BDL’s Most Interesting Power Rankings: Golden State is self-aware
Let’s face it — the best and most powerful teams in the NBA don’t really change from week to week. A handful of results in the middle of winter can only mean so much to a franchise’s championship hopes. What does shift regularly, though, is how much interest a squad can hold over the course of a season. Every Monday, BDL’s Most Interesting Power Rankings track the teams most worthy of your attention.
THE TOP 15
1. Golden State Warriors (44-4; last week: 2)
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The Golden State Warriors nearly lost to the Philadelphia 76ers on Saturday night, on the first night of a back to back and after two travel-heavy nights off. All-Star forward Draymond Green, following a 10-point, 13-rebound, nine-assist and seven-turnover night, was typically candid following the conquest:
“We definitely should have lost, and it was all my fault,” Green said. “I was selfishly unselfish, if you know what [that] means. And so we started turning the ball over, due to my self[ish] unselfishness, and it was all downhill from there. In other words, I was chasing a triple-double. Coach came to me at halftime like, ‘You better get it in this third quarter, ’cause you ain’t playing in the fourth,’ and it was all downhill from there. So definitely my fault, what went on tonight. Good thing we were able to get the win. Only right I was able to make a play after causing us to be in that position.”
This is why this team remains so endlessly compelling. “Ha-ha, Philly is awful”-jokes aside, the Warriors are going to be doing more of this as the final two and a half months of the season moves along – a season that then rolls into what most expect to be a two-month postseason for the defending champs. It’s not just going to happen on an anonymous Saturday in January against a tanking team, with the rest of the NBA watching the Cavaliers and Spurs. There will be issues in most outposts, as this team tries to motivate itself while staving off nature red in tooth and claw.
And that’s just fine. As things stand now, the Warriors would have to finish the season on a 29-5 tear in order to break the record for most wins in a season. We call that a “tear” because winning eighty-five percent of a team’s professional basketball games is a freaking “tear.” That sort of run equates to a 70-win season.
It’s a testament to how great that 1995-96 Chicago Bulls team was, and how great this Warrior team is – most expect Golden State, barring injury, to pull it off.
They’ll have to keep ennui at arm’s length, though, and they’ll need to consider the value of resting key players. Festus Ezili is already a question mark, sadly. Two consecutive years of all-out, 100-plus game basketball is no joke. Nobody understands this better than coach Steve Kerr, who signed on with a Chicago Bulls team that had just lost a weary Michael Jordan to retirement, then watched as further retirement rumors continued unabated upon MJ’s return.
February doesn’t have to act as the dog days. There’s still room for fascination.
In the meantime, this somehow managed to happen even before February hit:
2. Toronto Raptors (32-15; last week: 5)
This is a team with a coach that sends shout-outs to Eric Koreen. This isn’t a hit-piece, we swear.
(Maybe it is.)
The Raps responded to a loss to the Cavaliers on Jan. 4 with an ongoing 11-game winning streak. Seven of those wins came at home, and with the exception of a quality win over a Blake Griffin-less Clipper-squad, each of the victories came against middling-to-awful Eastern squads.
Still, with Chicago and Atlanta both losing on Sunday, the Raptors are six and a half games up (respectively) on the other Eastern hopefuls. The team is making its hay when it’s supposed to, ensuring that any future swoon wouldn’t put them in a position to have to face Cleveland in the second round of the playoffs.
Presuming the Raptors get there. And presuming any upcoming swoon doesn’t hit hard.
Even if this roster has its holes, it’s still easy to see growing potential in this squad, especially as various experiments with Jonas Valanciunas and Patrick Patterson play out. Cory Joseph is a proper sparkplug, and DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry are playing killer basketball. The team has five road games between now and the All-Star break, and you’ll have a hard time convincing me that contests against Denver, Phoenix, Portland, Detroit and Minnesota aren’t all winnable.
As in, “16 wins in a row,”-winnable.
(Watch as they lose them all. I just ruined everything for everyone in Canada right before TNT’s big Sting concert.)
