NBA PREDICTIONS PART 2
The NBA’s Eastern Conference Has Turned Into a Game of Whac-A-Mole
It’s the only way to understand this season at the quarter pole
Note: I started writing this article after the first week of the season but was so confused by the results I delayed publishing three times. After all the injuries, Covid-related absences, and trades, my predictions ended up back where I started.
Last November (otherwise know as “the off season”), I analyzed the winners and losers of free agency.
But there were too many unknown variables to make complete predictions.
There was no way to know if Kevin Durant was healthy or what would happen if Kemba Walker wasn’t healthy.
There was no way to know if any rookie could contribute without the testing grounds of March Madness, Summer League, training camps, and a full preseason schedule.
There was no way to know how much Covid-19 would affect teams traveling to arenas instead of playing in a bubble.
And there was no way to know if the contenders would come out of the gate hungry or comatose.
The answer is most of them were comatose, as Boston, Brooklyn, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, and Toronto were a combined 15–23 as of New Year’s Day. And the Clippers lost by 50 to the Dallas Mavericks without Porzingys.
The level of play has been so uneven, it feels like every Eastern Conference team has popped up and down to surprise the elite teams like they’ve playing Whac-A-Mole instead of basketball. Or is it the elite teams that get hit on the head with that soft sledgehammer by the kids in the conference?
As confusing as this all seems, I wrote these New Year’s resolutions for the NBA’s Eastern Conference, starting with the near misses and ending with the Conference contenders.
Eastern Conference
Seeds 7–12: Focus on making new friends this year
Charlotte fans will have a blast with LaMelo Ball.
Knicks fans will enjoy having Tom Thibideau make them respectable.
Detroit hit a home run signing Jerami Grant, a player who will make a difference on the court and in the community.
Cleveland picked up a treasure trove of athletic, high-energy veterans (Jarrett Allen, Taurean Prince, Javale McGee) who have made them #2 in defensive efficiency.
Toronto gets to make new friends with hotel workers as they will be in a bubble at home (for now, in Orlando) and on the road.
Orlando, after losing Fultz for the season discovered a new best friend Cole Anthony.
#6 Miami Heat: Prayer is good for the soul
With the short off season, it may take Miami a couple more months to recover psychologically from their Finals loss and by then it will be too late.
Losing Jae Crowder in free agency killed this team’s defensive identity, and Iguodala can’t play more than 15 minutes per game anymore. Herro and Robinson will probably regress in their second years as teams game plan for them. Jimmy Butler played the best basketball of his life in the playoffs and I don’t think that is sustainable. The only hope for this team to win a round in the playoffs is another Pat Riley mid-season miracle deal and I don’t see it coming.
#5 Indiana Pacers: Spice up your life
If variety is the spice of life, watch some Playboy After Dark or order some TexMex food through DoorDash, because the Pacers won’t be kicking it up a notch on a basketball floor. They look to be a lock for another first round playoff loss. The last time they avoided a first round playoff loss was in 2015, when they avoided the playoffs altogether.
This is a team with a bunch of really good #3 options, once led by Victor Oladipo who might have been a #2 option on a title contender for one season, but thinks he’s a #1 option. Now he’ll get to be the guy on a dismantled Houston team that will have to fight to make the play-in.
Malcolm Brogdan was the perfect #3 guy with the Bucks, but they were too cheap to keep him. Instead, they mortgaged the franchise to the hilt for Jrue Holiday. I’d rather have Brogdan.
Sabonis, Turner and Warren are all good players who would look great if they played with Brooklyn, the Clippers, or the Lakers.
#4 Boston Celtics: Shoot your wad
Danny Ainge has been great at fleecing other teams, dumping players at the smallest chance to get another asset, losing All-Star for nothing in free agency and then being unable to convert all those draft picks into The Guy.
Ainge blew the chance to get Jimmy Butler cheap from Chicago. He blew the chance to get Paul George from Indiana. And he blew the chance to rent Kawhi Leonard for one season which would have given the Celtics their best chance at winning a title.
