 |
| Who hasn’t wanted to do this at the office? |
I mention this on the eve of another NBA season because the fact of the matter is that for 29 teams in the NBA – most likely everyone who isn’t the Golden State Warriors, although that is by no means a certainty – the season is going to prove to be unsuccessful. And that’s okay, really. It’s okay and it’s essential. You need winners and losers. Losing is essential. But even more importantly, you need a variety of losers. Because the fact of the matter is that while all 30 teams in the NBA would love to win the title, it isn’t realistic to expact that to be happening. Every team in a professional league has a ceiling, they have a level that they could realistically hope to attain and, in the big picture, reaching that level actually constitutes success.
I mentioned this idea this past summer while talking about the World Cup: if, in 2016, I’d said that two years hence, the Croatians would finish 2nd in the World Cup, the Belgians would finish 3rd and the English 4th, both players and fans from those nations would say that, in the bigger picture, that’s a pretty good outcome. But in the moment, of course, in the here and the now of 2018, finishing third for the Belgians means, “god damn it, why are Fellaini and Chaddli still in this game and why can’t we break down the fucking French defense?” For the Croatians, it’s “jesus christ, we’re dominating this final and we should be beating this goddamn team.” The loss, in the immediate, feels painful and agonizing and frustrating. The immediate result runs contrary to the process. Finishing second or third is terrific, but finishing second or third also means that, at a critical moment, you failed.
I mention soccer even though this is an NBA blog, since there are an incredible number of similarities between the two – not the least of which being that players in each have come to have something of a mutual admiration society for each other. Both sports are star-driven, games in which the players have incredible agency over their careers. In both sports, players have taken agency over their careers to a much greater extent and come to realize their full stardom and earning potentials. With stardom potential, of course, comes petty drama and paparazzi – both sports are full of gossip, full of glamour, full of hangers-on and shady characters on the fringe.
And both games are great, even if the end product can come to feel like a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t matter, ultimately, that one team is a prohibitive favorite in the NBA, just as it doesn’t matter that Bayern or Barca or Juve or Man City is a prohibitive favorite in some European soccer league. As a whole, the NBA is better than it’s ever been. The players are more skilled, better drilled, and in better condition than they have ever been. They are also more “woke,” more aware, and more connected to fans than they have ever been. These are exquisite athletes, and the level of play in the NBA is the highest the sport of basketball has ever known. It’s worth following if, for no other reason, you’ll see something terrific and artistic and almost balletic on a nightly basis.
And, of course, you’ll also see the Sacramento Kings.
And like I say, within a given league, every team has a ceiling. If you break through that ceiling, your season is a success. The Sacramento Kings are going to play hard, they’re going to play with incredible enthusiasm and energy in lieu of having any talent, and if they, say, finish with a 33-49 record then, damn, that’s a decent season right there. It means the kids played their asses off and they beat a few teams along the way who took the night off or didn’t care or whatnot, it means their young players finally stopped making the sorts of game-ending, soul-killing sorts of mistakes that bad young teams make, and maybe they learned a few things along the way. (And this is about as nice as I’m ever going to talk about the Sacramento Kings, so you should roll with it.) As much as we all want to win, we do have to grade on something of a curve when the season is over.
And here at In Play Lose, where we are connoisseurs of failure, I love all of it. I love the 60-loss season just as much as the Game 7 choke job. There are plenty of layers and levels to losing. Love it. Bring it on. Let’s revel in the failure and have a good laugh, since laughter is always the best medicine. And just as there are different strata and levels of expectation that wind up being contained in any particular league, The Lose has different strata and levels of failure as well, some of which are more interesting to me than others. I have determined there to be nine different levels of Lose within the NBA, all of which provide different challenges to explicate for a purveyor of failure such as myself. Perhaps the best way to preview what is one of my favorite sports leagues in the world, on the eve of its new season, is to express it using those different levels of Lose:
1. Falling Short
These are teams who are striving to win the NBA title and have realistic expectations of doing so. Only one of them can do so, of course, so for the others, this constitutes the highest level of losing. But being in this category also speaks to general excellence of your franchise. These are the élite, after all – so it doesn’t make for great Lose blogging, at least not until the month of May.
