only Jeff Green, ladies and gentlemen!), but it is lottery protected for this year and next. So in practice, holding on to the 8th (or even 7th seed) this season garners billionaire owner Steve Ballmer a few million bucks in gate revenues for a couple playoff games as the team gets dumped on by either Golden State or Denver, while costing them something like the 13th or 14th pick in the 2019 draft, a spot not far from where they snagged future star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander last year.

    Should they choose to operate with an eye towards the future — for the record, I’m not saying it’s right, just that it’s perfectly rational — then they could make some real needle-moving players available at the deadline, namely Harris and Williams. Tobias Harris has played phenomenally well all year, to the point many considered him a snub from the All-Star team. [Based on how stacked the West is, I probably wouldn’t go that far, but it’s not a crazy position. Rudy Gobert was certainly more deserving and also didn’t get selected.] His contract is expiring, and there are a number of teams who could use a strong, athletic combo forward who can do just about everything on the court. On a personal level, I don’t wish another trade on Harris; all he’s done his whole career is continue to get better every single year and be “rewarded” for it with another trade to a new city. He is the perpetual backup plan for NBA franchises, which isn’t a fate his game deserves. But he’s only 26 years old, if you can believe that, so there is still time for him to find the right home. Maybe it happens on Thursday.

    Another frequent trade piece, Sweet Lou Williams, could also be available, as is tradition. Williams’ contract is exceptionally team-friendly, and he remains an outstanding bench player, even in his 14th pro season. Finding a trade partner may prove difficult, since any team which could realistically consider Lou-Will to be the missing piece probably would not be able to offer a pick LA would find desirable enough to part with Williams’ combination of production and value. His contract will still be outstanding next year (and if we’re being honest, even the year after, when it becomes unguaranteed), so there’s no hurry if the Clips can’t find a deal that blows up their skirt. On balance, I would expect Williams to stay put for the time being, but if there’s one thing the NBA trade deadline has taught us over the years, it’s to expect the unexpected. Get your popcorn ready.

    Top Photo Credit: NBC Sports

  • The NBA’s Best Team is Hiding in Plain Sight

    As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

    Sometimes the truth can be right in front of you, but you have to want to see it. In the first round of the 2018 East Playoffs, the 44-38 Milwaukee Bucks, a 7-seed, went the distance before falling in Game 7 to the no. 1 defense in the league, the 55-27, 2nd-seeded Boston Celtics. Those same Celtics would go on to lay a righteous beatdown on the upstart Sixers in the second round, then push the Cavaliers to the brink in the East Finals before LeBron flipped the doom switch on them to advance to his eighth consecutive NBA Finals. Boston returned two of their stars from injury this season and looked to be the odds-on favorite to come out of the East following LeBron’s exodus to LA. Yet they’ve struggled relative to expectations, continually battling to find the correct roles and responsibilities for all of their talented players.

    But let’s get back to Milwaukee. After the first round defeat, it would have been easy to view their glass as half empty and look at them as just another minor speed bump to be cleared in the weak East. They fired Hall of Fame player/disappointing head coach Jason Kidd midseason last year, replacing him with the equally heinous Joe Prunty on an interim basis. The front office raised the stakes by trading for disgruntled Phoenix point guard Eric Bledsoe in November of 2017, only to see him get sonned by Boston backup-turned-starter Terry Rozier in that first round series. Sure, they had their young franchise cornerstone in Giannis Antetokounmpo, but with no head coach, a middling win total, an inexperienced GM, and a roster with a lot of cap space tied up in underperforming assets, there were plenty of reasons to think the Bucks were headed for the dreaded treadmill of mediocrity, at best.

    This justifiable skepticism ignores how close that ill-fitting, poorly-coached team was to toppling the Celtics, a series win which would have completely flipped the narrative. And then, a funny thing happened, if you were paying attention: the Bucks nailed the offseason. Getting any head coach who did not actively cost the team wins would qualify as an upgrade over the disastrous Kidd/Prunty combo, but it cannot be overstated how vast the gulf is between those jokers and new head coach Mike Budenholzer. Coach Bud installed coherent systems on both ends of the floor to better utilize the immense talent and versatility of Giannis, enabling him to become one of the most dominant interior forces the league has seen in the last two decades. Budenholzer figured out how to mask some of Bledsoe’s weaknesses and maximize his strengths, leading to a strong bounce-back campaign and a genuinely surprising amount of recent All-Star buzz.

    Going from the worst coaching situation in the league by a country mile to a Coach of the Year candidate was worth a bunch of wins on its own, but they weren’t done. The front office did its part with regards to the roster as well. Realizing the need to continue to surround Giannis with shooting to give his game room to breathe, GM Jon Horst brought in veteran stretch bigs Brook Lopez and Ersan Ilyasova at relative discounts to pair with incumbent sharpshooters Khris Middleton, Malcolm Brogdon, and Tony Snell. He also found diamonds in the rough in the 2017 Draft, snagging big man D.J. Wilson and wing Sterling Brown with non-premium picks. Neither player was a factor in his rookie year, but both have turned into valuable floor spacers and role players who continue to see their minutes climb as this season wears on. The jury is still out on this year’s first round pick, NCAA Championship Game hero Donte DiVincenzo, but his ideal form certainly fits the mold as yet another floor spacer and athletic secondary playmaker to put around Giannis.

