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| All of these teams are awful |
IT’S SHAPING up to be one of the most exciting playoff races in years out West in the NBA – at least from the perspective of In Play Lose, of course, where we judge everything on the premise of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” And there is so much bad basketball at the moment out west. Be still my foolish heart.
As you can see from this snapshot of the West standings, a 6½ game crevasse has developed after currently 7th-seeded OKC, with all eight remaining Western clubs having fallen into the abyss. The Blazers are presently on pace to lose 50 games, and they’re currently the best of this lost – and by “best,” I mean “least bad.” And as you can see from the streak column – L1, L3, L5, L3, etc. – it’s not as if anyone is exactly rising to the challenge.
Now, let’s be honest here: being the 8th seed in the NBA playoffs is not going to end well. In the East, you’re going to get beat on by the Cavs, and it will be a swift and ugly exit. But at least in the East, there are a whole bunch of teams for which getting that 8th seed would wind up resembling some progress in the bigger picture. If you’re the Bucks or the Pistons – a couple of young teams still looking to grow – getting that spot and getting out there for four playoff games would be a valuable learning tool. If you’re the Buzzards, who started so badly this year, reviving your season and being #8 at season’s end is something that you can take as a positive. If you’re the Knicks or the Bulls – two storied franchises perpetually awash in tabloidesque media coverage – at least an 8th seed can slightly mollify the fan bases during what appear to be transition years. The fan bases in New York and Chicago are demanding, but they also want to see some progress from last year, and either team making the playoffs, with their strangely constructed short-term rosters, would ultimately constitute as such.
But in the West, meanwhile, everyone is terrible. This group of eight is six kinds of crap, and the Warriors and going to beat into the ground whomever comes out of here. And this, of course, begs the question: who really wants to be the 8th seed? If you’re the 8th seed, you’re out of the lottery, for starters, so that means you’ve got a meh sort of draft pick this coming summer. (If you’ve got a pick at all, I should say. The Kings may finally lose their first round pick to the Bulls this summer as a result of a comically awful trade that happened in 2011.) Clearly, you’re not very good, and being the least bad by season’s end is not really what you want to hang your hat on.
I’m inclined to leave the Dallas Mavericks out of this discussion, a first-rate organization who is just having one of those injury-laden disasters of a season where nothing goes right and you just have to write it off, except that they’re only four games out of a playoff spot at the moment. There is no benefit whatsoever to an older team like Dallas getting the 8th seed, at this point. None whatsoever. You’re better off being lousy and restocking with better draft picks. But apparently Dallas just can’t get bad enough, because as terrible as their season as been, the rest of the pack in the West just keeps coming back to them.
You can probably also write off the Lakers here, since after a bright start, the injuries set in and the realities of such a young and inexperienced team caught up with them. Young teams in the NBA tend to get really jacked up and frisky for games against the big guns in the league. As such, they win a few here and there – particularly because the big guns don’t view them as a long-term threat and, as such, they don’t give a shit about a one-off result. But it’s the teams in the middle of the pack, teams that need to take it seriously, that absolutely kill teams like the Lakers – and the NBA is full of games against teams in the middle of the pack, usually in quick succession and often on long road trips which start out bad and end up worse. So the Lakers have sunk and are now about where we thought they’d be – a fun kind of bad team that’s focusing on the long-term process and looking to win in the 25-30 range – but again, everyone else around them in the West has been so awful that the Lakers are still sniffing around the playoffs. They might at least win a game against the Dubs in the playoffs, simply because all it seems to take to stop Steph Curry from making shots is to lay down the Lakers floor inside the Staples Center, but they’d also be likely to give up about 150 in one of the games, since the defense is awful.
If there’s a common thread among most of these teams trapped in the muck at the bottom of the Western Conference trash heap, it’s that the defenses are dreadful. The Lakers are 29th in the NBA in defensive rating. The Blazers are 30th. We’ve already been over how Minnesota’s best players can’t guard anyone. Denver’s games have turned into track meets here of late, as their defensive-oriented yet entirely pragmatic head coach Mike Malone has come to realize that his team can’t stop anybody, and so he’s better off trying to win games entirely with offense. This ploy has always been a good idea in Denver, actually, given the not insignificant advantage of hosting one-off games against road-weary teams at a mile high altitude. But you have to offer up at least some resistance. NBA guys can run all day, and will enthusiastically fill layup lines if given the opportunity. A recent possible 1-8 playoff preview proves instructive here – the Nuggets put up 119 on the Dubs and made some pretty nifty plays, but at no point in this game were the Dubs ever even remotely threatened. They could score pretty much any time they wanted to. Oh look! Dunks! Layups! Whee!
The two franchises I think would want this spot the most – the Kings and the Pelicans – do so entirely for financial reasons, as they want to get a couple of playoff home games’ worth of revenue out of the deal. The Kings want the spot the most and probably need the spot the least. In another preview of a possible 1-8 playoff matchup last night, Golden State put in about 15 minutes of effort and it was enough to beat the Kings by double digits on the Kings home floor. Oh, the Kings got off to a good start, but then Boogie decided to pick a fight with the furniture and get himself T’d up, and the Warriors, of course, being the savvy bunch that they are, know very well that when Boogie throws a tantrum like that he is never, ever going to get another call from the zeebs, so Zaza just pushed him around the rest of the game while KD would try to slide over and swat every one of Boogie’s shots into the Sierra foothills, and Boogie of course didn’t get any calls and got frustrated and the Kings lost all focus, at which point the Dubs just ran away from them in predictable fashion.
