The NBA So Far (part 4)

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As promised here is our continued look at the NBA. For the last installment of this series (on the top 8 teams) we might switch things up a bit.

13. The Portland Trail-Blazers (72points)*

The Blazers started off this season as one of the best teams in the West and they looked like they could potentially pull off a few upsets in the playoffs and get to the finals. Their starting five was solid on both offense and defense, but they also had key contributors off the bench. Then things started trending downwards and the team has not been able to pull it together. McMillan decided to sub Crawford into the starting lineup instead of Felton (who apparently forgot how to play basketball) which was obviously not going to work, since Crawford will never primarily look to pass. He is a great scorer off the bench and can go off for 50 (did so while playing for three different teams) on any given night, but he should not be forced into playing like a distributor. The other move McMillan made was subbing Batum in for Matthews, which turned out great for Batum, but put Matthews in a giant shooting slump. So then came the trade deadline which involved rumours surround the Blazers. Will Crawford go to the Wolves? Will Felton go to the Lakers? Well neither of these two happened, but the team said fuck it and just traded just about everyone else away. Camby was shipped to the Rockets, Wallace to the Nets (I still don’t get why the nets did this…it’s not like Wallace will make Deron stay), Oden was waived (go to Pheonix, it’s your only chance at playing again!), and McMillan was fired. What did the Blazers gain from this? Not much to be honest, except more playing time for their younger players. Where will they finish the season? At home on their couches watching the NBA playoffs (hopefully Felton stays away from whatever he was eating prior to this season). Now the Blazers can look forward to the NBA lottery and hope the team rebounds next year, since they do have some good pieces to surround Aldridge with.

-Igor

*Editors Note: It really speaks volumes as to how much this team fell off from the start of the season.

12. The Denver Nuggets (72points)

When we initially picked the teams that we wanted to write about, I jumped on this Nuggets squad. They were playing a fun, up-tempo style and were winning games without a true star, but unfortunately, injuries got the better of them and they were unable to sustain their red-hot start to the season. As of this writing (insert joke about how out-dated some of these rankings are) the Nuggets are in a three-way tie for 7^th in the Western conference, but are a half game out of fourth, and four games out of third. The West basically breaks down to nine teams fighting for the last five spots, as the Thunder, Lakers, and Spurs have created separation from the rest of the pack. So where do the Nuggets fall in that mix? If I had to choose, I think 8^th is the spot that they will end up with. For starters, Denver is still not fully healthy, and the constant flux of line-ups and minutes has not allowed them to be consistent whatsoever. Secondly, the Nuggets have only six (!) home games remaining in the regular season, are they good enough to scrape some road games? Yes. Can they win more than 54% (their current winning percentage) of them? Probably not; From April 13^th to April 25^th Denver plays the Lakers, the Rockets twice, the Clippers, the Suns, the Magic, and lastly the Thunder in that order. That stretch of games will determine whether or not they make the playoffs, but until then all they can do is try to keep winning games and hopefully get healthy for the playoffs. If Denver makes it in I firmly believe that anything can happen, even Mark Cuban is on record as saying that “seeding has never mattered less”. So the key is to just make the playoffs and hope that the match-ups work out in your favour. Until the playoffs actually start however, we know nothing.

-Daki

11. The Orlando Magic (82 points)

So after much speculation, Dwight Howard has decided to exercise his player option for the following season and remain with the Orlando Magic. It would have been interesting to see how he would have fared in New Jersey with Deron Williams, which seemed to be the only plausible city Howard was going to end up in. The Lakers were not going to trade Bynum, and no one else was offering any trade the Magic would be willing to accept. So now that Howard is still with the Magic, they have the exact same team they’ve had all year. They’re 3^rd in the Eastern conference, which is impressive considering the inconsistencies they’ve been battling all season, especially from Jameer Nelson, who seems to be finally picking up his pace and playing the way he should have been playing all season. Howard has had his usual great season, and hopefully his level of effort picks up now that he knows he’s going to be staying in Orlando this year. One of the biggest surprises for the Magic this year has been the improved play of Ryan Anderson, who is leading the league in both threes attempted and threes made. The Magic are playing well right now and they are 3^rd in the league points allowed per game. They have the ability to go far in the playoffs, but they’ll need their starters to be more consistent more often. However, it will be difficult to beat the Heat in the playoffs, as they are, in my opinion, still the favourites to win the title this year.