    What has transpired this season could only have been foretold by the most prescient, forward-thinking analysts. Vegas pegged Milwaukee for around 48 wins in the preseason, a number which now seems comically low given their 34-12 record. By winning percentage and almost any statistical measure, the Bucks are the best team in the NBA this season. [If we’re defining “best” as “most unbeatable when they bring their ‘A’ game” or “most difficult to eliminate in a seven-game series,” then of course the answer is still Golden State until further notice, but let’s not get off-track.] Milwaukee is currently on a 60+ win pace, and their point differential (a neat +10.0, tops in the league) suggests they’ve actually been a bit unlucky. They are 5th in Offensive Rating, 1st in Defensive Rating, 5th in Pace, 2nd in 3PA rate, 5th in Assists per game, 2nd in Effective Field Goal Percentage, 1st in Effective FG% Allowed, 1st in Defensive Rebounding Rate, and 1st in opponents’ Free Throw Rate. They score efficiently, move the ball, force tough shots without fouling, clean the glass, and win their average game by double digits. But yeah, other than that they pretty much suck.

    The Bucks are this year’s version of the ’17-’18 Rockets in a variety of ways. In both cases, the offensive philosophy has been to push the three-point revolution to its logical conclusion in support of a unique, transcendent superstar, in the process creating an offensive attack visually unlike anything we’ve heretofore seen. As with Houston, the evolution of the offense has overshadowed what may be the biggest reason for the jump in wins: huge gains in defensive efficiency. Kidd’s hyper-aggressive, blitzing scheme inadvertently gifted opponents with oodles of open threes, and the Bucks struggled to the 19th-rated defense last year as a result. This season, they’ve ridden a more conventional scheme, additional continuity (including Bledsoe re-discovering the point-of-attack bulldog form he displayed in his pre-Phoenix days), and the dominant rim protection of both Giannis and Brook Lopez (!!) to the league’s top defense. And with more than half of the season in the books, there is nothing fluky about what’s going on; this team is for real, on both ends.


    Morry Gash/AP Photo

    Naturally it all starts with Giannis, who remains the MVP front-runner despite James Harden’s recent assault on the record books. Somehow just 24 years old, The Greek Freak is producing at an unfathomable level for any player, let alone a guy still years away from his peak. As Harden’s statistical output has continued to crescendo, Giannis has chugged along consistently, putting up numbers each month roughly in line with his season averages of 26.5/ 12.6/ 5.9 on 58% shooting in only 33.1 minutes a night, the lowest amount of court time he’s logged since his second year in the league. [If Coach Bud decides to play him 40+ a game when the playoffs roll around, we may be in for some bonkers stat lines.]

    As I predicted, Giannis has played more minutes at center this year. B-R estimates 23% of his minutes have come at the 5, easily a career high, but also misleading. Lopez is the nominal center when he’s on the court, but this distinction only applies defensively. On the offensive end, Brook is essentially a 7’1″ shooting guard who does most of his damage from long range, while Giannis acts as a point center, initiating the offense from every level of the floor. I give Jason Kidd a lot of crap in this space for his lousy coaching, but I will afford him one back-handed compliment. Kidd caused a brief stir a couple seasons ago when he declared Giannis would be the team’s point guard going forward. He actually was onto something (make Giannis the hub of the offense and put the ball in his hands) but he botched how to build a lineup around it (by going bigger at the other spots rather than smaller). Coach Bud has synthesized the results of the prior experiments into a cohesive rotation, and adding Lopez’s combination of consistent floor spacing and shockingly stout interior defense has made the whole thing hum.

    Khris Middleton has cooled off some after scorching Boston in the aforementioned playoff series and carrying it into the early part of this season. The starters outside of Giannis (Lopez, Brogdon, Middleton, and Bledsoe) all average between 12.1 and 17.3 ppg, and their contributions in rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks display a similarly even distribution. The Bucks could still end up with two or even three All-Stars (particularly in the wake of Victor Oladipo’s devastating knee injury) in the JV Conference, but while Giannis is obviously deserving of his starting spot, any additional berths — whether it be Middleton, Bledsoe, or even Brogdon, whose case is a little stronger than most realize — will amount to individual recognition for team accomplishments. [Paging the 2015 Hawks, who were coached by — you guessed it — Mike Budenholzer!]

    It’s more of the same from the bench unit: solid shooting, ball movement, and defensive versatility at nearly every spot. George Hill is overpaid and has struggled with his shot since coming over from Cleveland in a trade, but his role suits his skill set at this stage of his career, and he continues to provide the same calming offensive presence and long-armed, switchable defense which have always been his calling cards. Ilyasova remains the same player he’s been for the last decade: an efficient stretch-4 (36.6% from deep) with a little more ability to defend and attack closeouts than you think. Tony Snell is still an effective-but-limited 3-and-D wing, but he is beginning to see more of his minutes annexed by Sterling Brown, who mimics most of Snell’s strengths while also showing off added athleticism and off-the-bounce verve. Young big man D.J. Wilson continues to see his role expand as he shows off the breadth of his game. His motor consistently runs hot, he has wingspan for days, a solid feel for the game, and while the sample size is small, it doesn’t hurt he’s currently shooting 46.3% from deep. Injuries wiped out his rookie season, but there’s a real player here, and one who may render the disappointing Thon Maker expendable in the long run if the former YouTube star’s game doesn’t take a massive leap forward in the near-term.