The Kings roster is horrible, littered with useless bigs and laden with wasted high draft picks of yore (former Top 10 picks Willie Cauley-Stein and Ben McLemore were both DNP-CD against the Dubs on Sunday night), and as we just mentioned, they’re likely going to lose that first round pick to the Bulls. But the Kings are desperate to be seen as being relevant again, and also desperate to make some of the revenue they gave away when their cockamamie ownership group made the deal with the devil that is David Stern in order to buy the franchise. And this desire to feast on the crumbs of relevance, of course, will likely prevent the Kings from doing what they should do, which is to try to restart the franchise through trading Boogie and Rudy Gay, both of whom want out already.
The Pelicans, meanwhile, started 0-and-forever but have been about a .500 team since Jrue Holiday came back – which shows just how good Anthony Davis really is, because Holiday’s addition brought the number of actual useful NBA players on this roster up to two, and it’s amazing what two guys can do when one of them knows what they’re doing and the other is Anthony Davis. And I can see the Pelicans trying to make a move here before the trade deadline, because what have you got to lose? The franchise is moribund, Milk Shake Arena is less lively than a New Orleans cemetery, you’ve got a lot of sunk cost in perpetually injured players live Tyreke Evans and Quincy Pondexter, you’ve got more holes in this roster than Swiss cheese, but just getting a third guy out there on the floor who knows what the hell they’re doing might be good enough to get you the 8th seed, get some extra playoff cash and build some positivity going forward.
And, of course, the reason this all is even an issue is the fact that Portland have been terrible. Portland were a 5th seed in the playoffs last year, and played five wildly entertaining playoff games against the Warriors during the second round of the playoffs. It seems somewhat surprising that the Blazers are suddenly this bad, but it probably shouldn’t be, because no one thought the Blazers would be that good a year ago. I mean, if you looked at the Blazers at the start of last year, they didn’t make much sense. The front court is so-so, the center position is a mystery, the defense is bad, and somehow this team is going to win 44 games by having two smallish guards shooting lights out from deep? Yeah, OK, good luck with that – but then they went and did just that, which was pretty awesome to watch. Well, OK, so now we move forward a season, and Dame and C.J. are still great shooters in the backcourt, but the front court is still so-so, the center position is no longer a mystery – instead, it’s just not very good – and the defense is still bad. Regression to the mean is a bitch.
And the Blazers compounded the disaster in the offseason by doling out awful free agent contracts. They signed Evan Turner for too much, who they don’t need and who has been terrible. They then felt forced to match the gaudy offer sheet the Nets threw at third guard Allen Crabbe, who was a restricted free agent. Restricted free agency is one of the great troll jobs in all of sports. If you have money to burn, you throw a whole bunch of it at a guy you think another team can’t afford to lose, and put the onus on them to match and suck up the costs. The Blazers did this very thing a few years ago when they made a huge offer to Enis Kanter, which OKC then had to swallow and match, which is how the normally market-savvy Zombies wound up with a $73m backup center who cannot guard anyone. So the Blazers went and matched the offer sheet to third guard Crabbe, apparently suffering from an immediate buyer’s remorse at signing potential third guard Turner, and then tried to solve their defensive issues by signing Festus Ezeli from the Warriors – who didn’t want him anyway, because he has bad knees, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, Ezeli is now out for the year with knee issues that, unfortunately, may never fully heal. What doesn’t make sense about any of this is that none of these guys, ultimately, make the Blazers that much better. They’ve now capped themselves out and still have the same sorts of issues they had before, having simply papered over the cracks a season ago but not solved any of the problems. In terms of actual difference-making talent, the Blazers seem to have more of it than any of these other teams, and you would think Portland might figure it out and separate from these others, but they cannot get on any kind of a winning run because the defense is so bad that they lose too many games they should win.
Now, bad playoff teams are nothing new in sports, of course. We’ve had two cases, in recent years, of sub-.500 teams winning their division in the NFL and hosting playoff games – and then winning those games, in fact, with one of those games being memorable and the other being probably the worst playoff game in NFL history (see the third buzzard point). The L.A. Kings were a sub-.500 team during the regular season when they first won the Stanley Cup. The indignity of the work stoppage which wiped out the 1994 World Series spared baseball from another indignity, which was that the AL West was so bad that year that the Rangers were leading the division despite being 10 games under .500. And in the NBA, most historians recall MJ going off for 63 against the Celtics in 1986, but most people forget that the Bulls were 30-52 that year. Everything is cyclical in sports, and sometimes this is how the leagues stratify. There’s good and bad. Sometimes, there’s good and really bad with not much in between.
And 8th seeds have won playoff series in the NBA, of course (sigh but also yay), but generally those teams have been decent and simply wound up #8 because of the quality above them. This does not apply to the state of this year’s West. These teams are absolutely awful. It’s comedy gold. The only thing successful here is me getting through this entire blog post without talking about the Phoenix Suns. The less said about the Suns, the better.