I begrudgingly admired the Houston Rockets last season. At one point last spring, I think I said that the Rockets were the NBA’s equivalent of Three True Outcomes baseball, and that it wasn’t a compliment. Just because they attempt to play in the most efficient way possible – shooting only 3s and layups and free throws after Harden holds the ball for most of the shot clock – it doesn’t mean that I want to watch it. That said, they’re commitment to that style was admirable, and their ruthless efficiency was commendable. They were so committed to it that they willingly missed 27 threes in a row against the Warriors in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, chucking up one brick after another from deep as their double-digit lead evaporated and the series slipped away. I say that it’s begrudging admiration because I hate Harden’s flailing on his way to the hoop and his vague, near-travelling on stepback treys, and any team with Chris Paul is inherently going to be the most annoying team in the NBA, but goddamn it, this team is good, and I appreciate that in this era of whining about “the Warriors ruined the sport,” the Rockets said, “fuck it, let’s beat those guys,” and damn near did. That said, I hate their offseason. They lost role players and replaced them with Michael Carter-Williams, who can’t shoot, Carmelo Anthony, who can’t defend, and Marquese Chriss, who can’t do anything. Their window may close pretty quickly, but at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me if Daryl Morey goes out and makes a deal for the malcontented Jimmy Butler. (More on him later.)
I love me some Boston Celtics and I’ll be curious to see how they fit all of these great pieces together. It may be a little murky at first, since Gordon Hayward is almost a newish quantity after missing the whole previous season, since Kyrie’s troublesome knee is probably always going to be a concern, the shooting tended to come and go last year and the offense occasionally verged on being impotent, and I wonder if there will be some strange sort of internal tension stemming from the fact that this may become less of Kyrie Irving’s team and more of Jayson Tatum’s team – as it probably should be. But they’re deep and incredibly well-coached, defend like hell, can play all sorts of different styles, and I think anything short of an NBA Finals appearance will feel like a failure.
Of course, the Toronto Raptors might get in the Celtics’ way, because they now have Kawhi Leonard on their team, who is the ultimate series wrecker, a guy who can just wipe most of the opposition’s best scoring threats off the map while also getting you 25 points a game. Toronto had a weird offseason after their obligatory playoff meltdown, entrusting their fate to an unproven head coach in Nick Nurse, then trading franchise icon DeRozan for Kawhi and creating a team that you’d probably not normally entrust a rookie head coach with. And the Raptors will be bothered all year, of course, with distractions created by media and fans pertaining to what Kawhi does next summer when he’s a free agent, but this season, they’ve got about 10,000 guys who can play the wing – when most teams have one or two – they’ve got one of the five best badass motherfucking players on the planet when healthy (which he appears to be), and the defense is going to be filthy. Obviously, trading a franchise icon and stalwart like DeRozan is a shock to the system, but Kawhi is such a ridiculous upgrade that this team has a potential to be terrifying.
But let’s be honest here, barring a catastrophic injury (which I don’t wish upon anyone, friend or foe), the Golden State Warriors are prohibitive favorites here. Anything other than winning a 4th title in five years will be construed as a failure. And I’m sure that I’ll write too much about the Warriors over the course of the season, as I’ll put my objectivity slant aside and devolve into being a fanboy. Much like with Kawhi in Toronto, I genuinely don’t care about all of the non-stories about how KD and/or Klay might be somewhere else next season that the media will create in order to have something to talk about. If that happens, sobeit. I don’t care. They’ve earned the right to make those decisions. The Warriors were only 58-24 last season, and lots of the narrative about them being lazy and unfocused conveniently omits that their four all-stars only played 41 games together over what was, in fact, an injury-plagued season. But the Dubs were admittedly dragging last year, and I actually think they’ll will be more engaged this year, finding the idea of incorporating the recovering Boogie Cousins into their lineups to be a fun sort of challenge. (Oh yeah, they added a 5th All-Star. Have fun with guarding them.) The focus here in the Bay Area seems to be on joy, celebrating the successes of late and honoring the last year in Oakland before moving into the new arena in downtown San Francisco next season, and when the Dubs are playing with energy, with joy and with love, you have no chance.
2. Knocking on the Door
This group of teams doesn’t make for great Lose blogging, either. They’re really good teams who are on the rise. They’ll most likely get some mention here on this blog if they somehow gag away a playoff series, but otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.