    The recipe for a contender is in place: MVP-level superstar, elite coach, size, shooting, stingy defense, an ahead-of-the-curve offense, and a deep, talented bench. The formula is being borne out in the results, yet fans and media still seem to not be taking this team seriously as a threat. Since this group’s success is relatively new, the usual tropes about “learning how to win” and “paying their dues” and “not skipping steps” will all come into play, much the same way they already are for their upstart doppelganger in the West, the Denver Nuggets, who incidentally feature the same “foreign MVP-caliber point center/underrated coach/deep-but-unspectacular supporting cast/funky offense/improved defense” formula.

    The difference is, with LeBron gone, Boston struggling to jell, the Raptors showing some chinks in the armor, Philly still figuring out who their alpha is, and Indy losing Oladipo, the East is wide open. This is the type of goofy season ripe for a team like Milwaukee to come out of nowhere and make the Finals. Sure, the (now) Five-Headed Death Hydra of Golden State will probably be waiting there, and the Bucks have some difficult roster-building decisions to make this summer (when Bledsoe and Middleton both likely become free agents), but let’s cross those bridges when we come to them. For the time being, let’s enjoy the new star in the NBA firmament. “Fear the Deer” is no longer just a silly marketing slogan. It is now a directive the other 29 teams ignore at their peril.

    Top Photo Credit: USA Today Sports

  • NBA Midseason Awards

    With the regular season officially passing the halfway mark, it’s time for a roundup of my completely imaginary, utterly non-binding ballot for the NBA’s major awards. Let’s get to it:

    ALL-NBA TEAMS

    First Team:

    C: Joel Embiid

    F: Giannis Antetokounmpo

    F: Kawhi Leonard

    G: James Harden

    G: Stephen Curry

    Second Team:

    C: Anthony Davis

    F: LeBron James

    F: Kevin Durant

    G: Damian Lillard

    G: Kyrie Irving

    Third Team:

    C: Nikola Jokic

    F: Paul George

    F: Blake Griffin

    G: Kemba Walker

    G: DeMar DeRozan

    Before you begin throwing things at your screen and harassing me on the internet, please understand one thing: picking these teams is BRUTAL. The overall talent level of the league is so high, the margins between guys are so thin, and the criteria for selection are so nebulous. Harden and Giannis should undoubtedly be first team, but beyond that, I could be convinced of almost anything else, especially on the third team.

    For all the “death of the big man” talk which has gone around over the last few years, choosing only three centers is incredibly difficult. I can’t find my way to leaving off two dudes putting up prime Shaq numbers (Embiid and Davis, a coin flip for first vs. second team) or the best player on the best team in the West (Jokic), and thus deserving guys like Rudy Gobert, Nikola Vucevic, Marc Gasol, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Clint Capela all get squeezed out.

    Beyond Giannis, the forward spots are more or less interchangeable. Kahwi, LeBron, KD, and PG all have a strong case for making the top unit. If you wanted to leave Blake off and move DeRozan to his spot, thus opening up another guard spot for someone like Kyle Lowry, Victor Oladipo, Ben Simmons, or Russell Westbrook, I wouldn’t take issue with it either. Just more evidence of how many legit candidates there are for these spots. We can have all these different arguments without even mentioning guys who will get All-Star consideration such as Mike Conley, Khris Middleton, Jimmy Butler, Bradley Beal, Klay Thompson, Steven Adams, Jusuf Nurkic, Tobias Harris, Danilo Gallinari, LaMarcus Aldridge, Luka Doncic (hold that thought), and Devin Booker. The Association is freaking STACKED with stars right now.

    I feel a little better about the guards. Curry has missed a bunch of games, but he’s been unbelievable when he’s played, combined with no one else who has quite approached his per-game production while also being more durable, so Steph gets the nod. If we didn’t have to build these teams with some semblance of positional designations in mind, the makeup of the individual teams would look quite different, but I’m fairly confident I have something like the correct fifteen guys. Let’s move on before I reconsider.

    SIXTH MAN OF THE YEAR

    Winner: Domantas Sabonis, Indiana Pacers

    Honorable Mention: Montrezl Harrell, Derrick Rose, Spencer Dinwiddie

    Yeah, I know, it appears I’ve already changed my mind from just a few weeks ago, but hear me out. My previous pick, Julius Randle, has now started more games than he’s come off the bench, and with a trade of either him or fellow PF Nikola Mirotic looking increasingly likely prior to the trade deadline, I see little chance he’ll remain eligible for the award at season’s end.

    In any case, Sabonis is a more-than-deserving winner, for all the reasons I discussed back in December. His per-36 numbers remain monstrous (21.4/ 13.7/ 4.2) with a righteous 62.2 FG% and terrific defense, giving him a solid case for both this award and Most Improved Player. Since there are more players I want to discuss, he’ll have to settle for 6MOY on my fake ballot.