This is the year when Danny Boy either makes the big deal, or the front office should get rid of him and his bad karma. You can’t have top players say they don’t want to play for the Celtics because of Ainge’s careless treatment of past players.
For now, the Celtics will tease their rabid fans with the same old formula of overachieving during the regular season and then falling short in the playoffs.
Brad Stevens is a great coach at developing young talent and squeezing the last drop out of them, but at this point I’d say he’s now overrated. Very few coaches in NBA history have been able to mold a young team into a playoff team and also motivate superstars to win a title. Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich never did both. Larry Brown did it back in the day, and Erik Spoelstra seems to have done it, too.
So far, we’ve seen Stevens struggle to balance the skills and egos of rosters with Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. And now he can’t control Jayson Tatum, who just signed a max contract extension and seems to suffer from a terminal case of Kobe-itis, a common malady suffered by NBA stars with too much irrational confidence. Players who show symptoms of this disease past the age of 21 are never cured of this condition.
Tatum will revert to taking long fall away jump shots instead of getting to the rim when the game is on the line, so the Celtics will be limited by how many times he rolls a seven.
Boston is like the Clippers East, in that they have two star wings who don’t make each other better and who will settle for jump shots way too often in crunch time.
They can only take turns, and the wrong guy will be the one who takes most of the turns at the ends of games.
Jaylen Brown is my favorite player on the Celtics because of his intelligence and maturity. He is a better fit on a championship team because he is willing to play within his team’s system. After Paul George, he’s the best two-way shooting guard in the league (with the injury to Klay Thompson).
The Celtics need a complementary superstar, and that means either an All-Star center or point guard. I like the back court defense of Brown and Smart, so I would look for a great defender at center like Gobert.
Without a star center, the Celtics will be treading water in cap purgatory for years to come and never sniff at an NBA Finals when there are three seven footers blocking their path in the East in Durant, Giannis, and Embiid.
#3 Milwaukee Bucks: Develop a plan B
This is year three of the great Budenholzer experiment in Wisconsin and it’s looking more and more like the great Budenholzer experiment in Georgia.
He gets great effort from his players and uses a simple system that stresses spacing on offense and protecting the rim on defense. With a superstar like Giannis, they look like a super team in the regular season because they play in the East, but it all comes to a screeching halt in the playoffs when they play the best teams in the East.
Coach Bud is not a bad coach who will lose a playoff series to a less talented team because he can’t call basic ATOs, or allows game winning layups when you have a dominant rim protecting center defending the three point line.
No, that’s Brett Brown territory.
What he can’t do is adjust his scheme to take away the most obvious play in basketball for a team trailing in a game: jacking up lots of three-pointers.
While I blame the front office for completely whiffing the free agent off-season of 2019 — refusing to pay Brogdon will go down as the worst self-inflicted wound since OKC traded James Harden — Bud still has that look of exasperation on his face each time an opponent rolls the dice, hits 20 three-pointers and beats the Bucks.
Through 15 games, Milwaukee is #23 in three-pointers attempted by opponents (36.3), #26 in three-pointers made by opponents (14.0), and 27th in 3-point percentage allowed (38.6%).
I can’t even use the word “allow” in describing the Bucks’ defensive scheme and inability to close out on shooters. They invite three point shots, so it’s just a question of whether the opponent makes them. When opponents make 14 or less three-pointers, the Bucks are 8–0. When opponents to make 15 or more three point baskets, they are 1–6.
When the Bucks beat Miami without Jimmy Butler and Jae Crowder by 47 points by making 29 three-pointers, I realized Miami was going to be bad this year. Then the Bucks lost to the same team a day later, as Miami hit 15 three-pointers (one less than Milwaukee) and I realized Bud isn’t going to change this year.
The other big problem for the Bucks is their poor decision making with regard to the development of their best player.
