Doing a Power Rankings type of thing is something I’ve been debating about doing. On the one hand, I’m a rabid fan of not just the Trail Blazers, but the whole NBA; I care almost as much about what percentage Kyrie Irving shot on Monday, how many minutes the Greek Freak played for Milwaukee on Tuesday, the evil shake-and-bake move Kevin Durant put on Andre Iguodala on Wednesday, or the great lockdown defense of the Memphis Grizzlies on Thursday as I do how many points LaMarcus Aldridge put up on Friday.
On the other hand, I’ve done Power Rankings before, and have never really enjoyed writing them or reading them, really. They seem somewhat arbitrary to me. By the time the Dallas Mavericks dropped seven slots in (insert Random Person’s Rankings here), those with their eyes open, like me, could already tell they had a terrible week.
There’s also the fact that this is a place for local content. While the occasional foray into what teams outside the Pacific Northwest are doing is tolerated, I don’t want to get into the habit of that out of respect for what we’re trying to provide for you, the local reader.
After two solid weeks of ruminating, two things came to mind:
The Blazers are a contending team, vying for supremacy in the Western Conference. If Portland were a rebuilding team, like the Milwaukee Bucks or the Orlando Magic, I’d only feel comfortable highlighting what the Blazers would be doing–the team wouldn’t have any impact on the league in terms of being competitive this year, so the only fair thing to do would be highlighting the progress the young players were making week-by-week. For those types of teams, that’s what the fans care about…the hard-core fans, anyway.
However, Portland has emerged as a force in the West. The Blazers are just one powerful team out of many, though. And I do mean many; last season, Dallas qualified for the 8th and last spot in the playoffs with a 49-33 record, one ahead of the Phoenix Suns. Winning 16 more games than you lose is a very good season by any measure–doing that last year in the West barely qualified a team for the playoffs. That’s insane.
Keeping up with the Joneses is a favorite habit of fans of good teams, and if I could do my little bit to help with that, I will.
Also, I won’t do it every week. The thought of doing a weekly Power Ranking is too much for me to stomach; plus, anyone can find ten weekly editions other people are doing, easy (The Power of Google!) I’m thinking about listing the teams I think are doing well, the teams treading water, and the teams I can smell rotting from here every few weeks or so, as well as at certain milestones during the NBA season (Christmas, All-Star break, etc.).
The only thing I know for sure is that it won’t be weekly. Other than that, it’s pretty much whenever I feel like it.
With all that out of the way, here’s my NBA Preseason Power Rankings:
1. San Antonio Spurs: The NBA Champions got a year older, but that’s the only negative. Gregg Popovich is the best coach, Tim Duncan is still making an impact when the Spurs need him to, and Tony Parker is the premier pick-and-roll point guard in basketball. (Chris Paul might have an argument, but when he wins an NBA ring as the best player on his team–something Parker just did a few months ago–I’ll think about listening.)
The Spurs’ depth is their real strength. They just come at you in waves, and that strategy wore down Portland, Oklahoma City, and Miami in the playoffs last year. Those squads were all top-heavy teams. I’m not sure if that strategy will work this year or in the future, but I won’t be surprised if it does, either.
2. Oklahoma City Thunder: Grrrr, this team can get on my nerves. There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t curse the arrogance of GM Sam Presti, the incompetence of coach Scott Brooks, or the Gary Payton-esque qualities of Russell Westbrook. Westbrook, in particular, seems to lift his team up almost as often as he undos it. (I also don’t need to tell any Seattleites that OKC’s owner is a cheap pile of sleaze.)
All that stuff is shoved to the backseat when I watch Kevin Durant play. His growth from skinny teenager to scoring champion to MVP and bona fide superstar has been awesome to see.
If Presti doesn’t turn the Reggie Jackson situation into James Harden Part 2, and if Brooks finally realizes Kendrick Perkins would have a better chance of giving live birth to dinosaurs than playing decent NBA basketball, and if Westbrook can stay on the court, Durant can have the best chance possible to return to the Finals.