    Photo by Layne Murdoch Jr./NBAE via Getty Images

    MOST IMPROVED PLAYER

    Winner: Pascal Siakam, Toronto Raptors

    Honorable Mention: De’Aaron Fox, Nikola Vucevic, Domantas Sabonis, Justise Winslow

    Speaking of, this is perhaps the most difficult award because the criteria voters choose to weigh when considering the idea of “most improved” are rather subjective and context-dependent. Sometimes, the winner ends up being a second-year player who outstrips his expected developmental trajectory and combines it with additional minutes and usage, giving the statistical appearance of a massive leap in production. The question is whether we should reward this type of improvement with the award, or basically just say, “Good job becoming what you’re supposed to become. Keep it up.” In this case, I’m  referring to De’Aaron Fox, who in the absolute sense, is the “most improved” player in the NBA. I am bullish on his future, but how do we properly triangulate his “improvement” relative to how poor his rookie season was and how high our expectations are for such a highly-pedigreed player? Good things are coming his way, no doubt, but I personally don’t see him as the type of player “meant” to receive this award, whatever that means.

    The other archetype for the award is the solid veteran who unexpectedly goes from “good” to “great” in a given season, with Vucevic being our avatar this year. Vooch has improved in a real sense, averaging career highs in points, rebounds, assists, and usage, while stretching his game out to the 3-point line (38% from deep on 3.1 attempts per game) in accordance with modern NBA big man orthodoxy. If Orlando’s front office is smart — an ‘if’ so big you can see it from space — Vucevic should get traded before the deadline in a few weeks, but that is more a testament to his contractual situation and Orlando’s continued inability to field a competitive team than his play. He’s been fantastic and should absolutely be a first-time All-Star, but he’s also been an under-the-radar excellent player throughout much of his career, which unfortunately hurts him a bit when it comes to this award.

    I’ll split the difference and give it to Siakam, who has been a revelation for the East-leading Raptors. Now in his third season, Siakam came into the league as something of an oddity, starting 38 games his rookie year for a 51-win Raptors team after being drafted 27th overall out of New Mexico State in 2016. I remember watching some of their games that year and thinking, “Wait, who is this guy, and why on Earth is he starting?” Then he would show flashes of the player he would become, and I realized the answer to my question was because he was freaking everywhere on the court. He was an unrefined mess at that point (hence why he got drafted 27th), but it was easy enough to see the building blocks of a really useful player.

    Fast-forward two years, and we are seeing that player emerge on a consistent basis. Siakam has gone from a guy who just runs around like his hair is on fire to a guy who runs around like his hair is on fire but with skill and purpose. It’s weird and a little unfair to compare anyone to Draymond Green, but Siakam functions as something like Toronto’s analogue to 2015 Dray: an immensely mobile big who is a beast in transition, scores around the hoop, makes the right decisions, seems to get every loose ball, and hits just enough shots from the outside to command attention. He is sturdier than he looks but also has quick feet, making him tremendously versatile on defense. He never gets a play run for him, but much like Sabonis, is always around the ball and influencing the action in a positive way.

    Siakam has become an integral part of Toronto’s core, averaging 30.9 minutes a night (third on the team), producing 15.2 ppg/ 6.9 rpg/ 2.8 apg on 57/33/78 shooting, and filling in every crack for a team on a 60-win pace. From a guy no one had heard of (and 26 teams didn’t want) two years ago to the third-best player on a potential Finals team? Now that is some improvement I can get behind.

    COACH OF THE YEAR

    Winner: Mike Malone, Denver Nuggets

    Honorable Mention: Dave Joerger, Mike Budenholzer, Doc Rivers, Gregg Popovich

    I don’t particularly like this award because rather than reward the coach who actually “performed” the best, it tends to just go to the coach of whichever team outperformed expectations to the greatest extent. While there is certainly a correlation between the two things, they are not the same, but we  use the latter as a shorthand for the former because it’s much easier to quantify. It’s a team award masquerading as an individual award, and while the coach deserves a fair share of the credit when his team exceeds preseason expectations, it still feels like an oversimplification.

    If we were truly trying to honor the “best” coach, the award would just be renamed after Popovich and handed out to him annually at season’s end. His consistent excellence makes it difficult for any individual coaching job he does to stand out from the others, leading to him often being overlooked by voters in favor of a newer, shinier object. [Obviously, I’m about to be guilty of this as well.] Doc Rivers has done a nice job pivoting from the star-laden Lob City rosters to the more egalitarian style of this year’s deep Clippers team. It’s unclear to what extent, if any, removing his personnel responsibilities has made him more focused and effective as a coach, but he has to get credit for how hard he has this band of misfits and castoffs playing, as well as for going against type by giving rookie Shai Gilgeous-Alexander extended minutes to acclimate to the NBA game.

    Bucks’ head man Mike Budenholzer deserves some shine for the improved defense and hyper-modern, five-out offensive scheme he’s brought to Milwaukee to surround MVP candidate Giannis Antetokounmpo. The question becomes: is Coach Bud really this phenomenal, or does basic competence just appear spectacular vis-a-vis the Kidd/Prunty turd sandwich Bucks’ fans endured last year? I personally think he’s done a terrific job in extrapolating out the modern offensive game to its logical conclusion in support of his generational superstar, and would be perfectly okay with him winning the award. My suspicion, however, is the voting public is still harboring some (perhaps undeserved) skepticism about whether or not the Bucks are for real, which will hurt his case.