Giannis is a 7-foot ball handling phenom who can’t shoot from outside who can’t be guarded in the post. Their decision has been to have him work on his three point shot.
But what if he learned to shoot a little jump hook in the paint? Even if teams build a wall in transition, he could post up and force double teams on every possession.
The Bucks’ core features Middleton, DiVincenzo, Connaughton and Portis all shooting over 40% from deep, while point guards Jrue Holiday and D.J. Augustin shoot over 38%. Only Brook Lopez (35%) and Giannis (30%) shoot below league average.
Their 5-man lineups with a core of Giannis, Holiday, and Middleton and DiVincenzo are way more efficient without a big center. Here are the net ratings when you add the the fifth player:
Add Connaughton (+35.3); add Portis (+32.5); add Lopez (+9.4)
If you substitute for DiVincenzo, you get some similar good lineups:
Add Augustin and Portis (+26.9); add Augustin and Lopez (+1.8); add Connaughton & Lopez (+7.4)
The only negative lineup was Connaughton & Portis (-24.4) (There was only one minute adding Connaughton & Augustin, but it was positive.)
Last year, the Lakers struggled during stretches of games as they experimented with different lineups and offensive schemes, but they knew they could shift to a fifth or sixth gear for their title run because of playoff LeBron and their defense.
The Bucks ran up the score on all the crappy teams in the East, creating advanced stats that made them seem to be a historically good team. But beating down the East is fool’s gold and I wrote about their weaknesses long before the 2020 playoffs.
Playing Giannis as their center would require him to learn post moves, and allow the Bucks to play a switching defense that could contest three point shots. But it will require a better coach who can make adjustments.
Imagine if Popovich, Nurse, Spoelstra or Stevens had coached the last two Bucks teams. Is there any way those teams don’t reach the Finals?
If the Bucks don’t learn a Plan B, they will go down in the second round of the playoffs again.
Unless they are matched up with Miami in the first round, where it could get really ugly.
#2 Brooklyn Nets: Be defensive on the court instead of on twitter
Fortunately for social media stiffs Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, they play pretty good basketball. The Brooklyn superstars should be the best duo in the East on offense, but Kyrie has never been known as a two-way player.
DeAndre Jordan is well past his prime as a basketball player but he pulled off the greatest banana boat recruiting mission ever by getting Durant and Irving to join the Nets. The only problem has been that Coach Steve Nash had to play him.
Basketball is a team sport and roster building is a skill that seems better suited toward company retreats and reading tea leaves than crunching data.
The floor spreading balance achieved by a starting lineup of Durant, Irving, Jordan, sharpshooter Joe Harris and Spencer Dimwiddie (the best point guard on the Nets the year D’Angelo Russell made the All-Star game) manhandled opponents to the tune of an Offensive Rating of 121.5 and Net Rating of +35.3.
When Dimwiddie got hurt, they brought in non-shooters Luwawu-Cabarrot (whose name alone should count for two players on the roster) and LeVert and the Nets’ Offensive Rating plunged by over 21 points, while yielding huge negative Net Ratings.
The Nets had three signature shorthanded wins early that featured big games from Jarret Allen and Caris LaVert by themselves (against Philadelphia), with Irving (against Utah) and with Durant (against Denver).
But they had so many bad losses they couldn’t really be any good, could they? Apparently, the front office thought the same thing, so they gutted the team’s roster and tossed in their draft future to get James Harden.
Since the Harden trade, the team has committed to small ball with Jeff Green at center. He played the entire fourth quarter in the win against Milwaukee (they made 15 three-pointers and shot 48.4% from deep).
But then Kyrie Irving returned to the team, the Nets gave up 272 points in two games against Cleveland, the worst offense in the NBA. The Cavs are so bad, that offensive explosion against the Nets only moved them up to #29 in offensive efficiency.
Brooklyn’s defense is like a Mike D’Antoni experiment gone mad. At least Houston had sturdy switch defenders like Chris Paul, P.J. Tucker, Eric Gordon, and Trevor Ariza when they almost beat the Warriors in 2018.