(Note: Durant fractured his foot and is out 6-8 weeks. We’ll see if the Thunder really are an elite team, or if it’s just Durant being historically incredible).
3. Cleveland Cavaliers: So the Cavs are the league’s newest super team. In the long-term, this is a huge deal in the NBA. Short-term? They won’t win the title this year, despite the ridiculous odds Vegas is giving them.
Like with James’ former team, the Miami Heat, it will take time to mesh the talents of these great players, especially two young guys in Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love that have hogged the ball all their lives. They can’t do that if Cleveland’s to go where LeBron wants them to go. Their potentially slack defense could bite them in the playoffs as well.
The Cavs will win multiple titles as LeBron winds down his prime years, but it won’t happen yet.
4. Los Angeles Clippers: The Clippers’ issues of past years are gone now. No leadership on the court? Paul’s now on the team. Crappy coaching? Vinny Del Negro was replaced by Doc Rivers, who proved once and for all that he’s not only a great coach, but a better leader and man. No rim protection? Rivers turned DeAndre Jordan, a big man with potential and nothing else, into the NBA leader in rebounds per game and field-goal percentage, as well as a menacing monster on the defensive end capable of making guys eat the ball whenever they drove to the hoop. Racist and disgusting human being owning your team? Donald Sterling was forced to sell the Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
There are no more excuses for Chris Paul or the Clippers. If they don’t win the title this year, it will be because of this simple fact: They’re not good enough.
5. Chicago Bulls: Forget about the multitude of offseason additions the Bulls made. The issue that will make or break their year is Derrick Rose. The last time he was seen on an NBA court was right in this very city, when he tore his right knee playing against the Blazers last December.
Rose doesn’t need to be an MVP for the Bulls to win a title, but he has to make an impact at all times on the court. If he’s unable to do so, or if (God forbid) he gets hurt yet again, Chicago will fall into the same old scrappy-yet-not-good-enough mode they’ve been consigned to the last two years.
6. Golden State Warriors: Much has been said of the Warriors’ refusal to trade for Love when Minnesota first made him available. Some folks (count me in this group) say that sacrificing Klay Thompson and their other young pieces to add Love would be a mistake; Stephen Curry and Kevin Love would be your two best players, and as awesome as they would be offensively, in the playoffs their lack of defensive aptitude would be exploited ruthlessly.
Others say it was idiotic to not add a top-ten player in Love just because Golden State liked Thompson too much. The one sure method of proof is time, and time will tell whether the Warriors were right or wrong to keep the Splash Brothers together.
7. Portland Trail Blazers: Optimism hasn’t been this high in Rip City since I was in high school, and I’m 28 now. ESPN even came by the Blazers’ practice facility to speak with Damian Lillard and LaMarcus Aldridge, as well as slap together a four-minute montage of Portland’s 2013-14 campaign.
Whether the Blazers build on all that positive impetus will depend on Lillard and the young guys on the bench, specifically their development. They’ll be the difference in whether Portland stays in this second-tier of teams, or joins the Spurs, Thunder and Clippers as legitimate threats to win it all.
8. Dallas Mavericks: This team is going to be fun to watch and disgusting to play against. A starting lineup of Jameer Nelson, Monta Ellis, Chandler Parsons, Dirk Nowitzki and Tyson Chandler, backed up by a good bench and a great coach in Rick Carlisle, is something every team in the league will want to avoid like the plague, I promise.
If the Western Conference wasn’t a murderer’s row of excellent teams, I’d easily declare the Mavs a contender in the West. This year, however, they’re a dark horse that needs one or two lucky breaks.
9. Memphis Grizzlies: With Marc Gasol getting hurt last year, people forgot about Memphis very quickly even though they’d eliminated the Spurs in 2012, advanced to the Conference Finals in 2013 and pushed the Thunder to the very brink in last season’s playoffs.
