Who's Really to Blame for NBA's Worst Teams or Rebuilds?
The NBA is packed with parity this season. At the top of the league, several teams have legitimate paths to a championship. At the bottom, five squads are truly dreadful.
The San Antonio spurs (minus-8.4), Portland Trail Blazers (minus-8.9), Detroit Pistons (minus-9.0), Washington Wizards (minus-9.2) and Charlotte Hornets (minus-10.6) are all being outscored by at least eight points per 100 possessions.
While the Brooklyn Nets aren't near that range in point differential, what seems like a general aimlessness of their rebuild earned them a spot in this discussion, too.
There are specific scapegoats for the struggles of each of the above, but the difference between a bad team and a bad rebuild deserves a word first.
The Nets are here as a rebuild. The Spurs, who have a generational young talent, are objectively a bad team. But it's hard to criticize a rebuild that just started and already has Victor Wembanyama as a cornerstone.
And then, there are a couple teams that probably at least have a toe dipped in both categories.
Whether it's a bad team, a bad rebuild or a bit of both, the reasons why all of these organizations are where they are at this moment are below.
Charlotte Hornets: Health and Front Office
1 of 6
It's hard (and probably not right) to blame anyone for repeated injuries to a star player, but it's also impossible to ignore all of LaMelo Ball's absences during his career. This season, he's appeared in just 22 games. Last season, he finished with 36 appearances.
When he's actually available, there's an argument that Ball, who's averaged 21.6 points, 7.9 assists and 3.3 threes over the past three seasons, is a top-25 to -30 player. All the time he's missed has to have at least some impact on the team's fortunes, but you can't blame the 2023-24 record entirely on that.
Charlotte's point differential is better when Ball plays, but it's minus-8.6 per 100 possessions when he's on the floor.
Getting to this point also took some misses from the front office. Their top draft pick in 2021 was James Bouknight. Over the years, picks they've traded in various deals have turned into Jalen Duren and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The Gordon Hayward contract obviously didn't return too much.
Generally speaking, there just hasn't been a ton of hits around LaMelo.
I wouldn't necessarily brand the Hornets a bad rebuild, though, even if it feels like a perpetual one.
Ball can be an absolute superstar playmaker. Brandon Miller looks like an ideal, floor-spacing and multipositional wing to have alongside him. Mark Williams has the potential to be a high-end rim-runner and -protector.
There's a potentially solid foundation in place. It just isn't ready to stack up wins yet.
Washington Wizards: Front Office
2 of 6
The Washington Wizards' front office doomed the team to its 2023-24 struggles over the course of many years (and multiple leaders of that front office).
Signing Bradley Beal to a five-year, $251 million contract in 2022 was a massive, self-placed stumbling block. There was no realistic path to contention at that point, and Beal wasn't the player to forge one. He's now on the Phoenix Suns, and the big contract Washington got in return for him was Chris Paul, who of course turned into Jordan Poole.
His contract isn't as onerous as Beal's, but he's also not as good. Poole signed a four-year, $128 million deal in 2022, and he's already been moved to Washington's second unit. He's arguably this season's least efficient scorer and playing nowhere near the level of a starter.
But he's obviously not the only reason Washington is losing so much.
The Wizards' 2022 first-round pick, Johnny Davis, already looks like his NBA career could be on the ropes. They took wings or forwards in each of the first rounds prior to that, and while Corey Kispert looks like he could be a contributor to a good team, Troy Brown and Rui Hachimura have both already been moved off the roster.
There are some hints of hope from Deni Avdija and Bilal Coulibaly, but it's hard to look at the current roster and feel a ton of confidence that anyone will develop into a franchise cornerstone-level player.
Detroit Pistons: Coaching
3 of 6
The Detroit Pistons have a lot of interesting young talents on the roster.
Cade Cunningham has good size for a lead playmaker. In spite of way-below-average scoring efficiency throughout his career, he'll sometimes give you glimpses of a good creator and distributor who knows how to navigate pick-and-rolls and control pace within a possession.
Jalen Duren looks like he could be a double-double machine, and he's actually shown a little bit more than expected as a passer this season.
Jaden Ivey is a dynamic slasher who already has his three-point percentage up near the league average this season.
Ausar Thompson is a potential game-changer. He has no real position, but that's a good thing in his case. He can run an offense, defend the opposition's best wing, dominate the glass and finish above the rim. There is very real 5x5 potential here. If he develops even a moderately reliable jumper, he has star upside.
But head coach Monty Williams, who is in the first season of a gargantuan six-year, $78.5 million deal, has done no one above many favors in 2023-24.