Were I in Vegas (which I won’t be until early November), I would put money on Giannis being the MVP, because the Milwaukee Bucks have a coach in Mike Budenholzer who actually knows what he is doing, and with the spacing and movement on offense they’ve shown here in the preseason, Giannis could be absolutely unstoppable and we’ll finally have to bow down to our Bucks overlord.
The Indiana Pacers simply have a lot of guys who know what they are doing – a novel concept in the raw-talent obsessed NBA – they can play lots of different ways and their best players have taken the cue from their leader, Victor Oladipo, in that their secondary threats – Sabonis and Turner – also appear to be in great shape after significant off-season regimens. The Pacers are going to be good. I like this team a lot.
I also like the Utah Jazz a lot in the West, as their first five play so well together and they defend the hell out of the ball. They’ll go as far as Donovan Mitchell ultimately takes them, but fortunately, his potential verges on limitless. It’s a weird team to watch, in that we’ve been used to Ricky Rubio disappointing us and Joe Ingles looks like a high school gym teacher, but they’re impeccably coached by Quin Snyder and they always seem to know the right play to make. If I were the Houston Rockets, I might be looking over my shoulder, since I think the Jazz are in the rearview mirror and gaining rapidly.
3. Precarious Positions
Okay, now this is more interesting to me from a Losability standpoint. Here we go. These are teams which could, or even should, be pretty good, maybe even good enough to belong in the previous category, and yet there are questions and concerns. All of these teams may bottom out and be a lot worse than we first thought, and we’ll look back and see that the preseason concerns were warranted.
I want to trust the process, but I’m wary of the process. This whole idea that the Philadelphia 76ers are going to start Fultz instead of J.J, Redick – thus breaking up what was the best lineup in the NBA last year – seems weird to me. It seems like the sort of move that a thin-skinned organization would make that didn’t want to admit they made a mistake – which is what history may judge it as, given that they traded the pick which landed Tatum, as well as what may be a plum Kings draft pick, to the Celtics in order to land Fultz. And this team really took off late last season after the buyout pickups of Belinelli and Ilyasova gave them lethal shooters off the bench – neither of whom are with this team any more. The Sixers rid themselves of their GM, Bryan Colangelo, after the embarrassing burner account scandal, which hindered their ability to make deals in the offseason, and I can’t look at this team and say that they improved the roster. They’re counting a lot on their internal development, but the externals aren’t positive.
The New Orleans Pelicans, of course, are the ultimate one-note franchise. I consider it to be simple math, Y = X + 2, where Y equals when Seattle gets an NBA franchise and X equals when Anthony Davis leaves New Orleans. That is how dependent upon AD this franchise is. If Anthony Davis leaves, this franchise is dead. Of course, a good way to keep him, though not a guarantee, would be to keep winning, which New Orleans did a lot of last year. The Pelicans were great at the end of last season, as AD played at an MVP level and Jrue Holliday was beast and their frenzied approach simply ran opponents into the ground, and they need to play at that level again this season. If healthy, the Pelicans are a 4-seed in the West. Given that health is always an issue in New Orleans, who knows? I find the hand-ringing over losing Rondo curious – he was last season, and is now, a terrible defender who gets by on reputation – but he’s been replaced by Elfred Payton, who has never done anything in his NBA career. The Pelicans need him to do something, anything at all. The margin for error is small in New Orleans, the roster is thin and has a history of being brittle.
It’s easy to put your faith in Pop and say that it’s no big deal that they lost Kawhi, since the San Antonio Spurs were sans Kawhi and still won 47 games a season ago, but the Spurs are now sans Kawhi and sans Danny Greene, Slo-Mo Anderson, Tony Parker and Ginobili. That’s an enormous brain drain as well as a talent drain. Oh yeah, and they have now lost a starting point guard to an ACL and a backup for two months with a foot injury. It just gets worse and worse. They do have DeRozan now to go with LMA, and they’ll likely play a style of basketball straight out of the 90s absent the 3-point shot, but as much as I believe in Pop, this team has feasted on bad teams for years in order to prop up their regular season record, and I just don’t think there are enough downtrodden teams in the West any more which will enable them to do that. I know they’ve got a playoff streak dating to the 1990s, but this roster just isn’t very good, and repeating last season’s result of being an 8-seed in the West would probably constitute an achievement.
