The Golden State Warriors dominated headlines throughout the season’s first seven weeks, ensuring the San Antonio Spurs would again be overlooked. And now that Gregg Popovich’s dominant team is finally getting the attention it deserves, another longtime Western Conference power has taken its place as the league’s most forgotten potential champion.
Hello, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Oklahoma City. It’s good to have you back.
The Thunder’s record won’t impress anyone. For a team accustomed to winning 60 or more games when fully healthy, that its managed a solid 16-8 record into mid-December isn’t exactly eye-opening – roster turnover and coaching change be damned.
But that surface-level takeaway ignores crucial context, namely the six games Durant missed in mid-November with a hamstring strain.
Oklahoma City has a 13-5 record with the 2014 MVP in the lineup, good for a 59-win pace. Its net rating with Durant, Westbrook, and Serge Ibaka on the floor is +16.9, the league’s best non-Warriors mark. And despite the quietly lengthy absence of Durant and other adjustments gleaned from wholesale offseason changes, the Thunder boast the third-highest adjusted point differential (SRS) in basketball.
Reminder: Oklahoma City has lost just one playoff series since 2012 when its Big Three are healthy. With Durant and Westbrook playing at MVP levels and Ibaka guiding the recent improvement of Billy Donovan’s defense, there’s ample reason for the Warriors and Spurs to fear the Thunder.
And after an undefeated week that included wins against likely playoff teams, it’s time the basketball world realizes it.
*Rankings compiled from games played between December 9 and December 16.
1. Oklahoma City Thunder (3-0)
2. Cleveland Cavaliers (2-0)
Iman Shumpert is back, Kyrie Irving is soon to follow, and Kevin Love is playing the best best basketball he has in years. The Cavaliers are on track again after a brief derailment, basically, just in time for holiday match-up against the team that beat them last June.
Speaking of the defending champions, an underrated aspect of Love’s early-season performance should be causing them some concern. Cleveland was left without any way to punish Golden State’s super-small lineup in the Finals other than on the offensive glass. Timofey Mozgov just isn’t a reliable low-post threat against even overmatched defenders, and scoring will never be Tristan Thompson’s game.
But it certainly is Love’s, and he’s doing a lot of it from a spot that could pose problems for Golden State: the block. No high-usage player in the league scores more efficiently from the post than the Cavaliers’ big man. He averages a staggering 1.20 points per possession in post-up situations, and produces at least one point on 60.4 percent of those tries – numbers well above the solid marks he notched last season.
Is that newfound proficiency an antidote to what makes the Warriors so hard to beat? Of course not. But it’s definitely a start, and something that warrants special scrutiny when Cleveland and Golden State face off on Christmas.
3. Denver Nuggets (3-0)*
Emmanuel Mudiay left his team’s game on Friday night late in the second quarter with a sprained right ankle. The Nuggets trailed Minnesota by 15 at the time of his departure, the same deficit they held as the game clock signaled halftime. How’d Denver respond? The same way it has in the two games since with the rookie floor general sidelined.
The Nuggets went on to beat the Timberwolves in overtime, then defeated the Houston Rockets on Monday and dispatched Minnesota again one day later to leave the week undefeated. At 11-14, Denver currently sits at a tidy eighth place in the Western Conference.
It’s unfair to equate the recent success of Mike Malone’s club with the absence of Mudiay. Three games is a small sample size, and it’s not exactly like the Rockets and Timberwolves are world beaters, either. But if the Nuggets remain in the playoff race as the season wears on, it will be interesting to see whether or not the teenager’s playing time declines.
Mudiay, despite some tantalizing flashes of innate court sense and rare athletic ability, hasn’t set the league on fire in his debut campaign, and Denver has been better all season long with him on the bench. If those trends continue, will upper management opt for the financial boon inevitably associated with a postseason push? Or continue playing for the future?
Time will tell. For now, though, the Nuggets’ success is all that matters. It’s been much too long since this team was respectable to be concerned with anything else.
4. Los Angeles Clippers (3-1)
Did y’all see this bizarre @JJRedick postgame interview? ? https://t.co/5mmcLZkjj3
— NBA TV (@NBATV) December 15, 2015
Just how thin is the line between losing and racing to the locker room for a post-win dance-off? J.J. Redick and the Clippers know better than anyone.
With 25 seconds left in the fourth quarter of Los Angeles’ 105-103 overtime win over the Detroit Pistons on Monday, Redick climbed Andre Drummond’s back while a free throw was in the air. The result? A pair of attempts on the other end by Detroit’s worst shooter from the charity stripe, but without the consequences normally associated with intentionally fouling an opposing player with under two minutes remaining.
Drummond missed one of the two free throws, of course, setting the stage for a game-tying triple by Redick just seconds later – and the Clippers’ dance-off following a victorious overtime win.
Los Angeles, by the way, is 8-2 since falling below .500 on November 25, righting a supposedly sinking ship. How is Doc Rivers’ team doing it? With defense, surprisingly. The Clippers 96.3 defensive rating over that timeframe ranks fifth in the league.
Is that play sustainable over the year’s duration? If so, Los Angeles’ offseason hopes of a title will once again seem somewhat realistic.