    Speaking of basic competence being a vast improvement — ladies and gentlemen, the Sacramento Kings! After slogging his way through the back end of the Grit ‘n’ Grind era in Memphis, Dave Joerger has proven his adaptability by embracing an uptempo, spread-out style more befitting of the young, fast, athletic roster he has in Sacramento. Preaching pace while handing the keys to the offense over to second-year speed demon De’Aaron Fox was a bolder move in preseason than it seems now since we have proof-of-concept. Inserting veteran stretch-4 Nemanja Bjelica into the starting lineup to better space the floor around Fox was an inspired choice, particularly since there may have been organizational pressure to hand a larger role to no. 2 overall pick Marvin Bagley III right out of the gate. Improvements from Fox and backcourt mate Buddy Hield were likely to lift the Kings out of the West basement in any case, but credit to Joerger for persisting through organizational dysfunction and pushing the right buttons.

    With that said, the award has to go to Denver’s Mike Malone. After barely missing out on the postseason last year, most folks around the league predicted the Nuggets would be a playoff outfit this season, but I doubt anyone saw them as a threat to secure homecourt in the West, where they had resided for much of the year prior to absorbing a beat-down at the hands of the possibly-switch-flipping Warriors on Tuesday night. Malone clearly has the benefit of a deep, talented team, but many of the core pieces are young and unproven, and the team’s depth has been repeatedly tested by a litany of early-season injuries. Denver’s perennially sieve-like defense has turned stout (10th in Defensive Rating), even with defensive anchor Paul Millsap missing eight games. Malone has found lineup combinations that work amid the injuries, cobbling together an elite bench unit featuring unheralded players Monte Morris, Juancho Hernangomez, Torrey Craig, and Malik Beasley.

    And the transformation of Nikola Jokic from chubby, cola-swilling second round pick to bona fide NBA superstar continues unabated. Malone and his staff have consistently pushed Jokic to be more aggressive and lead by example, despite his reticence to do so. Being a basketball genius helps, but it also helps to have the confidence of his coaches when he tries sorcerer-level shit like this:

    At 29-14 in the brutal West, no one has exceeded expectations quite like the Nuggets, so Malone could win on the usual dumb criteria alone. But the way he has mixed and matched lineups, built an effective defense around a ground-bound, lumbering center, and lifted up his young talent suggests a coach who has done a lot more than just benefit from an overachieving roster.

    DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR

    Winner: Paul George, Oklahoma City Thunder

    Honorable Mention: Rudy Gobert, Joel Embiid, Myles Turner

    Big men tend to get the benefit of the doubt in DPOY voting, and with good reason. Even with the migration of the game to the perimeter, there generally remains no more impactful defender than the disruptive back-line menace. Reigning DPOY Gobert, as well as Embiid and Turner, all fit the bill as  defensive anchors who captain high-end outfits and turn the paint into a no-fly zone, but this award simply has to go to George.

    When the Zombie Sonics lost ace defensive wing Andre Roberson to a knee injury prior to the season, there was speculation PG might not be able to handle the heavy burden of being both a top offensive option (alongside Russell Westbrook) and a primary wing defender. The speculation could not have been more wrong. George has been an absolute killer on both ends this season, averaging career-highs in scoring and rebounding while locking down the perimeter for the team which has spent most of the year with the league’s top-rated defense. [Note: they dropped to 3rd in D-Rating after giving up a baffling 142 points to Atlanta at home last night. It was a strange night in the Association overall.] He averages 2.3 steals per game (2nd in the league behind Westbrook, who has his own case for the award), sports a 102 individual Defensive Rating (elite for a primary wing defender in today’s league), and NBA.com’s “Hustle Stats” page might as well have a sub-heading which reads “Or, here’s why Paul George is so freaking good.”

    From an “eye test” standpoint, he seems to get his hands on the ball all the time, an assessment with which, again, the stats shake hands. He has reached the rarefied defensive air Kawhi achieved back in 2015, where he appears to be “mirroring” the movements of his matchup, essentially neutralizing every move as it’s happening. His size and quickness allow him to switch comfortably across almost any matchup, a trait he shares with ascending teammate Jerami Grant. And yes, PG certainly benefits from having another defensive skeleton key out there like Grant, along with a resurgent Westbrook and a back-line stopper in my beloved Dothraki son Steven Adams. But his defensive dominance goes beyond what stats can capture (which is still a lot, even in our current data-driven world), and if any perimeter player is going to be rewarded, it should be George.

    USA TODAY Sports

    ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

    Winner: Luka Doncic, Dallas Mavericks

    Honorable Mention: DeAndre Ayton, Jaren Jackson, Jr.

    The easiest call on the board. Jackson looks like a can’t-miss star, and Ayton will be the next Patrick Ewing if he can ever get his motor to rev above second gear, but with all due respect, this is a rout. Doncic is already the lead creator for a team hanging around playoff contention, he’s a bona fide crunch-time assassin, and his per-game averages (20.2/ 6.7/ 5.0) for a rookie have been matched or exceeded in NBA history by Oscar Robertson, and…that’s it.

