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Ghost01 12 years, 1 month ago.
festar35
Ghost01
NbanflguyIt’s time to look ahead to the second half of the season, and for once we mean that literally.
In past seasons the All-Star break has actually been at around the two-thirds mark of the season, leaving just a final push to the finish line between the dead Monday after the All-Star Game and the playoffs.
This time around, we have a lot more to digest before play resumes Tuesday night, simply because we’ve learned so much less about the teams at this point. Most have completed 33 or 34 games thus far, which is about 20 games fewer than we’re accustomed to.
As a result, much more is left unresolved as everyone heads out of Orlando after a serviceable if unspectacular All-Star weekend. (Final grade on Orlando as an All-Star host: B-minus. Not a disaster like Atlanta or Vegas, certainly, but not a home run like New Orleans or L.A., either. While Orlando offers a great arena and reliable weather and handled the logistics well enough, everything is just way too spread out, and that sucked a lot of the energy out of the weekend.)
We’ll start today in the East, where it sure looks like a two-horse race and a bunch of teams choking on the dust of the Heat and Bulls. Miami and Chicago are the only two East teams with a 100 percent probability of making the postseason according to today’s Playoff Odds; with 27 wins already and a likely cut line around 30, both are closing in on the point at which they could lose the rest of their games and still make it.
One of those two is the East champion in 86.8 percent of our scenarios, and if anything our program is probably a bit conservative with favorites in the playoffs. It would be a huge upset if they aren’t the conference’s top two seeds, and it’s the expectation of virtually everybody that they’ll be meeting again in the conference finals.
But today let’s take a different angle and check out the potential interlopers. If it’s not Miami or Chicago in the East, it means it’s one of the other 13 teams. We can safely eliminate five of them from further discussion (Toronto, New Jersey, Detroit, Washington and Charlotte), leaving eight teams that warrant our time today.
Sorry to go all Rumsfeld on you, but the rest of the field consists of "known knowns" like Philadelphia and Indiana, and then several interesting wild cards.
Leading the way is our host from this past weekend, Orlando. The Magic currently sit in third in the conference but are facing a big decision point in the next three weeks; as you may have heard, Dwight Howard can opt out of his contract and become a free agent after the season, and he appears to have eyes for Brooklyn or Dallas.
Nonetheless, I’m hearing there’s a good chance that Orlando keeps him through the trade deadline and calls his bluff on leaving money on the table with a free-agent departure. (The oft-mooted $30 million figure isn’t exactly accurate since Howard will almost certainly get paid somehow five years from now, whether it’s by the Magic or somebody else, but a move would still cost him several million dollars, especially if he went to a state with income tax).
In fact, it’s possible that Orlando goes the opposite direction and doubles down on its bet — trading, say, low-level prospects like Justin Harper and/or Daniel Orton for a point guard who can successfully advance the ball past half court. It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy, but one that has to freak out Chicago and Miami at least a little bit — neither has a big man who can handle Howard physically, and if you go back and look at Howard’s history he has never lost a playoff series in that situation.
Further down in the standings, the one East team everybody should be watching is the Knicks. As I wrote last week, replacing the Knicks’ sub-replacement-level output at the point with star-caliber play from Jeremy Lin propels them into a much higher category of playoff opponent, and that’s before accounting for the likes of J.R. Smith and Baron Davis.
The Playoff Odds still aren’t sold, envisioning a 32-34 landing for New York, but I suspect that a fully healthy Knicks squad is capable of much more. At 17-18 they still have work to do, but a reasonable goal is to push into the top six in the East and avoid the Chicago-Miami tandem in the first round.
After those two, the most interesting team may be Atlanta. The Hawks are in a rut at the moment and may only be the sixth or seventh seed in the East by the time the playoffs roll around, but by then they’ll have Al Horford back in the lineup. Atlanta split with both Miami and Chicago before Horford went out this season, with the win over Chicago a rout and an impressive road win in Miami.
The Hawks, like Orlando, are looking to upgrade via trade but don’t have a ton to offer; their standing offer to the rest of the league to trade Marvin Williams for darn near anything has gained little traction. Any drama at the trade deadline would likely come in the form of a Josh Smith deal, although there appears to be little enthusiasm for such a move unless it returned a bona fide star.
Standing pat, even at full strength the Hawks are highly unlikely to upend Miami or Chicago, but they could give either a competitive series as they did with the Bulls a year ago.
Further down, we have defensive-minded veteran teams in Boston and Milwaukee that are trying to figure out whether they’re kicking or sticking. The Bucks are out of the money right now but hope Andrew Bogut‘s return in March can fuel a run to the playoffs; certainly the Celtics’ struggles are also fueling that enthusiasm, because it’s kept the 13-20 Bucks just 2½ games out of the playoffs.
Either team could be something of a threat if they get their older players healthy, especially if the trade deadline brings in some new blood — and both teams are expected to be active on that front. But it won’t matter much if they limp into a No. 8 seed and a first-round beatdown against Miami or Chicago.
In contrast to Milwaukee and Boston, one team that would be ecstatic to draw Miami in the first round is Cleveland. Expected to be at least a year or two away from making a postseason run, the Cavs have hung around on the fringes of the playoff race despite losing Anderson Varejao. The Playoff Odds and my own intuition both remain skeptical of their chances of sneaking in, but they remain in the race.
Which takes us back to our "known knowns" Philadelphia and Indiana. It’s very possible they will meet in the No. 4-vs.-No. 5 series in the first round, a high-quality series that nonetheless would draw 643 fans and be relegated entirely to NBA TV. (Unless there’s an NBATV2 by then.)
These are probably the two best teams in the East after Miami and Chicago, but their lack of star power has consigned them to the fringes of the NBA discussion so far. One other thing hurts them: a perceived lack of giant-killing ability. Philly played Miami twice and lost by 21 and 20; Indy suffered a similar fate, falling by 35 and 15.
Yet there’s a danger in overlooking these teams too, because they’re in a strong position to improve their hands by the March 15 trade deadline. That’s particularly true for the Pacers, who are well under the salary cap and have a glaring need for a distributor who could immediately push their offense several rungs up the ladder. Even with a sticky offense, Indiana is 21-12 despite playing 19 road games.
As for the Sixers, they were briefly atop the Power Rankings after a series of one-sided wins early in the season, and have been particularly good when center Spencer Hawes is in the lineup. In their case it’s fourth-quarter half-court offense that is the Achilles’ heel; they have few shooters and their go-to scorer, Lou Williams, is too low-percentage to be a repeatably reliable weapon in that situation — he’s basically an East Coast Monta Ellis in that respect.
Nonetheless, they too offer the prospect of dramatic improvement with the right deal, and it’s why we shouldn’t take our eye off them just yet — not with several young, desirable players whom they could put in a deal and a couple of large contracts for ballast.
In the big picture, this conference is a lot less intriguing than the West, because the possibilities for something other than Bulls-Heat just aren’t as strong. But they do exist; we still have half a season left to play, and between the trade deadline and players returning from injury, most of the East’s pretenders can offer at least the possibility of being dramatically better in May than they are today.
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