5. San Antonio Spurs (3-1)
After he became the league’s eighth all-time winningest coach and his Spurs passed Golden State for basketball’s highest point differential, Gregg Popovich was asked to explain the lack of interest in sports’ longest-running dynasty.
“We just do what we do. Same boring thing for 20 years,” he told the San Antonio Express-News. “And whatever happens, happens, and we move on.”
Sounds about right. And what’s become increasingly clear as the New Year approaches is that the “same boring thing” might mean another title for San Antonio come June.
6. Toronto Raptors (3-1)
The Raptors, still playing without Jonas Valanciunas, beat San Antonio in a hyper-competitive game last Wednesday. They won just as many games this past week as the Spurs did, too. Normally, that would mean Dwane Casey’s team should sit above Popovich’s in these rankings.
But we sat and watched Toronto blow a 26-5 lead over the Indiana Pacers on Monday – in just over six minutes of play. Paul George and company would go on to beat the Raptors 106-90.
Toronto is 8-4 since Valanciunas was lost for six weeks to a broken hand, with wins over the Spurs, Cavaliers, Clippers, and Atlanta Hawks. Before the Milwaukee Bucks finally beat Golden State last weekend, it was the Raptors who came closest to handing the reigning champions their first loss of the season.
Just what is this team? Like so many others in the East, we’re still not quite sure.
7. Chicago Bulls (3-1)
Fred Hoiberg has tinkered with his starting frontcourt for the second time this season. Derrick Rose has shorn his hair and lost a protective mask. And Joakim Noah is showing flashes of the bounce and overall athleticism that once helped him to the MVP conversation.
No matter, though, the Bulls just can’t seem to find their footing. Talent surely isn’t the problem for this team, right? After Chicago rebounded from a dismal start to defeat the lowly Philadelphia 76ers on Monday, Doug McDermott said a fiery halftime locker room was the reason for his team’s turnaround.
“It was very vocal, to be honest,” the sophomore sharpshooter told ESPN.com. “[Joakim Noah] was very heated and [Pau Gasol] actually talked up, saying we’ve got to step on teams’ throats like this, you know, that aren’t winning this year. Other teams see this film of us lollygagging the first half and they’re not scared of us. So we really wanted to change that around in the second half, and I thought we did a much better job.”
Impassioned speeches and pointed post-game quotes won’t fix what ails the Bulls. A popular preseason championship dark horse, they’ve yet to find the form that sparked so much quiet optimism less than two months ago. Though 14-8 Chicago stands second in the East, that’s not an accurate representation of this team’s performance. Net rating and adjusted point differential, for instance, place the Bulls seventh and eighth in their conference.
Will Hoiberg’s club ever figure it out? That remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, at least it has Jimmy Butler’s reliably stellar two-way play to lean on.
8. Charlotte Hornets (2-1)
It’s time to start taking the Hornets seriously.
They’re one of three teams in basketball to rank top-six in both offense and defense this season. Who are the other two? San Antonio and Golden State, of course. Charlotte turns the ball over less frequently than any other team. It commits fewer shooting fouls than everyone but the Spurs and Atlanta Hawks, and they grab an insane 80.2 percent of defensive rebounds – the league’s second-best mark.
That’s a winning formula, obviously, one that most would associate with consensus title contenders like the Cavaliers, as opposed to a relatively anonymous team missing arguably its most important defensive and offensive players.
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist won’t play this season, unfortunately, but Al Jefferson is several weeks away from returning. It remains to be seen how Steve Clifford will integrate the traditional low-post hub after his team has enjoyed such immense success in his absence. If Jefferson becomes just another piece of the puzzle for Charlotte as opposed to its biggest one, though, there still might be another step for this team to take.
And if that proves the case, the Hornets might prove even more than a thorn in the side of a more established Eastern Conference power come playoff time.
9. Indiana Pacers (2-1)
Frank Vogel deserves credit. Paul George certainly does, too. George Hill is playing the best basketball of his career, and Ian Mahinmi is a much different player than he was just a season ago. Even Monta Ellis warrants plaudits for adjusting to his new, reduced role with nary a peep of discord.
But the person whom the Pacers have to thank for their 14-9 start nearly as much as anyone is someone different altogether: C.J. Miles.
How many players in basketball can drain threes with frequency and accuracy while capably guarding multiple positions? The list is small, but it’s a single name longer after the lefty marksman’s eye-opening play over the season’s first seven weeks.
Remember the training camp fanfare that accompanied George’s move to power forward? The national audience might have forgotten altogether, which isn’t quite an indication of Indiana’s franchise player sucking it up and playing good soldier. Instead, Miles’ physical and emotional comfort banging with opposing big men – while PG-13 guards the other team’s most threatening wing – is cause for the Pacers’ easy adjustment to small ball.
He’s definitely not an All-Star, and hasn’t quite earned the distinction as one of basketball’s best role players, either. Whatever you want to call him, though, Miles has been an absolutely integral cog of Indiana’s early-season play.
10. Golden State Warriors (1-1)
This will likely be the only time all season that a team without one of the league’s top records of the past week makes these rankings. But it’s fair to make an exception for Golden State when it fell from the unbeaten, right?