I’ll put the Denver Nuggets in this category, because the Nuggets simply have to be in the playoffs this year or everyone’s getting fired. They get something of a mulligan after losing out to Minnesota in Game 82 a season ago, given that first Paul Milsap, and then Gary Harris, suffered serious injuries which ultimately cost them last year. This team should be dynamite on offense with Jokic, Harris, Milsap, and Jamal Murray, but goddamn it, play some goddamn defense. They’re a 5-seed in the West, or better, if they play some defense. Given that Jokic can’t guard his own shoes, and they look like a bunch of toreadors on a regular basis, this is no sure thing.
4. Fun Bad
These teams aren’t great from a blogging standpoint, because they aren’t very good and everyone knows it. All of these teams are focused more on talent development, to some extent, and young players generally do a lot of stupid things along the way. They’ll all play like hell and will be extremely watchable, while periodically doing some jaw-droppingly dimwitted things which cost them wins. Now, it should be noted that all of these fun bad teams could, in fact, turn out to be better than we all thought, and if they figure out how to avoid the ‘bad’ part of fun bad, those timetables may be accelerated.
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel for the Dallas Mavericks, who wound up landing Luca Doncic in last year’s draft after all of the machinations were finished. Doncic is a young player years ahead of other rookies, in that he’s been playing in the Euroleague – the 2nd-highest level of the game – for years now instead of laboring in college and posterizing the Vanderbilts and the the Wisconsins and Washington States of the world. His game is way more savvy and nuanced than your typical teenager. Pair him and Dennis Smith Jr. and there is so much to like about the Mavericks, but young players still screw up a lot and this roster isn’t good enough to overcome it.
I was impressed with Doc Rivers’ coaching job for the L.A. Clippers a season ago. The Clippers competed and played like hell. They’re the epitome of fun bad, in that they’ve got enough talent in Lou Williams and Tobias Harris and their spate of wings to be competitive on a nightly basis, but lack that killer superstar who put them over the top and will probably lose a lot of the close games they could hope to win.
It’s probably a stretch to put the Swamp Dragons, aka the Brooklyn Nets, in this category, but the Nets will be fun as hell as well and play crazy games, shoot a tonne of threes and be willing to lose 120-118 in this, their first season where they have control of their first round pick since god-knows-when. The Nets are also in a nice position to land some free agents in the summer of 2019, when a lot of awful contracts come off the books and everyone in the league will have some money to spend. Being loose and fun and well-coached and playing like hell in New York City makes for a decent sort of selling point to prospective free agents. The results aren’t there yet, but all the signs indicate that the Nets are moving in the right direction.
5. Need To Be Better Than They Are
All of these teams need something good to happen to them. There is a sense of urgency among this group. The problem is that, well, they aren’t that good.
Both the Detroit Pistons and the Charlotte Hornets are desperate to make the playoffs, which is doable in the East, whereas there are probably 12-13 teams in the West who are better than they are. I can’t find a single reason to care about either of these teams. Detroit has, at least, been freed from the Reign of Error that was the tenure of coach/exec Stan Van Gundy, who walked away from this mess after assembling an unwinnable roster locked in salary cap hell. Having the freshly fired Dwane Casey on the bench should help, and they’ve got more tangible talent than the Hornets in the quest for the #8 seed in the East. But in the meantime, the Pistons will continue covering up those red seats in Bad Pizza Arena with black tarps to mask their lackluster attendance, while the Hornets try to figure out whether or not to hit the reset button by unloading Kemba Walker – their best player, who is something like the 5th-best paid player on their mismatched roster – or fully engage in a shamfest of a battle for the #8 seed in the East.
I bet you didn’t know that the Miami Heat have the highest payroll in the NBA. I bet you cannot believe what you just read. For all of his championship rings and his successes, the fact of the matter is that the roster Pat Riley has assembled in Miami is, well, underwhelming and he’s not gotten near enough stick for that. Their hopes to land Jimmy Butler from the Wolves is an effort to turn a 7-seed in the East into a 6-seed in the East. What’s the point? Spo will coach them up, of course, because he’s a voodoo witch doctor, but a team saddled with the dead weight that is Hassan Whiteside and Tyler Johnson’s ballooning bombast of a contract and the contract of the seriously injured Dion Waiters is a waste of time.