The Grit and Grind Grizzlies are right in that dark horse territory the Blazers and Mavs occupy; they’re not championship contenders in the traditional sense, but that doesn’t mean they can’t stuff you down the nearest gopher hole if you’re not careful.
10. Houston Rockets: Remember me mentioning I disliked Thunder GM Sam Presti because he’s arrogant? Take that feeling, replace Presti with Rockets GM Daryl Morey, and multiply it by 10.
Morey is a slave to analytics, to the point that he sees people as numbers instead of, well, people. He doesn’t understand that how five basketball players work together on the court is as important as the spots where certain players are most successful shooting from.
He says the Spurs are the organization he wants to emulate, but San Antonio mixes their own incredible aptitude for analytics with an understanding of how players work together. As long as Morey and the Rockets continue to struggle with chemistry issues, they’ll continue to get results like the one Damian Lillard served them in May.
11. Toronto Raptors: Fan slogans tend to be corny and over-the-top, understandably so. Fan is short for “fanatic,” after all. But I have to admit, Toronto’s hash tag #WeTheNorth was not only unifying and clever, but a reflection of a fan base and city that’s lain dormant for far too long.
Did you know Toronto’s the fourth-largest city in North America? Having a good team up there means more to a sports league than most Americans realize, and with Kyle Lowry, Demar DeRozen, and the rest of the Raptors’ young but improving crew, we might be hearing “We The North!” from Toronto for a long while.
12. Washington Wizards: Although Bradley Beal hurt his wrist recently, the East is weak enough to let me put the Wiz here without sweating too much.
With John Wall, Marcin Gortat, Nene when healthy, and a solid bench headlined by future Hall-of-Famer Paul Pierce, Washington has the horses to keep things afloat until Beal returns after six weeks.
13. Charlotte Hornets: This team was as much a surprise in the East as the Blazers were in the West last season, relative to expectations. The former Bobcats set the NBA record for lowest winning percentage just two years ago, but after signing Al Jefferson, hiring Steve Clifford, and getting improvement from point guard Kemba Walker, Charlotte transformed into Grizzlies East: a tough, defensive-minded unit that made you work for everything you got on the court.
With another year in Clifford’s system, and the signing of combustible yet talented guard Lance Stephenson, the rebranded Hornets look to make a much greater impact this season.
14. Miami Heat: This will be the true test for Coach Erik Spoelstra: without LeBron James, can he make this team a contender in the East?
With Chris Bosh, whatever’s left of Dwyane Wade, and a couple free-agent pickups in Josh McRoberts and Danny Granger, the Heat are good enough to be a playoff team, easy. But the loss of the world’s best basketball player, and best athlete of my generation, means Miami’s run of four straight Finals appearances is all but ended.
15. Atlanta Hawks: After Al Horford tore his pectoral muscle for the second straight year, Atlanta had to scratch and claw just to make the postseason. Coach Mike Budenholzer employed an unusual variation of Miami’s “Five-Wide” offensive formation by placing five average-to-great 3-point shooters on the floor, stretching defenses like Silly Putty, and letting underrated point guard Jeff Teague go to work.
Budenholzer had to resort to such drastic measures because of Horford’s injury, but with the tent-pole big man back and healthy, Atlanta looks to put it’s front-office troubles behind it.
16. Phoenix Suns: Speaking of unusual teams, the Suns employed two point guards in their starting lineup last season, as well as choosing to go without a traditional center at times.
The result was a run-and-gun team that came very close to making the playoffs last year, finishing 48-34. Goran Dragic and Eric Bledsoe were the guards behind the explosive offense, and now they have Isaiah Thomas, the former Sacramento King, backing them up. I don’t know if Phoenix can replicate last season’s Vortex of Awesome, but I do know they’ll score so many points, they’ll break a few scoreboards this season.