Even the 7-second Suns had some elite perimeter defenders like Shawn Marion and Raja Bell.
Brooklyn’s only remaining good defender is Kevin Durant, who is also their best offensive player. And he’s coming off an Achilles injury.
Brooklyn needs to find a good rim-protecting center before the playoffs begin, because the team can’t exist in its current state and expect to win the East. I’m not even sure I would favor them in a series against the Celtics.
With their all their offensive weapons, they check three boxes. We won’t know about Nash’s coaching until the playoffs.
#1 Philadelphia: Let Darryl cook
No, I did not drink too much over the Holidays.
I keep making my list and checking off the boxes twice.
As much as I don’t believe this can happen, there are too many factors that indicate the Philadelphia 76ers could make a title run.
Let’s look at the six keys to winning an NBA championship in the Post-Warriors apocalypse and how many boxes Philadelphia checks.
I talked about that in more detail in Part 1 of my NBA predictions.
- Shoot at least league average on a high volume of 3-point shots (but don’t get crazy to the point you stop going to the rim). Philadelphia is #14 at 36.1%, while shooting 32 three-pointers per game. Check.
- Play elite defense when it counts. They are #4 in defensive efficiency. Check.
- Excel at attacking the paint in both the half court and in transition. None of the Eastern Conference elite teams are in the top 5 in points in the paint: Brooklyn leads the pack (#10), followed by Milwaukee (#13), Boston (#15) and Philadelphia (#16).
- Have a coach knows how to put his players in a position to win. While Doc Rivers is not good at making in-game adjustments, his is as inspirational as any coach in the NBA. He overachieved in Orlando. He got the big 3 in Boston to sacrifice and play for each other to win Boston’s only championship since 1986. He got Tobias Harris and D’Andre Jordan to play like All-Stars when he was with the Clippers. And he kept his team, and the league, from falling apart in the aftermath of the Donald Sterling scandal and the Jacob Blake shooting. People are finally talking about Joel Embiid as an MVP-candidate and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Check.
- Have one unstoppable, high efficiency superstar. Embiid, if he can stay healthy, is the only guy in the East who can physically dominate and wear down his opponents. Durant can do it with his jump shot, but he doesn’t wear people down and foul them out the way Embiid can. It’s so damaging to opponents psychologically, you have Marcus Smart, the biggest flopper in basketball crying about Embiid getting so many free throws. Embiid boasts a gaudy career-best TS% of .674, while making 83.3% of his league-leading 10.7 free throws per game. Check.
- Have one or more players who can slow down the other team’s superstar. Embiid is an excellent rim protector (Philadelphia is #5 in opponent points in the paint), while Ben Simmons is an All-Defense NBA-level player who can guard all five positions. Danny Green is a fantastic help defender and surprisingly good as an off-ball rim protector. And Matisse Thybull is an excellent perimeter defender. In other words, they’ve got a defensive specialist who can guard any opponent’s best offensive threat. Check.
That’s five boxes out of six checked, four and a half if you deduct a half point for Rivers’ lack of adjustments. But I think Darryl Morey’s front office moves have created a roster that doesn’t require too many adjustments, as long as Embiid stays healthy and motivated the way he looks right now.
Last season, I thought Philadelphia would need to blow the team up and suffer through more “process” years. Morey came in and rebuilt the lineup on the fly. He could certainly make one more trade to shore up some area of deficiency before the playoffs begin.
While Philadelphia has the least reliable superstar from a health and conditioning standpoint, the 76ers now have the highest ceiling of any team in the East.
Through the first quarter of the season, when Embiid and Simmons both play, the 76ers are 12–1. Their only loss came against a team that no longer exists: the Brooklyn Nets led by Caris LaVert, Jarrett Allen and Taurean Prince.
On Wednesday, they will play the Lakers and we will see exactly where they stand.
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this article, please check out part 1.