Midterm Report- The Cream of the Crop

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This was supposed to be the return of the dominant teams.  A return to a time when there was a clear cut hierarchy in the NBA.  Essentially a return to the 80s when such revered teams as the Bird Celtics, the Magic Lakers, the Dr. J Sixers, and the Bad Boy Pistons (ignore that the high water marks of all those teams didn’t really intersect, but that’s how people like to remember it).  It was going to be a five team race for dominance in the NBA.  The four strongest teams from last season (Cavs, Lakers, Celtics, and Magic) and an old favorite (Spurs), all added pieces without giving anything way and were going to leave the rest of the league in the dust.  It hasn’t really turned out that way though.

It isn’t so much that the rest of the league is better than suspected.  They’re not (aside from a few teams who have made a slight uptick).  It has more to do with each of the “elite” teams being more flawed than anyone thought going into the season.  It wouldn’t be hard to imagine any of them being upset in an early playoff round (although unlikely to actually happen) by a frisky underdog.

How did this happen though?  These teams were supposed to just blow through the season and make it a mere formality before the playoffs started.  How did we get to the point where these teams are slightly disappointing or in some cases even noticeably struggling?

[B]Los Angeles Lakers:[/B]
We’ll start with the reigning champions.  The Lakers were the favorites going into the season.  And rightfully so, they had the fewest amount of holes among the “elite” teams.  What no one realized is those inherent holes (and really the lack of an above average point guard has been a problem forever) were a lot more gaping than originally believed.  Now like most teams, they were bound to suffer a few injuries.  In fact, they were lucky in this department last season.  The injuries in of themselves haven’t been terrible.  They’ve missed Pau Gasol for a chunk of the season (which looks to be an ongoing problem really), but aside from that and Ron Artest falling down stairs, they’ve been reasonably healthy (I suppose I should mention Luke Walton’s been hurt too, but I don’t think anyone cares).  What the injuries have done though is expose the Lakers extreme lack of depth.

Depth wasn’t supposed to be a problem because they’re were good enough at the top with Bryant, Odom, Artest, Gasol, and Bynum that it shouldn’t have been an issue.  But Bynum hasn’t exactly progressed the way they’ve wanted to.  Artest’s offense is, well, offensive.  And without Odom coming off the bench, they really have no bench.  So with Odom starting, they’re really a four man team (so long as Gasol is out) because they get little to no production out their three headed point guard rotation.

It’s also had an undesirable impact on their best player.  It could be that Bryant’s playing like he always has, and that’s supposed to be commendable now, but for all the change that’s touted about Kobe Bryant there hasn’t been much evidence of it.  Bynum is turning into a black hole, Artest can’t score, and Odom refuses to score at times, so Bryant has taken it on his shoulders to carry the offense for long stretches of a time.  And by “carry”, I mean, not let another player touch the ball (unless leading directly to an assist) for multiple possessions in a row.  I’m not sure why this is being ignored and supporters will probably say that the team requires it, but the Lakers have trouble winning if Bryant isn’t hitting his shots.

[B]Orlando Magic:[/B]
Next up we have the defending Eastern Conference Champions and 2009 NBA Finals doormat, the Orland Magic.  No team apparently strengthened their roster in the offseason the way the Magic managed to.  They turned Hedo Turkoglu, Rafer Alston, and Courtney Lee into Vince Carter, Ryan Anderson, Matt Barnes, Brandon Bass, and Jason Williams (allowing several pieces of filler to drift away as well).  On paper they looked like the deepest team in the league.  They had a solid back-up for every starter and then some (the “then some” being Brandon Bass and Anthony Johnson, much to their chagrin).

There’s an old adage that comes into play every so often in the NBA about having too much talent.  It happened to the Lakers in the late 90s (before they jettisoned Van Exel, Jones, and Campbell for players who were willing subvert their games more) and it looks to be happening to the Magic now.  It’s been proven over time that good NBA teams need a clear hierarchy in their systems to succeed.  Who’s the alpha dog for the Magic though?

That’s the biggest problem the Magic have this season.  Dwight Howard is undoubtedly the best center in the NBA, but he is noticeably a step below the class of dominant players like Lebron, Bryant, Wade, and Paul (Melo can even be thrown in this season) at the moment.  It’s been shown over the last few weeks that Howard’s game gets easily disrupted if the player guarding gets “physical” with him because he doesn’t really have any reliable go to moves, so he’s at a loss when he’s not the one initiating the contact.  He’s a guy who can easily anchor your defense (although he’s having trouble limiting his fouls this season), but he’s not a guy that holds your offense together.

Then there’s Vince Carter.  This is the most talent that Carter has ever played with in a career that’s been pretty well frustrating.  He was supposed to be in an upgrade over Turkoglu, but that hasn’t been the case at all.  In fact, by all estimates he’s playing worse than Turk did last season (although don’t scream that they should’ve kept Turkoglu, it’s not looking much better for him in Toronto).  This was supposed to be the season when he proved what kind of merit he really had and he wasn’t just an underachiever, but that’s rarely been the case.  He’s shooting poorly and he’s not facilitating that well (thankful, he’s not really turning the ball over either).  In essence, he’s just another guy you don’t want to carry your offense.