-Jovan

The NBA so far

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As promised here is our (delayed) All-star break feature on the NBA. What we decided to do was rank the teams (sort of like a mid-way point power rankings) in order of how they have played so far, as well as their chances for winning the title. Four of us ranked the teams from one to 30 with the last place being one point, second to last being two points and so on. here is the first part of our list, these will come in chunks then we will do a big article for the elite eight. We also divided the teams by doing a draft for the rights to write about them, because anytime you can do a fantasy draft for anything you have to do it (it makes things about 100 times more fun). Anyways, here is our first installment of teams, starting with number 30.

30. Charlotte Bobcats (4 points)

Four voters, one point per last place, you can probably guess which team we had unanimously in last, ladies and gentleman your Bobcats! (Cut to MJ whiffing on an easy putt). To be fair, they chose a hell of a year to suck, Anthony Davis is a beast and could form a solid foundation for any franchise. I am giving as much effort to this paragraph as the Bobcats have given to their season, so there.

-Daki

29.The Washington Wizards (9 points)

Quick. Name the Wizards head coach... If you guessed Randy Wittman you’re either a cheater (very possible), a die-hard Wizards fan (impossible), or Randy Wittman (possible). The Wiz head coach has been as irrelevant as his team excluding John Wall this year. Washington came out of the gate to a very slow start (2-15) and got Flip Saunders fired as head coach. This surprised no one because how much do you think guys like Andray Blatche and Nick Young worked out over the lockout? Not a lot. Since that time the Randy Wittman led-Wizards and John Wall have stormed all the way back and are now in the East’s playoff race!! Ok not really, but they have been slightly better going 5-13 since Wittman took over. The Wizards do have some form of weird entertainment value as they’ve somehow managed to create a team mostly made up of ‘the guy you don’t want on your basketball pick-up team’ guys. You know the guy I’m talking about. The one who is insanely lazy on defense, turns the ball over with no care and thinks he’s one hundred times better than he is. That’s basically the entire Washington roster other than Jan Vesely (plays the game the right way but is just very raw) and Wall who is the one redeeming quality of the Wizards. Last year’s rookie of the year has seemingly gotten better in every aspect of his game and seems like a Derrick Rose Lite at this point in his career. Wall seems to have the demeanor in some games of a prisoner counting the days until his sentence expires. Funnily enough this is basically what Washington has become. Quick random theory on this; what if Wall did something to Stern pre-draft that David is making him pay for in his first few years in the league. After ‘The Veto’ we all know the commissioner has great control over things so why put it past him? Insane? What’s more likely? That David Stern is punishing John Wall for something he did or that someone thought the supporting cast of Andray Blatche, Nick Young, JaVale McGee, and Rashard Lewis’ corpse was a good idea...?

-Luka

28. The New Orleans Hornets (11 points)

Who would have thought that David Stern would make Eric Gordon sit out a large amount of games (probably the season) so the Hornets would get a top pick to add to the young core of players they have? The foundation they got from the Clippers in the now famous 'veto' suddenly does not seem so bad when you add a top pick. It is also incredible that Stern convinced the Hornets to play Kaman again so that they could raise his trade value exponentially (My theory: he tells the refs to treat him like LeBron) and maybe add another valuable building piece. Of course I am only speculating, there is only a 50% chance that what I wrote about Stern is actually true. Anyways, the Hornets are in full out 'tank the season' mode which will eventually spark the debate talking heads have every year: how do we prevent this from happening? There really is no way to prevent it, but what I would do is have the bottom eight teams play a tournament with the winner getting the number one pick. I will expand this idea in a future post, this is not the time or the place.

