Early Thoughts on the NBA Regular Season

Ahhhhh, League Pass, so good to have you back. I'm slack-ass on the Coach, MVP, DPOY and ROY picks, still mulling them over. First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on the first coupla nights of action.

I watched the Pistons beat the Hawks in Atlanta. It made me even warier of the Hawks: last year Millsap and Carroll were in contract years and Korver was smarting from getting left off the World Cup roster (I thought he should've made it), they snuck up on people and got deliriously hot in Jan-Feb. This year Horford's in a contract year but....none of that other stuff. Millsap got paid, Carroll got paid to go somewhere else, Korver can't possibly be that awesome again (can he?), they gave up on Adrian Payne, they got rid of the overly maligned Executive of the Year Danny Ferry and all they added was Tim Hardaway Jr. The Hawks will still be one of the better teams in the East but I'm not seeing a top 4 finish for them. As for the Pistons, they looked better than I would've thought. Drummond looks ready to be beastly (more of a scorer than I thought he would be) and they move the ball really well. The game was sloppy (1st game of the year) and perhaps the muddy track suited the Pistons better than the Hawks...uh, not sure that's a good sign.

I watched all of the Bulls beating the Cavs. Great defensive stops at the end by Pau and Butler but frankly it should not have been that close. The Bulls were really better at most everything that night, not to say that they're wildly better than the Cavs but they've played the Cavs tough in the regular season and I wasn't surprised to see them win their opener. And not that it was a blowout but I thought the Bulls kinda got lazy and let the Cavs sneak back into it. Two good teams that will both get better as the year progresses, not much to learn from this one, just a good game to watch.

I watched the Wizards beat the Magic. If you're looking for sneaky teams that might find their way into the playoffs in the East, the Magic could be on that list: they're young but they're really talented, they're gonna be good eventually. And this game showed all the highs and lows of that: they battled against a superior for 47 minutes but the savvy Wizards pulled it out in the end. On the one hand the Wizards are the veteran squad that got the W but on the other hand they weren't vastly superior to the Magic. In tennis you might see a final score where one guy dominated the other, but at any given point in that match the players weren't necessarily all the far apart, the better guy is one who makes the right play at the right moment. Likewise in team sports: the Wizards were better when the clock struck zero but the Magic were better for most of the time before that. The Wizards are gonna get 10-15 more wins than the Magic because they're gonna be better at the right moment but not at ALL moments.

I watched the Celtics roll the Sixers. Okafor has a marvelous debut and I still think he and Nerlens are gonna make a great tag team down low....but not any time soon. The Sixers are still built to be awful. Is this the summer when they finally look to make something happen? They'll have Embiid, Saric, a top 5 pick and a ton of cap space to work with....do they want to be any good? As for the Celtics, they were the Celtics, rolling the Sixers is something they should do with ease and they did.

I did not watch the Nuggets drub the Rockets in Houston (105-85, yipes!) but I'm curious: wtf happened there? A look at the box score shows that all the Rockets shot horribly, it could be the pesky Nuggets brought the tenacious D but I'm guessing the Rockets were just sluggish, a team wide 'flu-like symptoms' let's say. This cannot be a harbinger game: I say the Nuggets are the worst in the West, the Rockets could quite possibly be the best, this lopsided, weird-ass game changes nothing in my mind, so I'm just not even gonna watch it.

I watched the Knicks drub the Bucks in Milwaukee. Weird game: neither Porzingis nor Melo did much of anything in this game and still NYK won by 25 on the road? Uhhhhh....wha...wha happened? The Bucks were without Antetokounpo or Jabari and, man, in case you'd forgotten: MCW cannot score to save his life! Its like he's allergic to the basket. I thought Greg Monroe looked good for the Bucks but without Parker down low and some Greek freakin' on the perimeter, the Bucks just looked stagnant offensively and out of sorts defensively. I'll chalk up the poor D to opening night sweats and a depleted core. As for the Knicks: hey man, Derrick Williams looked good. Look: the term 'bust' is a tricky one because it doesn't refer to the play on the court as much as to his place in the draft order. Williams had too many expectations thrust upon him and got bounced around the league like an orphan but that doesn't mean he's a bad player, he's just not the player we'd been led to believe he was going to be. Draft order can be a curse (just ask Thomas Robinson and Anthony Bennett) but take it easy when you're throwing 'bust' around--Williams was pretty good in Sacramento last year, you just didn't notice because it took place in Sacramento! O'quinn, too, looked ready to be a baller but one observation: felt like he went out of his way to not give Porzingis the ball, was I just imagining that? At the end of the day, the Bucks still have more upside than the Knicks and I fully expect the Bucks to be the better team throughout the season.

I watched the Clippers over the Kings. Man, I thought the Kings looked so awful early on that I don't know how this was even a game. As I watched I just couldn't believe that the Clippers weren't winning by 400 points and in the 4th quarter the Kings actually came back and took the lead! The Clippers had to work to pull it out in the end...and I have no idea why it took so much effort. The Kings looked awful, way awful, awful-er than usual. Cousins was trying too hard, Rondo doesn't try hard enough, McLemore was non-existent for most of the game, Cauley-Stein is such a poor fit for this team--the Kings might be much worse than I thought. Still, though, they had a lead late in the 4th quarter, no idea how that came to be.

Watched the Wolves beat the Lakers. The Lakers were the better team for almost all of this game, not sure how they pissed it away at the end. Rubio confidently knocking down jumpers--where did that come from?!?  I think Towns is gonna be really good, Wiggins looks like a legit DPOY-type player, I still think the Wolves are in lottery territory but they get might good faster than you think. As for the Lakers, they're a slopfest, man. They've got some talent and some tenacity, they'll win a few games, but they're not any good. They're not really a tank-type team and I'm not seeing any notable trade assets there (I expect Roy Hibbert to be on a playoff team come April though). But they'll be rolling off a lot of salary this summer, maybe they'll be the Lakers again....some day.