3. Cleveland Cavaliers (34-12; last week: 1)
All the enmity tossed toward LeBron James and former coach David Blatt in the wake of Blatt’s firing was deserved. James never pushed to give Blatt’s offense a chance and he cost a coach his job as a result, and Blatt had to go following a season and a half that saw equal amounts kowtowing and weird, brusque statements that turned an entire team (if not an NBA community) off.
Once you get past that and back into the games, though, this ongoing experiment deserves your attention. The Cavs are 4-1 under Tyronn Lue, with power forward Kevin Love blossoming of late, even if he still can’t articulate what, exactly, he’s supposed to be doing out there:
“I still don’t know how to answer it,” Love said when asked again how to define his role. “We’re all just out there playing and making good reads and being good basketball players. It starts with Bron. As far as basketball IQ goes I don’t think there’s anybody better, nobody has a better basketball IQ than him. Kryie [Irving] is out there playing. He seems to be finding his way after coming off that injury. We have guys who play off them. I can’t tell you enough how fun they make the game and when we play like that it just opens up everything for us.”
It took James’ Miami Heat 185 games to get its act together. If you stepped down from the time machine to tell me that LeBron and the Cavaliers just beat the Warriors in a six-game 2016 NBA Finals, I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest.
I’d be a little dismayed that you used a time machine to make your way to the first day of February in the middle of Indiana, but the basketball end of things I can handle. The Cavs still have room to grow.
4. Portland Trail Blazers (22-26; last week: not ranked)
If the glass is half-empty, Portland looks to be one of those half-steppers. The kind that can’t run a proper rebuilding project because they dared not to be terrible this season in the wake of LaMarcus Aldridge’s departure. The squad still doesn’t play defense, Damian Lillard was snubbed out of an All-Star appearance, and they might miss out on a high end lottery pick.
Five-year plans are not the focus at this point in the season, though, as the Blazers continue to confound defenses with an offense that has thrilled during the 2016 calendar year. The team has won seven of nine and four straight overall, and their ability to delight deep into a League Pass evening is much appreciated.
Better yet? Lillard’s about to go off. There’s a reason he torched Kobe Bryant’s Lakers on Saturday: Mamba cost him an All-Star berth.
5. Miami Heat (27-21; last week: 11)
The Heat’s much-anticipated road swing (11 trips in 12 dates) is over, and the team … y’know, it didn’t do all that poorly! Five wins in 12 tries shouldn’t act as the end of things, and with Sunday’s impressive win over a lackluster Hawks squad, the Heat somehow rank fourth in the East. They survived.
What happens from here on out is crucial. President Pat Riley has never been afraid to make February deals, and the uncertain futures of Luol Deng and Hassan Whiteside would, in another era (some would say, “Riley’s era”), make the Heat sellers in what is still an uncertain trade deadline season. With Whiteside’s low salary and Bird-rights complications and Deng’s ongoing bad injury luck, though, who is lining up to talk these things out?
The stay in Florida will be a brief one, it should be noted. Miami has watchable road contests against Houston, Dallas and Charlotte coming up, which will finally leave them having played more road contests than home dates on the season.
6. San Antonio Spurs (39-8; last week: 4)
It’s easy to overestimate this team’s ability to outsmart us. Gregg Popovich and the Spurs have led the league in clever for years now, so nobody should be mocked for thinking that his team needed a midseason wakeup call after all the fawning that (deservedly) derived from the team’s hot start.
Tim Duncan could just be out with a knee injury, and nothing more. Not rest, not a chance to move LaMarcus Aldridge into better defensive habits, and not a lesson to both league and team alike about how important Duncan is. That didn’t stop Coach Pop from reminding us of as much on Saturday, though. From Jeff McDonald at the San Antonio Express-News:
“He’s our base from which everything else emanates,” coach Gregg Popovich said. “Everybody else knows how to operate based on who he is and what he does. That’s my biggest concern in the game, really — him not being there for everybody to move around.”