-Daki

27. New Jersey Nets (17 points)

The main news that has been surrounding the Nets this year has been the potential acquisition of Dwight Howard that will be concluded in the next few weeks. I won’t talk about this trade anymore, but rather focus on the Nets’ season up to the half way point. Deron Williams has been their star player and seems to have overcome his wrist injury issues by putting up a career high in points per game (21.7, including a career high of 57 tonight!). However, his assist numbers are the second lowest of his career and this is probably because of the inability of his teammates to score. Luckily for the Nets and Williams’ assists, Brooks Lopez returned about a week ago and has made an immediate impact on the offensive end. Outside of these two, MarShon Brooks and Kris Karda..I mean Humphries are the only other players worth mentioning. Hump is his usual self grabbing ever offensive rebound off his missed layups and Brooks is a young player with lots of potential (as I mentioned in mine and Luka’s Rising Stars mock draft). The Nets are struggling this year and I don’t expect anything to change unless they do acquire Dwight or another big name player to keep Deron and make an impact in the NBA when they move to Brooklyn next year.

-Igor

26. The Detroit Pistons (21 points) 

Remember when the Detroit Pistons were one of the best teams in basketball? It wasn’t too long ago and yet it seems like an eternity. Back in those days the 5 Piston starters were all all-star caliber players, Joe Dumars was considered one of the best GM’s in the NBA and the palace was rocking each and every night. How the times have changed. These days only 3 pieces remain of the mid-00’s Piston glory days. Tayshaun Prince, Ben Wallace, and Joe Dumars. Each a shadow of their former selves (I still think Prince could be a serviceable player for a title contender. He is wasting away on this team though). Wallace’s game was never going to get better with age (his post game makes Dwight Howard’s look like a mix of Olajuwon’s and McHale’s) but it is the decline of Dumars that has ultimately doomed the Pistons. Weird free agent signings for even worse contracts combined with one of the most confusingly crafted rosters in the league have set up Detroit for the type of success they’ve had over the last few years. Very little. This year the Pistons are simply one of the league’s bad teams with a few bright spots on the floor and on the sideline. The hiring of Lawrence Frank was an inspired one since everywhere he’s gone, he’s proven he knows what he’s doing. Of course anyone is a massive upgrade from John Kuester who was the first coach to my knowledge to have a legitimate mutiny performed on him (seriously, the players refused to practice and everything). On the floor the Pistons have one of the most under-appreciated, least-talked about young stars in the game in Greg Monroe. Monroe has been a force this year averaging 16 and 10 with 2 assists and a steal per game. If he can continue to develop in sync with some of the young guys he has around him (Jerebko, Knight, Stuckey) the future of the Pistons could be much more promising than their present. As for the time being though they’ll just have to settle for being known as the team that gave Charlie Villaneuva and Ben Gordon a combined 90 million dollars. 

-Luka 

25. The Toronto Raptors (23 points) 

It’s been a tough year for the Toronto Raptors. Bryan Colangelo didn’t make any significant off-season moves, the players he did bring over have underperformed, and to top it off, Andrea Bargnani has been out for most of the season with a calf injury. It’s unfortunate because with the defensive leadership of Dwayne Casey (the only good move Colangelo made), Bargnani was finally showing up on both ends of the court. Nevertheless, the Raptors still have a better record than three of the Eastern conference teams, and they’ve had numerous close games against better teams that were lost due to poor execution in the final minutes of the games. The Raptors have been battling inconsistency all season (ie. Demar DeRozan and Jerryd Bayless) and they don’t have a true leader, but they have still managed to function as a team and challenge stronger opponents. With the players the Raptors have, that’s still somewhat of an accomplishment. The season won’t end any different for the Raptors. They’re probably going to stay a bottom 8 team in the NBA, and hopefully Colangelo will draft a player who will make a significant difference for this long-struggling Raptors team.

-Jovan

That will do it for part one, look for part two sometime this week.