17. Brooklyn Nets: The Nets seem to be a team in shambles. Brook Lopez has foot issues (the worst issues for a center to have), Kevin Garnett is 100 years old, Deron Williams hasn’t been a top-five point guard since he forced Jerry Sloan, the legendary Utah Jazz coach, to retire, and Joe Johnson isn’t good enough to justify the mammoth contract that mercifully is about to run out.
I place them at 17 because if Lopez can stay healthy, new coach Lionel Hollins (a member of Portland’s renowned 1977 championship team) can drag this team to a playoff berth and give the Nets a couple more home games’ worth of revenue before the Cavs, Bulls, Raptors or Hornets summarily dispatch them. If Lopez gets hurt again, Brooklyn will likely lose 55 games.
18. Denver Nuggets: Brian Shaw, by all accounts, is a very good coach. In Los Angeles and Indiana, you’ve only ever heard good things about Shaw from the players he’s worked with and the people he’s worked for.
In Denver, however, Shaw was a strange hire and an even stranger fit. The Nuggets, from mighty mite Ty Lawson, to Kenneth Faried, to JaVale McGee, have a team that screams to any sane basketball person, “THIS TEAM SHOULD RUN!!!!!” Yet Shaw was brought up in Phil Jackson’s triangle offense, then worked in Indiana, factory of anemic offensive output.
Denver has a team full of offensive players chafing under a defensive coach. A coach is much easier to replace than a roster, and in the end, it wouldn’t surprise me if Shaw was fired before the end of the season, especially if the Nuggets start badly.
19. New York Knicks: Carmelo Anthony can bleat all he wants about staying in New York because of the chance to do something special, playing for Phil Jackson, blah blah blah. The real reason he stayed was because owner James Dolan backed up a dump truck full of money and dumped it on Anthony’s lap.
As he wastes another year playing with bad teammates, I wonder if Melo will regret that decision. The real test will come next year, when the Knicks will have huge amounts of cap space, and the ability to build a true team for the first time since I hit puberty.
20. Indiana Pacers: Do not Google Paul George if you value your lunch. The horrific broken leg he suffered during Team USA duty in the summer, coupled with Stephenson’s departure, all but slammed the Pacers’ window of opportunity shut.
George is another player I really enjoy watching, and his injury was a blow to my heart. Get well, PG. The NBA is a better league with you in it, and not just because you make the Pacers semi-watchable.
21. New Orleans Pelicans: Anthony Davis got a running buddy in Omer Asik, the Turkish center who’s as good on defense as he is limited on offense. Asik’s arrival, coupled with a dose of good health on the team’s perimeter, should allow Davis to finally tap into his immense offensive potential while remaining a defensive terror.
This is year five of Monty Williams’ coaching tenure, and it has to be said that if he can’t craft a top-10 defense with Davis, Asik, and Jrue Holliday wrapping opposing point guards in a straitjacket, he should be fired.
22. Detroit Pistons: We were SO CLOSE to having Andre Drummond on the Blazers. He was taken ninth by Detroit in 2012, which means we were one Joe Dumars brain fart away from getting our center of the future along with Damian Lillard. Imagine a starting lineup of Lillard, Wesley Matthews, Nicolas Batum, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Drummond. Drool.
Drummond is a beast with all the tools needed to become the next Dwight Howard, and he has the man that developed Howard, Stan Van Gundy, coaching him. If the Pistons can undo the shoddy roster building work Dumars did before he was fired, they’ll become a good team someday.
23. Minnesota Timberwolves: It always sucks to trade away a great player, but the Wolves did the best they could under the circumstances they were shoved into. Having Andrew Wiggins, Zach Levine, and a hopefully in-shape Anthony Bennett running alongside Ricky Rubio should be a fun diversion for Minnesota fans while the team beings yet another rebuilding project.
Personally, having Flip Saunders, the man who coached Kevin Garnett in Minnesota, run the team would make me queasy if I were a T-Wolves fan. He can’t be worse than the terrible David Kahn, but I’m not sure if he’s much better.