Popovich calls Duncan “the center of the universe” in terms of the Spurs’ defensive scheme.
The Spurs never were catching the Golden State Warriors, and the team still has eight days to go before its vaunted rodeo road trip (that will be thankfully broken up by the All-Star break), so perhaps this is good a time as any for a refresher course in the importance of the best player of his generation.
7. Oklahoma City Thunder (36-13; last week: 6)
The Thunder play Golden State on Saturday. That’s really all you need to know. We probably should have this team tied for first.
8. Boston Celtics (27-22; last week: 13)
Boston’s five-game winning streak came to an end on Sunday with a surprisingly offensively-potent loss to the Magic, but the league’s second-ranked defense remains a fun little watch. Dynamo stoppers Avery Bradley, Marcus Smart and Jae Crowder aren’t as big as Kawhi Leonard’s hands, but they still take on all comers, and the fact that the league’s coaches voted Isaiah Thomas into the All-Star Game as a reserve should be telling.
The squad’s trip to Cleveland on Friday should be must-watch television. We could see the return of Angry LeBron.
9. Los Angeles Clippers (32-16; last week: 8)
Say this about the Clippers: Los Angeles has one of the league’s most loquacious owners, most talkative coach/general managers, and the team is all over social media. The shooting guard just got a damn podcast. For them to manage to keep the Blake Griffin story relatively in-house (we don’t even know what restaurant Blake was at) is more than impressive. That’s a genuine shout-out.
(And, seriously, this J.J. Redick podcast is going to be great.)
There’s also the part where the team has won five of seven with Jamal Crawford – 14 1/2 years after his ACL tear – taking it to the team that chased him out of Chicago back in 2004.
10. Chicago Bulls (26-20; last week: 12)
Chicago had two days off in Los Angeles and it showed on Sunday afternoon in that same loss to the Clippers. The team alternated fantastic defensive close-outs with out-and-out lazy play, though the squad’s backcourt still managed to make sure the points per game average stayed afloat. After the game, Pau Gasol barked a little more:
After the fourth-quarter fade was complete, the Bulls expressed plenty of frustration in the locker room.
“We’re not disciplined; we’re not,” Pau Gasol said, according to bulls.com. “That’s it. It’s true. That’s a fact.”
Chicago is a mess. Sometimes, it’s fun to watch.
11. Indiana Pacers (25-22; last week: 26)
The Pacers have steadily ramped rookie Myles Turner’s minutes up in his first healthy month back (including six consecutive double-figure point outings off the pine), and it paid off in the form of two starting nods in the team’s last two games. In two wins, Turner averaged 14 points and 7.5 boards in 33 minutes, with five total blocks.
This guy is incredibly fun to watch dash around, and he’ll get a chance to act as the whirring objector in Indiana’s meeting with the Cavaliers on Monday.
12. Utah Jazz (21-25; last week: not ranked)
Finally healthy after a frustrating rookie season, here is what Rodney Hood is pulling off:
A steal at No. 23 in the 2014 draft, could Hood act as the swingman help the Jazz have been dying for ever since Jeff Hornacek retired?
13. New Orleans Pelicans (18-28; last week: not ranked)
Even after a daunting early schedule and even more hellacious run of injuries, the Pelicans (even at 10 games under .500!) are just three games out of the Western playoff bracket. This squad was built to win now, but judging by the roster and the squad’s play one wouldn’t be shocked to witness a demolition plan in February.
With that in place, is general manager Dell Demps going to possible submarine his own career arc by diving down the standings yet again? More important, who wants these guys? Teams figure they can get Ryan Anderson as a free agent this summer, just as many squads are scared of Jrue Holiday’s frustrating leg woes, as they are Eric Gordon’s knee. Omer Asik, sadly, seems a bit of an anachronism in 2016. The Pels could be sellers, but who is going to talk themselves into playing ball with NOLA?