    I could talk about Luka all day, but you get the point. We may be witnessing the genesis of an all-time great, so let’s just enjoy it before everyone finds some dumb reason to turn on him.

    MOST VALUABLE PLAYER

    Winner: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Milwaukee Bucks

    Honorable Mention: James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, LeBron James, Nikola Jokic, Paul George, Stephen Curry, Joel Embiid

    There are a number of guys with a tremendously strong case for the top award this year. As I said, the league is in a REALLY good place right now. Even so, it’s effectively a two-man race between The Greek Freak and The Beard, and I’m sticking with my preseason pick, despite the historic offensive barrage Harden has put on of late. From a statistical standpoint, there’s no way to deny what Harden is doing right now is on another freaking planet. His narrative is also strong (dude putting up unprecedented numbers to single-handedly will his team to the playoffs), but he suffers from having already won last year, as well as the way his style turns some voters off.

    Giannis, on the other hand, continues to enjoy unanimous approval throughout the league and remains firmly entrenched in his superstar honeymoon, while also putting up some eye-popping stats of his own: 26.4 ppg/ 12.6 rpg/ 6.1 apg/ 1.4 spg/ 1.5 bpg on 57.8% shooting. He dunks more frequently than apex Shaq, and he is dominant defensively (leading the league in individual D-Rating, Defensive Win Shares, and Defensive Box Plus/Minus, with Milwaukee as a team currently 1st in Defensive Rating). He is the stylistic inverse of Harden, but if he ever develops something resembling a consistent outside stroke, we’re going to start having the “nobody’s ever done anything remotely like this” conversations about him as well. [As an aside, I am slightly concerned he may never become a plus shooter from the perimeter. His appendages might just be too long to develop a truly consistent release. I hope I’m wrong, but it would be ironic if the physical characteristics which make his ceiling so ridiculously high in the first place are the same ones preventing him from actually reaching it.]

    The deciding factor in the race is going to be team success. As I wrote about in my preseason column, Russell Westbrook (and the resulting buyer’s remorse) aside, the bar for championship contention and MVP contention tend to go hand-in-hand. So in all likelihood, an MVP candidate needs to rack up 54-55 wins to get over the top. Houston is on a 48-win pace, and would have to win 30 of its remaining 39 games to crack 55 wins. Not impossible, given what they’ve accomplished of late, but they will now be without star center Clint Capela for the next 4-6 weeks due to a thumb injury (in addition to the continued absence of Chris Paul). If Harden can keep the team humming without Capela and position the Rockets for some kind of homecourt in the playoffs, then I’ll have to tip my cap and congratulate him on his second consecutive trophy. I hope he sounds like less of a drunken weirdo when he accepts the award this time.

    Milwaukee, by contrast, is 31-12, on pace for 59 wins. They face an easier schedule overall (due to the imbalanced schedule and the weakness of the bottom of the Eastern Conference), and their depth, style, and underlying stats all make 59 feel like an eminently reasonable goal. A 24-15 close to the season would get them to the magical 55-win threshold, even as it would represent a disappointment based on how they’ve played up to this point. “Best player, best team” is an overly simple heuristic for MVP voting, but it drives a lot of real world behavior, and Giannis has a much clearer path to the distinction than does Harden.

    Fair or not, each team’s success this year will also be judged relative to its performance last year. Houston is likely to drop 10+ wins from ’17-’18, while Milwaukee is likely to gain at least as many. Of course these changes in team success are largely driven by factors outside of the performance of their respective signature stars, but c’est la vie. I believed it before the season, and I believe it at the midway point — The Greek Freak takes home the hardware.

    Top Photo Credit: Getty Images

  • NBA at the Half: New Year, New West

    They say the NBA season “unofficially” starts on Christmas Day, but the truth is, even if we are only a couple weeks past the casual fan’s re-introduction to the league, the regular season is almost half over already. Now that we’re firmly into 2019, it seems like as good a time as any for a bit of a reset.

    In case you’ve been tuned out since Christmas (or before, tsk tsk), here’s a primer on where things stand in the ever-shifting sands of the Western Conference, starting with a team (and a player) you may have heard something about:

    James Harden and the Rockets are soaring to new heights. Along with every other NBA writer on Planet Earth, I covered Harden pretty extensively last week. He hasn’t slowed down much since, and while the Rockets finally dropped a couple games (at Portland on Saturday and home against Milwaukee on Wednesday in the battle of MVP candidates), they are still 12-3 in their last 15 games and sit at 6th in the West at 23-17. In the process, Houston has completely rewritten the narrative on its season from “wow, they suck compared to last year” to “wait, are they just as good as last year?” and simultaneously positioned itself within one more hot streak of Denver, Golden State, and OKC, the triumvirate of front-runners in the Conference.

    While Harden’s virtuoso act has obviously been the main story, things have quietly coalesced during this recent run for the rest of the roster as well. They are all the way back up to 3rd in Offensive Rating, despite being without guards Chris Paul and Eric Gordon for the last handful of games. Newly-acquired Austin Rivers has been a nice fit — a combination of words I’m fairly certain has never been written before — and 36-year-old Nene has looked a bit rejuvenated since returning from whatever injury it was this time. Two-way contract player Danuel House has given them good minutes as a thick-bodied wing who can hit open shots while leading the league in times the opposing team’s play-by-play guy uses the “surprised Marv Alberts” inflection when announcing his name following a good play.