For much of the campaign, he seemed torn between relying on veterans like Bojan Bogdanović and Alec Burks and giving developmental minutes to the younger players. His resistance to playing Ivey in a role anywhere near as prominent as he deserved was weird enough on its own, but it seemed ludicrous in conjunction with his insistence on starting Killian Hayes.
Thompson's role has been all over the map this season, too. There's no consistency for anyone.
And now, near the end of February, you can still tune into just about any Pistons game and witness long stretches of action where the team looks completely disorganized on both ends of the floor.
Things have gotten so bad that Detroit fans are pulling out receipts on their own preseason optimism.
The Athletic's Seth Partnow, who formerly ran the Milwaukee Bucks' analytics department, may have described Williams' impact best.
"It's not that unusual for bad coaching to hold a team back," Partnow wrote. "But it is quite rare for coaching to be so damaging that it sets a franchise back, yet here we are."
Portland Trail Blazers: Coaching and Front Office
4 of 6
There's only so much Chauncey Billups can do with the roster he's been given, but the poor play of the Portland Trail Blazers' young players has to fall on him and the player development staff, at least to some degree.
Deandre Ayton is undoubtedly playing worse than he did at any point during his time as a Phoenix Sun (a statement backed up by Basketball Reference's box plus/minus).
Shaedon Sharpe is way below average by that same metric for the second season in a row and has actually seen a dramatic drop in shooting efficiency.
Though it's too early for definitive statements on Scoot Henderson's long-term ceiling, he's off to one of the worst starts we've seen from an NBA rookie in decades.
Henderson is averaging 12.9 points on 11.8 shots, to go along with 4.7 assists and 3.0 turnovers. That's way too much bad for that little good, and it's translated to a minus-6.3 box plus/minus that's tied for 938th among the 945 three-point-era rookie campaigns of at least 1,000 minutes.
Of course, it was the front office who brought in all of the above. It's general straddling of timelines this season isn't helping, either. Malcolm Brogdon and Jerami Grant are good enough to make Portland marginally more competitive, but they should be somewhere else at this point.
The Blazers would be a worse team without them, but they might be in a better rebuilding position if those two were swapped for young talents or picks.
San Antonio Spurs: Coaching
5 of 6
The Spurs have an awful record and point differential and only one surefire future star on the roster. But that one future star is Victor Wembanyama. That alone makes this a rebuild headed in the right direction.
But the fact that he's already a top-25 to -30 player as a 20-year-old means San Antonio can justify more of a win-now approach, and legendary coach Gregg Popovich has been hesitant to do that.
Wembanyama's limited minutes may be the result of a front-office directive to keep him healthy, but playing him fewer than 30 a game certainly as something to do with all the losing.
But the bigger head-scratcher was the "Jeremy Sochan at point guard" experiment.
Sure, it would've been pretty cool if the 6'8" Sochan could've actually played point, but all the evidence from his college days and rookie season suggested he was a gap-filling forward who'd probably make most of his money as a defender.
Trying to square-peg him into the starting lineup with Wembanyama may have slowed down the (admittedly unstoppable) rise of the future star.
On the season, Wembanyama has played 506 minutes with Sochan on the floor and traditional point guard Tre Jones off. In those minutes, he averaged 21.2 points per 75 possessions with a 49.8 true shooting percentage (league average is 58.2).
He's only played 316 with Jones and without Sochan. He's put up 24.8 points per 75 possessions with a 53.4 true shooting percentage in those minutes.
Again, there may be some organizational pressure influencing these moves. San Antonio would be justified in wanting to stay bad for a couple more years. Adding more high-end lottery talent around Wembanyama could pay off in the long run, but Wembanyama has proven deserving of a bit more focus on winning now than in the future.
Brooklyn Nets: Front Office
6 of 6
Few teams seem as stuck as the Brooklyn Nets.
Their highest-paid player, Ben Simmons, has played in 13 games all season. There's little to no evidence to suggest he'll suddenly be consistently available going forward.
After about 12 months with the organization, it's become pretty clear that Mikal Bridges, the centerpiece of last season's Kevin Durant trade, isn't a bona fide No. 1 type of player.
When given the opportunity to acknowledge that fact and trade him for a rebuild-boosting package, the front office reportedly turned it down.
"Recently, the Houston Rockets were among the teams to register trade interest in Bridges," Michael Scotto wrote for HoopsHype. "Houston was prepared to send back several of Brooklyn's unused remaining draft picks from the James Harden trade, but talks never got to that stage because the Nets declined to entertain anything for Bridges when Houston inquired."
That was the get-out-of-jail-free card for an organization stuck in a cycle of megatrades gone wrong, and they wouldn't even entertain it.
Instead, they'll seemingly keep pressing forward with a roster filled with veterans who are all two or three spots higher in a team's pecking order than they should be.