And then there are the Portland Trail Blazers, whose 2nd-best player, C.J. McCollum, got into a long series of arguments this offseason online in which he said he’d rather get swept in the playoffs than go to a “super team,” and who seems to be getting quite good at that, given that the Blazers got absolutely embarrassed last spring in getting whomped 4-0 by the Pelicans in the first round of the playoffs, and haven’t won a playoff game since 2016. The Blazers punch above their weight during the regular season, are exquisitely coached by Terry Stotts and climbed to the 3-seed in the West last year, but this is always a turkey waiting to be carved. People keep saying the Dame/C.J. backcourt isn’t a winning formula, which is dumb, since the problem is the mediocre frontcourt that never gets addressed, but this team is still suffering from the hangover after the gin bender that was GM Neil Olshey investing $347 million in the summer of 2016 in contracts to the likes of Evan Turner and Myles Leonard, who is 7’1” and managed not to block a single shot last season. Stotts routinely saves his GM’s head with his coaching jobs, but the Blazers, despite being a 3-seed last season, were three games out of missing the playoffs entirely. The frontcourt still sucks, and the margin is so thin with this team that you could see them being a tangibly better team in 2018-19 and still missing the playoffs. My money is still on Stotts, however, to get this team into the playoffs, as he is quite accustomed to doing more with less. Which is an excellent segue into my next category …
 |
| Kings fans are delighted with their offseason. |
6. Doing Less With Less
All of these teams are terrible, and scarcely worth my time.
The Clueless: Last season basically ended after 13 games for the Memphis Grizzlies when Mike Conley got hurt. That they were so dependent on one guy speaks to how pathetic this roster is. Conley is the last Grizzlies draft pick to get a second contract, and he was drafted more than a decade ago. The roster is so thin that if the oft-injured Conley, the grumpy Marc Gasol, and the waste-of-money that is $92m free agent Chandler Parsons get injured – which they seem likely to do – this team is DOA. I have zero faith in this team to stay healthy, and they are also saddled with J.B. Bickerstaff, a not particularly good coach who got the job primarily because he was cheap and available. They’re far more likely to lose 50 games than win 40. I’m amazed that GM Chris Wallace still has a job, given how terribly he’s gone about assembling a roster, and given that they’ve been losing about $40m a season, I worry for the future of the Grizzlies, who may very well wind up being Sonics 2.0 in Seattle if the Pelicans and, yes, the Clippers don’t see Seattle as a possible cash cow when the new arena opens two years from now.
The Hapless: The Atlanta Hawks are trying to be bad, and will succeed at that, likely to be the worst team in the league. But this past summer’s draft, in which they traded prodigy Luca Doncic to the Mavericks for Trae Young, is the sort of trade that ultimately gets GMs fired. Young is going to be bad for the Hawks, and that sucks. I read a ludicrous story this summer from Vegas Summer League from a Hawks fanboy talking about his “breakout game.” There are no breakout games in Summer League. Don’t kid yourselves. Young has condierable upside, of course, but is also going to be a target, having been foolishly laden with expectations after what was, ultimately, a marginal trade by his team at best. The Hawks will be awful.
The Hopeless: The Sacramento Kings are the dumbest franchise in the NBA, if not all of Nortb American professional sports. They can’t really tank this season, since they gave away their #1 draft pick in the dreaded Sauce Castillo trade with the 76ers. But even if they try, what difference does it make? They pulled a Sam Bowie sort of move in drafting Marvin Bagley with the #2 pick instead of Doncic, tabbing a guy who has no real discernible NBA skill to fit in with their endless run of non-impactful bigs. The Kings will play their asses off and probably play well enough late in the season against downtrodden teams to win some games and cost the Boston Celtics, who own their pick in next year’s draft, but at what point does anyone – and I mean anyone – in this organization realize that Vlade Divac is truly terrible at his GM job and that the small-change, mollify-the-quaint-fan-base-with-Kings-legends approach to running this team just isn’t conducive to being successful? If the Sacramento Kings didn’t exist, In Play Lose would have to invent them:
 |
| Sacramento Kings twitter is a wonderful and strange place |
The Useless: The Phoenix Suns fired their GM, Ryan McDonough, a week before the season. This after firing coach Earl Watson three games into last season. Good God. Now, this is not to say that McDonough was good at his job. He wasn’t. He ran the franchise into the ground, he went from having too many point guards to having none, he turned three top-10 picks in the draft into Alex Len, Marquese Chriss, and Dragan Bender, who were three of the worst players in the NBA last season. He needlessly signed Devin Booker to a $133 million extension a year before he needed to, and when Booker turned up injured and needed surgery on his hand this summer, the Suns essentially had to write off this coming season before it started, even though they made a bunch of moves to indicate they were actually going to try to win. [Update: Booker is apparently going to be ready for the season opener, which is good news.] He’s been a terrible GM at the helm of a terrible franchise. But that last bit is the biggest point here. This is a terrible franchise, one which guys flee from at the first chance. Owner Robert Sarver is apparently more hands-on than ever, which is the kiss of death, as literally no one who leaves this franchise has anything good to say about how Sarver operates it. I hate this team. I hate everything about this team. They are everything wrong about North American sports, a team cynically exploited by a megalomaniac who suffers no real repercussions for putting out a terrible product year after year. Send this garbage franchise to the G-League. Or better yet, shoot it into the sun.