Not having one guy to be the “alpha dog” is fine most of the time.  The Magic have enough talent that when their offense is running smoothly it isn’t really a problem.  But over the last few games, their offense has been horrible (as well as their defense) and they’ve been looking for someone to take on the load and carry them.  The only problem is they don’t have any of them, so when they have trouble pulling out games when they go through slumps like they have recently.

[B]Cleveland Cavaliers:[/B]
The Cleveland Cavaliers had the best record in the league last season but they struggled against the better teams in the league (while absolutely eviscerating the lesser teams, more so than anyone else).  This year is a bit different.  They’re not storming the gates this year and seem to be playing with more reserve, which is helping them against teams like the Lakers, Celtics, and Magic (among others).  Although they run into the same problem they ran into during the playoffs last season.  What do they do when Lebron has to sit?

It’s easy to say that Lebron has more help on the Cavs than he did last season.  And by sheer numbers, that’s true.  They got rid of Ben Wallace, Sasha Pavlovic, and Wally Szczerbiak and replaced them with Shaquille O’Neal, Anthony Parker, and Jamario Moon, essentially replace three borderline rotation players (only Wallace saw minutes when things got tough) with two borderline starters and a solid rotation guy.  Despite that relative upgrade though, they didn’t solve the problem of getting Lebron a running mate.  Everyone thought it was Mo Williams last season, but that turned out to be a bit of a mirage (and no offense to Williams, who is a solid player, but he’s not the “All Star” they’re looking for).  So, they’ll potentially be facing the same problem they did last season, when things get tough, they’re going to have to rely on Lebron far too much to win and pray that he just turns on God Mode and destroys people.  It could happen, sure, but I’d rather have a little more insurance in case Lebron just plays excellently instead of being the culmination of all our basketball dreams (which he was very close to achieving in the playoffs last season...when he hit that jumper to beat Orlando in Game 2, I imagine that he briefly reached basketball nirvana).

[B]Boston Celtics:[/B]
The Celtics have a different problem entirely so far.  They’re not missing depth or a rotation piece (like the Lakers).  They’re not missing a go to guy who wants to and is willing to carry them when the chips are down (like the Magic, hell, the Celtics have at least three of them).  They’re not looking for a second banana to compliment their best player (like the Cavaliers).  When healthy, they’ll probably the best and most well rounded team in the league.  Therein lays the problem though.

Can this team actually stay healthy?  Garnett’s missed significant time.  Marquis Daniels was supposed to be their guard rotation piece that was going compliment Rasheed Wallace and put them over the top, and that was true until he predictably got hurt until god knows when (which should comes as a shock to no one).  On top that, Pierce is playing with a bum wheel as well.  They only have two young guns in Rondo and Perkins, and rumor has it that the two of them are getting fed up with the old timers.  So, this team isn’t young and they have injury concerns.  That’s not going to haunt them at all come playoff time (just ignore what happened last season).

San Antonio Spurs
Finally we come to the San Antonio Spurs.  They stumbled out of the gate more than any of the other teams that were supposed to contend and they still don’t necessarily look like contenders.  They suffered a few injuries, but their main problem has been integrating a number of moving parts into their rotation.

As of now, only Duncan, Parker, and Mason are regular rotation players from last season (Bonner would be too, but last time I looked, he’s out indefinitely, so is Finley too, but that’s a good thing).  So, they’re working with entirely new set of toys and it hasn’t been the easiest transition in the world.  They still refuse to start Ginobili, but they don’t really have a shooting guard to start there instead, especially considering Hill and Mason are slightly too short (and Mason sort of proved last year, he’s best coming off the bench).  So there’s Keith Bogans starting even though he’s a borderline rotation player.  They also have the same problem with their bigs, as they feel more comfortable bringing McDyess off the bench even though he’s their second best big.  So instead they’ve shifted a bunch of players in and out of the starting line-up and seem to have settled on rookie DeJuan Blair (which is working out relatively).

Of course they still have to deal with Richard Jefferson playing like he’s lost a leg.  This in and of itself magnifies the bigger problem of the Spurs age, which could end up being a bigger factor.  Their best five players are either old or playing hurt.  They don’t look like a championship contender at the moment but if given another month or two to gel and they could become the most dangerous team in the West.

That’s the rub though, all of these teams look like title contenders this year, but none of them are comfortable picks to win the title, at least at this point.  Don’t misunderstand me, one of these five teams is going to win the NBA title (if I’m wrong, I’m wrong), but none of these teams is making a suitably strong case to be mentioned with some of the truly great.  At the end of the day, that’s what we were promised as NBA fans at the beginning of the season that we were going to see some All-Time upper echelon teams finally come back to the NBA.  We were going to see a return of the dominant, established team.  That just didn’t happen and by the looks of it, it’s not going to happen either.