24. Boston Celtics: Until Celtics GM Danny Ainge decides what to do with mercurial (and injured again) point guard Rajon Rondo, Boston’s in a state of limbo. Coach Brad Stevens, meanwhile, will continue to learn, grow, and lose with the young team he’s got. They have good pieces, but Ainge is taking his sweet time putting them together.
25. Los Angeles Lakers: Kobe Bryant is an irrational, psychotically competitive sociopath. Keep that fact in mind whenever you hear him talk about the 2014-15 edition of the Lakers.
Bryant thinks a team with Jeremy Lin, Carlos Boozer, an injured Nick Young and a rookie Julius Randle can contend. Everyone else thinks a team with Jeremy Lin, Carlos Boozer, an injured Nick Young, a rookie Julius Randle and an old Kobe Bryant will be lucky to win 30 games.
26. Sacramento Kings: No one on God’s green Earth knows what this front office is up to. Going from Isaiah Thomas, a guy who scored 20 PPG last year, to a guy in Darren Collison who was beat out for a job on the Clippers by Jordan Farmar? What!?
The Kings say it’s to improve their defense, but since Collison never made an impact on that end in his career, that’s more a shot at Thomas’ 5-10 stature than anything. I’m sorry, but dumping your leading scorer simply because he’s my height tells me you don’t have a darned clue how to run an NBA team.
27. Utah Jazz: Utah plopped $15 million-plus per year on Gordon Heyward in the offseason, matching Charlotte’s offer sheet. The Jazz had oodles of cap space, so they could easily absorb the overpay for Heyward and remain what they are: a young talented team that needs a heaping pile of seasoning.
It helps tremendously that Tyrone Corbin no longer coaches that team. He had a habit of playing veterans, and when you’re a 30-win team playing a bunch of old guys, you’re an NBA laughingstock that’s going nowhere. Quin Snyder might not be a better coach than Corbin overall, but he’s a better fit for this team, and that’s all Utah cares about at this point.
28. Orlando Magic: Orlando is basically Utah East: get a bunch of young guys together, get a young coach, and see if they grow together. The Magic, however, are further along this path than the Jazz, and it’s time to see slightly better results from Jacque Vaughn and his coaching staff.
Victor Oladipo, Elfrid Payton (and his marvelous hair) and Nikola Vucevic form the core of a roster that will take some serious lumps, but with the last vestiges of the Dwight Howard era now wiped from the roster, the Magic can go all-in with their young guys.
29. Milwaukee Bucks: Last season was a horror story for the Bucks. The defensive maven of a center they gave a huge contract extension to, Larry Sanders, broke his fist in a bar fight, was cited for cruelty to animals, clashed with coach Larry Drew, and eventually sat out the year. O.J. Mayo, the veteran shooting guard they overpaid to come to Milwaukee, did squat diddly.
The Bucks had the league’s worst record, even with Philadelphia fielding a minor-league team. Drew was forced out by Jason Kidd, the former Nets coach who the Bucks acquired via trade while Drew was still the coach.
If it weren’t for the Greek Freak, there would be no reason to watch the Bucks. But Giannis Antetokounmpo is totally worth watching. The 6-11 teenager is a blank canvas just waiting to be painted on. I just hope Kidd’s the right painter.
30. Philadelphia 76ers: I’m not exaggerating when I say this team’s deliberately trying to lose. Even though Michael Carter-Williams and Nerlens Noel have potential, the Sixers’ other young guys–Joel Embiid and Dario Saric–won’t play this year. Saric, in fact, likely won’t come over from Croatia until 2016.
Surrounding MCW and Noel are guys who’d have trouble making teams in Europe, never mind the NBA. Philly’s looking for great lottery odds, but that’s a hard sell to a fan base that isn’t known for its patience. If I were a Sixers fan, I’d encourage them to not buy a single ticket–make these bums play in an empty arena.
It’s the only fitting response for the disgusting, vile travesty of a basketball product GM Sam Hinkie is daring to provide to those fans.
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