7. Blowhards
I have to admit, I love to kill these teams. You’ll note how many of these teams are in major media markets. All of them are self-important blowhards burdened with unreasonable expectations from zealous fan bases, and their tires generally get pumped by lapdog media.
Man, I’m going to love watching the L.A. Lakers be not very good this year. Okay, so they signed LeBron James in the offseason, and good for them for doing that. They also signed the biggest collection of misfits and jokers I’ve ever seen. The Lakers are, in keeping with their status of being the most-important story in the NBA, going to get lots of ink in spite of the fact that they have a 45-win roster. Lonzo Ball still can’t shoot, Brandon Ingram is a story only because he plays in L.A. – honestly, if he played for the Charlotte Hornets, would you care how good he is? They’ve signed a collection of clownshoes including Rondo, Lance Stephenson (on this roster only so LeBron doens’t have to be annoyed with him as an opponent), and JaVale McGee, who instantly sets this team as about the 13th-best team in the NBA’s Western Conference in terms of big men, which the Western Conference happens to be laden with – LMA, Jokic, AD, Gasol, Towns, Adams, Nurkic, DJ, Gobert, Ayton, and Draymond if the Warriors bother to play that way are all way better at center, and that’s off the top of my head. This is a very flawed roster. But this is also an era when NBA media is basically Pravda for the Lakers and we’re going to have to put up with every grade-on-the-curve story about how L.A. is somehow relevant, when they’re probably a 6-seed, at best. It’s only preseason and I’m already annoyed.
The New York Knicks are garbage, and this season, we’re going to hear nothing but how they’re going to sign KD and Kawhi and Jimmy Butler and every available free agent in the summer, in lieu of being any good in the present, especially because Porzingis is hurt. But why would anyone play for a team owned by Jim Dolan? Answer me that. Where is the upside in signing for this team? And Knicks fans deserve better than this. They do. But spending a season watching Tim Hardaway Jr. going 1-on-1 while Enis Kanter fails to guard his own shadow is going to kill the will to live of even the most diehard of Knicks fateful. I wouldn’t be shocked if this was the 2nd-worst team in the league.
The Chicago Bulls won’t stop anyone. God, this defense is absolutely horrible. Whatever improvement is seen on the offensive end, a team full of guys like Zac LaVine and Jabari Parker and Lauri Markkanen, none of whom can guard a chair, isn’t going anywhere. The Bulls are almost worthy of belonging in the fun bad category, as the games should be wildly entertaining, but the grand rebuild may not be as far along as everyone had hopes.
And, of course, there is no bigger blowhard in the NBA than OKC, who will, of course, promise big things with Russell Westbrook scowling a lot and going hall-bent-for-leather and putting up fluffy and puffy triple-doubles, but Russ had offseason “minor knee surgery” as did Paul George, and there is no such thing as “minor knee surgery,” and Andre Roberson, who keys their defense, suffered a patella tear last season, an injury the likes of which almost no NBA players ever recover. I’d be nervous about all of those injuries. On their day, the Thunder can compete with any team in the league. Off their day, they can’t beat the Phoenix Suns. The Thunder always make lots of noise and clamor to be relevant when, at best, they’re a 5-seed with a flawed roster that can’t make enough shots to advance past the first round of the playoffs. The delayed return of Roberson is huge, as he keys their defense – but if you’re team is so dependent on a guy who can’t shoot and scores little, you’ve got a problem. OKC are the ultimate much-ado-about-nothing group of blowhards in the NBA. At some point, the media who follows the NBA will hopefully stop pumping Russ’ tires and fawning over empty calorie statistics and acknowledge that a team constructed like this can never be all that good.