    After coming into the league as a tall, wiry guy who got pushed around a lot, at age 24, Clint Capela has developed into what — and pardon the technical jargon here — we in the industry refer to as a “grown-ass man.” His rate stats and advanced metrics look pretty similar to last season’s breakout campaign, but his minutes and corresponding counting stats are all career highs, and he has arguably become the team’s second-most important player, even when CP3 is healthy. He is in the top-tier of “true centers” in the league today (read: screener/roller/dunker/defender/rebounder-types) and is certainly deserving of All-Star consideration, though he’ll likely get squeezed out again because of the ridiculously crowded field of frontcourt talent in the West. Nevertheless, Capela has been a huge part of the team’s turnaround in the second quarter of the season, and the 5-year/$90 million contract he signed this summer is starting to look like it will be a bargain as he moves through the prime of his career and the salary cap presumably continues to rise.

    There are still hurdles for this squad to clear, even before a potential playoff rematch with the Warriors. Eric Gordon has been downright lousy. Chris Paul needs to prove he can stay healthy once he returns, and it will be interesting to see if he can both coexist with and cede minutes to his former mortal enemy Rivers. Relying as much as they do on role players James Ennis, Gerald Green, and Gary Clark on the wing is far from an ideal scenario. The preseason trade with Phoenix has been a total bust, as rookie De’Anthony Melton has shown some signs in a limited role with the Suns, while Marquese Chriss continues to DNP-CD his way out of the league. It has become increasingly obvious Brandon Knight’s career effectively ended the moment DeAndre Jordan dunked his soul out of his body a few years back, even if we don’t want to admit it. [Two things: first, what has happened to poor Brandon bolsters the argument for the “Sliding Doors” theory of NBA careers, which I’ll need to do a separate column about, to an incredible degree; and second, if you don’t think I’m mentioning this purely so I can drop the video of the dunk square in the middle of this column, then you don’t know me well enough yet.]

    Unlike Brandon, it appears everyone left the Rockets for dead a bit prematurely, and despite the limitations of the roster, if Harden and Capela can keep performing at this level, it won’t be surprising to see Houston lock up some form of home court in the playoffs.

    USA TODAY Sports


    San Antonio’s funeral will take place at half-past never.     First, a mea culpa: the Spurs rooked me, just like they eventually do to every writer/pundit/take-smith out there. After ascending point guard/defensive octopus Dejounte Murray tore his ACL in preseason, I penned a half-hearted Spurs’ obituary, which might as well be a rite of passage in this industry. At first, it looked pretty prescient. San Antonio struggled out of the gate, going 11-14 through December 5th with the exact combination of solid offense and execrable defense I predicted. In late November/early December, they lost four out of five games, with three of the losses coming by 30+ points. Without question, it was the nadir of the Gregg Popovich era in San Antonio.

    And then, something changed. Since a loss to the Lakers on December 5th, the Spurs have been the best team in the league, full stop, going 13-3 while ranking top-2 in both Offensive and Defensive Rating and sporting a gargantuan +15.3 point differential during the stretch. DeMar DeRozan has been terrific (if not quite MVP-caliber in the way his trade counterpart Kawhi Leonard has been for Toronto), and LaMarcus Aldridge is slowly returning to the form he displayed last year as the team’s primary option. The offense remains retrograde as hell (last in the league in 3PA per game), but it’s still not terribly hard to see how they’ve crafted a top-10 unit on that end. What is crazy is how Popovich has cobbled together a workable defense out of these parts, and it’s important we never take for granted just how much better he is at coaching than everyone else.

    Point guard Derrick White has done a solid Murray impersonation since returning from injury, and he looks to be yet another late first round find for San Antonio’s perennially shrewd front office. Bryn Forbes has done an admirable job filling in holes in the backcourt and providing needed spacing (43% from deep on five attempts per game). This year’s first round pick, athletic guard Lonnie Walker IV, is just now working his way back into game shape after a preseason injury, so the team could improve further as he and White get acclimated and solidify their spots in the rotation.

    It has truly been a remarkable turnaround for a team that appeared dead to rights a month ago, but it’s just another day at the office for Pop and the Spurs. Lesson learned.

    The standings remain tight, but the lesser teams are beginning to fall back. I was ready to write the obit for Minnesota after the firing of head coach/basketball czar/bellowing enthusiast Tom Thibodeau, but then the team went and beat OKC on the road, a top-notch win in which Andrew Wiggins looked like the star everyone keeps expecting him to be. The team danced joyfully in the locker room afterwards, as though they had been trapped under “ICE” and were now free. [Thank you, I’ll be here all week.] Perhaps the organizational restructuring will continue to breathe new life into the team, or it will turn out to be little more than a brief sugar high and reality will come crashing back down on them. Karl-Anthony Towns has gone full Beast Mode of late (26.3/ 13.5/ 3.3 and improved defensive focus since the calendar flipped to 2019), but the same questions I brought up in preseason (pre-Butler trade) about the ceiling of a team led by even this version of KAT are still valid. The improved chemistry may buoy their postseason hopes for a time, but in the end this is probably not a playoff outfit.