14. New York Knicks (23-27; last week: not ranked)
Golden State’s comfortable win over New York on Sunday, coming on the second night of a back-to-back, showed Knicks fans just how far this team has to go.
Still, look how far this team has come.
New York is three games out of the playoff bracket in an improved Eastern Conference. This time last year the franchise was dumping unwanted players for next to nothing, while shamelessly pushing Carmelo Anthony to the brink of the New York-held All-Star Game before the mutual decision to shut him down.
The Knicks have holes, but they also have something to sell. It might not be this summer, but 2017’s free agent turn isn’t that far away, and Kristaps Porzingis will be just 21 when it comes time to meet with prospective teammates.
15. Atlanta Hawks (27-22; last week: not ranked)
The trade talk, let’s be honest, is out there. This isn’t 1997, when Mitch Richmond may have been unaware of what Peter Vecsey was writing out in New York. The Hawks players are no doubt aware of the team’s status as trade deadline sellers, and also cognizant of the idea that coach-as-GM types (like Atlanta Hawk coach-as-GM Mike Budenholzer) are more likely to pull a trigger.
The issue here, in spite of the team’s indifferent showing in a loss to Miami on Sunday, is that Budenholzer mostly likes his guys. This isn’t like Larry Brown pushing to trade everyone for Tyrone Hill after a four-point loss. Yes, Budenholzer and Jeff Teague may have their moments, but does the coach really want to hand the keys over to Dennis Schroeder? The Hawks have played darn well with Schroeder this season, but initial impressions die hard, and Atlanta could stay quiet.
This team, for those that don’t care to watch games but love re-tweeting #WojBombs, could tilt all of February.
THE BOTTOM FIVE
26. Houston Rockets (25-25; last week: 9)
Dwight Howard returned from an ankle injury in time to participate in Houston’s three-game losing streak. There’s hardly any shame in losing to San Antonio and Oklahoma City in their respective buildings, but to do so by a combined 39 points is a bit much. The home loss to Houston on Saturday night was rather rough to watch, as the Wizards chalked up a season-high in points.
The Rockets have done well to claw back up to .500, but you still get the feeling that the entire team is waiting on the summer, and for Daryl Morey to give the rotation yet another star to work with. They might be disappointed, and in the interim this has not been a fun team to watch.
27. Los Angeles Lakers (9-41; last week: 28)
If this were a ranking of disappointments, the Lakers would be lower due to the squad’s fitful attempts to develop the team’s two (come on; Julius Randle played 14 minutes last year) rookies. The ongoing Kobe Bryant farewell tour, however, keeps them afloat. You still get a chance to see fleeting reminders of some of the greatest footwork in NBA history, the Staples Center experience is still engaging, and D’Angelo Russell has played much better over the last month.
It’s still disheartening, though, to behold the Byron Scott purgatory season.
But I thought confidence oh never mind forget it.
28. Orlando Magic (21-25; last week: not ranked)
The Magic did well to win on Sunday in the face of a tilting Boston squad that had downed them just two nights before. For the first time in weeks, Orlando was an entertaining watch, and not just because of the 119 points they managed. Scott Skiles’ offense, even while misguided at times, still involves plenty of ball movement.
That loss snapped an eight-game losing streak, though. The Magic’s turn-the-corner season is not going according to plan.
29. Brooklyn Nets (12-36; last week: 29)
Orlando’s last win, prior to the Celtic conversion, came against these Nets. The team showed some life to start the week by taking down the snowed-in Thunder in Brooklyn, and it competed in a loss to Miami on Tuesday, but the status quo remains for this squad – one that has lost nine of 11 games under interim coach Tony Brown.
30. Philadelphia 76ers (7-41; last week: 30)
Sixers games are not the slog to behold that they once were, as evidenced by the team’s borderline anarchic fun-run against the Warriors on Saturday. There are too many players, however, whose names you won’t have to remember past July. Until the trade deadline passes, this still leaves squads like the Nets and Lakers ahead of Philadelphia when it comes to a viewer’s important time tracking this league.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