8. Putting the Fun in Dysfunctional
I love these teams. This is easy money for The Lose. This is all kinds of bad ideas played out on an NBA court, teams blessed with talent but zero awareness.
Well, the Cleveland Cavaliers used to be blessed with talent, but the circus has left town with LeBron taking his talents to the South Bay. LeBron’s presence always made for high drama, and the Cavs were constantly engaged in soap operas and chaos off the court, and sometimes on it, while he was there. I’ll miss all of the melodrama, because it was amusing. What LeBron’s left behind is, well, not a very good team. They had the point differential last season of a .500 team, only to be saved repeatedly by LeBron’s late game heroics in the clutch. Any time he’s been off the floor in recent years, the Cavs have been terrible. I don’t, for the life of me, understand why it is they felt a need to give Kevin Love an enormous extension, since he’s probably their only good trade piece among the guys on their bloated books. A roster tailor-made to compliment LeBron does not offer much without him. I’ve enjoyed the Cavs and it’s gonna be a bummer to see them floundering and flailing all season.
After being a tire fire last season, with players openly acting like they hate each other, the solution in Washington was, apparently, to throw more gasoline on the fire by adding Austin Rivers and Dwight Howard to the mix. Howard has had such a strange career, he was a sure-fire Hall of Famer who has morphed into this guy that teams just cannot wait to get rid of. Hopefully, some good health will come John Wall’s way this year, which would help matters quite a bit in Washington, but the Buzzards were an unfocused, disorganized mess most of last season, squandering what appeared to be a golden opportunity to gain some traction in the East.
And then there are the Minnesota Timberwolves. Be still my foolish heart. This team is actually going to attempt to play the season while there is a state of open warfare between its best players, Jimmy Butler and Karl-Anthony Towns, who clearly cannot coexist. There were all sorts of rumblings and rumors to that effect a season ago, a season which was a case study in how good you can be in spite of yourselves, as the Wolves possess so many guys who can create their own shot that it makes up for not having a single guy on the roster who can pass. And from what I can discern from the reporting, Butler’s discontent this summer, leading to his demanding a trade, stemmed from wanting a contract extension that the Timberwolves weren’t actually in a position to give him unless they dumped a tonne of money, which is weird. Why would you ask for something when you know you can’t get it, and then make a scene about not getting it? Also, for someone who keeps saying he’s “all about winning,” asking to be traded to the Knicks, Clippers, or Swamp Dragons doesn’t seem to jibe with that idea. Frankly, most everything Butler said in the conveniently-timed tell-all interview on ESPN after his practice escapade sounded like nonsense. It all feels contrived and insincere. And Thibs, of course, doesn’t want to trade him, since Thibs wants to win and, more importantly, has to win to keep his job, but then you have the meddlesome owner going around saying Butler is available in trade and undermining his top exec. What a zoo. Look, the fact is that if I’m an NBA coach or GM not named Thibs, I’m looking at this situation, where player A is 22 and a skilled big capable of going 50/40/90 and putting up 28 and 12, and player B is 29, has an injury history, and has developed a questionable rep as a locker room guy (remember, the Bulls were a disaster in Butler’s last year in Chicago), and I’m tying my fortunes to the former. I don’t care if he’s not assertive enough or what have you. He’s 22! He can get better! But there isn’t a less process-based person in all of the NBA than Thibs, which is why it probably wasn’t the best idea to give him an exec role alongside the head coaching gig. The Wolves have spun themselves into this impossible tangle, and sure there is a lot of natural talent on this roster – enough so that they might win 50 games without ever declaring détente – but you could also see them just completely disintegrating and losing 50 games as well. Seeing the Bucks put up 84 in the first half against them in their last preseason game was pretty disheartening. Everything about this mess is pointing towards it all going over a cliff.
9. Irrelevant
Seriously, what’s the point of the Orlando Magic?