    After a surprising start, Dallas has dropped 11 of its last 15 contests to fall to 13th in the West at 19-22. The steep descent has done little to quell the much-deserved ballyhoo surrounding Luka Doncic, as the team now has its unquestioned cornerstone for the future. But what do you do about a problem like Dennis Smith, Jr.? He has shown some off-ball juice in his new role alongside Halleluka, but hasn’t quite enjoyed the second-year breakout many fans were expecting. Questions of fit will continue to circle him, and the organization will need to decide sooner rather than later about his future with the team and how to maximize his value.

    Dirk’s last ride through the league has been oddly mesmerizing. Opponents still have to account for the gravity his shooting creates, but he simply has no mobility anymore, and it’s strange watching fans (both of Dallas and the opposition) longing for one more glimpse of the all-time great we have become so accustomed to seeing. It’s always bittersweet watching great players age out, but there is this unusual, hopeful nature to it around Dirk, like he’s so universally beloved around the league that everyone REEEEAAALLY wants him to go out on a high note. It’s unfortunate it probably won’t include one last postseason berth, but fans can take solace knowing the Mavs are in good hands going forward.

    I wrote previously about the resurgence of Memphis, but as I kinda-sorta predicted, Grit ‘n’ Grind 2.0 has encountered some bugs lately, struggling to a 3-11 record in their last 14 games and dropping them into a tie with the aforementioned Mavs at 19-22. There is dissension in the ranks, they’ve lost useful wing Dillon Brooks for the season with a toe injury (should’ve traded him when they had the chance!), and they recently made a deal for lesser Holiday brother Justin in an attempt to bolster their questionable depth. Holiday is a solid player, but he is unlikely to be the cure for what ails them, namely an anemic, stuck-in-mud offense (27th in Offensive Rating, dead last in pace). The Chandler Parsons situation has just become sad.

    On the plus side, rookie Jaren Jackson, Jr. has been everything the Grizz could have hoped for, and looks destined for stardom. But today is not that day. Even if the defense can get it back together — they allowed only 86 points in a win over San Antonio on Wednesday — it’s unlikely there is enough firepower here to hang long-term with the more modern attacks in the West.

    Denver is for real. The upstart Nugs continue to sit atop the West at 27-12, and they could be getting closer to whole again soon. Will Barton, Gary Harris, and Isaiah Thomas should all be back sometime this month, making an already-deep rotation burst at the seams with quality players. The defense slipped a bit while Paul Millsap was out (now 10th in Defensive Rating), but the offense has gotten on track, with Jamal Murray beginning to show the breakout scoring touch we were promised and Nikola Jokic slowly, plumply edging his way into the MVP conversation. The role players have been dynamite, with Mason Plumlee, Juancho Hernangomez, Monte Morris, Torrey Craig, and Malik Beasley all filling their niches perfectly. The minutes distribution and chemistry could be thrown into a state of flux once the above trio returns to the court — along with whatever they might eventually get from first round pick Michael Porter, Jr. — but these are some serious first-world problems.

    Denver hasn’t been tested inside the crucible of the playoffs yet with this group, and they may not be quite the threat to Golden State Charles Barkley seems to think they are, but for now, things are gorgeous in the Sunshine State.

    What on Earth will New Orleans do? The Anthony Davis pre-agency chatter has reached a fever pitch around the league following LeBron’s tampering-adjacent comments and the Pels falling to 12th in the West at 20-22. They’ve won three straight over lackluster competition, and the recent return from injury of both Nikola Mirotic and Elfrid Payton can only help, but GM Dell Demps’ chair has got to be getting a little hot. Short of Davis agreeing to the 5-year/$239 million supermax extension New Orleans can offer him this summer — which he will likely decline, if you can believe that — there is no simple way for Demps to extricate himself and the organization from this situation. They could trade Sixth Man of the Year candidate Julius Randle before the deadline in an attempt to restock their barren wing rotation, but Randle has been really good, and it might not make much difference.

    If Davis declines the extension, it almost certainly means he is intent on bolting for greener (or purpler and golder) pastures, at which point it becomes a race to extract as much trade value for him as possible, which incidentally, would still be a ton. It is an edge-of-your-seat game of front office chicken playing out in front of our eyes. AD has dropped some small bread crumbs (his move to Klutch Sports, which is totally not influenced by LeBron in any way, along with his “legacy over money” comments), and the trade of a star of his caliber (whether to LA or otherwise) would be a cataclysmic event.

    Even in its current form, the team remains elite offensively (2nd in O-Rating) and a train wreck defensively (25th despite having a perennial DPOY candidate in Davis), making them an entertaining oddity ultimately going nowhere. The parts still don’t fit together in a coherent way. Their playoff drubbing of Portland last season feels like long ago indeed, a perfect storm of the right matchup at the right time which clouded our collective judgment about where this franchise was really headed. It’s unclear what the Pelicans will do next, but whatever it is will likely shape the future of basketball in New Orleans and whether or not it continues to exist at all.

    Top Photo Credit: NBAE/Getty Images