Sorry, but We're Going Here: Is Stephen Curry's Wild Season a Playoff Problem?
Stephen Curry has played at least 40 minutes in just four games this year, and he hasn't done it since Jan. 13. So it may not seem like the Golden State Warriors are leaning on him too hard.
But Curry's minutes aren't like everyone else's. Defenders hip check, hold and bump him wherever he goes on the court, and Curry is always going somewhere. Whether attacking with the ball or sprinting around in search of open space, Golden State's superstar rarely stops moving. But that's not even the real worry.
The Warriors have relied on Curry's superhuman play for a lot of bailout wins lately. That he's obliged so often may only deepen the dependency.
Just take in the sentiment behind these comments from head coach Steve Kerr and Draymond Green, both courtesy of Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle.
After Curry buried two deep threes to beat the Miami Heat, Green said he expected them to go in: "Absolutely. I don't even crash the boards anymore."
And following Curry's takeover in Orlando, Kerr said he continues to be impressed by Curry's range:
Golden State expects Curry to keep doing this.
And why not?
If we work backward, we've got Curry hitting 12 threes and a 37-foot game-winner on a sprained ankle against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Saturday. Two days earlier, he hit 10 triples and scored 51 points against Orlando to put a close game out of reach. He put up 42 and won the game late against Miami the day before that. And he sparked a 12-4 run that the Warriors needed to escape Atlanta with a win on Feb. 22.
Incredibly, you could make the case the Warriors wouldn't have won any of those games if Curry hadn't been brilliant.
His February stats suggest fatigue isn't an issue yet: He averaged 36.7 points on 23.5 shots, hitting 54.9 percent of his field goals and 53.6 percent of a whopping 12.5 three-point attempts per game. But everyone has a limit.
We can forgive the Warriors for getting caught up like the rest of us in what Curry is doing. When you see enough miracles up close, it's easy to become a believer. But Golden State has to monitor this situation and, more importantly, work to correct it.
Trusting in Curry's historically incomparable greatness has worked out just fine, but there should be an organizational urgency to provide him better help—especially because the playoffs will feature opponents with more time and greater focus on forcing anyone but Curry to score.
Were We Too Hard on the Magic?
Addition by subtraction is a real thing in the NBA. Just ask any team that ever traded Rudy Gay or Jeff Green. After a few weeks to process the Orlando Magic's deadline decision to send away Tobias Harris for a second-rounder and what will likely amount to cap space this summer, maybe it's time to reconsider a few things.
The most logical criticism is that the Magic could have gotten more for Harris, who is just 23 years old and who was on a team-friendly contract. By comparison, the troublesome Markieff Morris yielded a first-rounder. But making that point is tantamount to alleging Orlando's front office was negligent in its search for a deal. Maybe the market dictated Harris wasn't worth more than the Magic got for him.
Consider, too, that Orlando's return on the trade wasn't just the pick, Brandon Jennings and Ersan Ilyasova. It also got back a bunch of Harris' minutes, which promptly went to 20-year-old Aaron Gordon.
Gordon scored a career-high 22 points in Sunday's 130-116 win over the Philadelphia 76ers, and his numbers since Harris' departure are up across the board.
| Before | 21.8 | 7.7/6.1 | .465 |
| After | 31.3 | 14.3/9.3 | .508 |
And then there's the cap space Orlando will have after shaving off Harris' $16 million salary and (probably) buying out the last year of Ilyasova's deal for $400,000. Though it was initially easy to say the Magic's cap space wasn't as valuable as it seemed because so many other franchises will be flush with cash, we're learning Orlando might have some alluring advantages.
Tim MacMahon of ESPN.com reported "those close to the situation consider his hometown Magic to be the biggest threat to steal [Chandler] Parsons from the Mavs." OK, so if the trade really amounts to Gordon in a bigger role plus Parsons, is that really so bad?
It's fun to bash a deal that appears to be a mistake at first blush, but it might be time for a turnaround. Gordon's play and the possibilities that cap space could bring are forcing a reconsideration.
Should This Be the End for the Chicago Bulls?
Outscored on the season and lucky to be 30-28 through the end of February, the beaten-up, broken-down Bulls feel like a team that should be thinking about changing directions.
Joakim Noah and Pau Gasol figure to be gone next year, which will kick-start the process. But the thornier issue of moving on from Derrick Rose looms large. Still under contract through 2016-17, Rose's hold over the organization and its fans' psyche is strong—strong enough to make a new chapter almost impossible as long as he's still around.
Implausible statements like the one Rose gave K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune aren't helping:
There's confidence, and there's...whatever that was.
You have to start thinking about offseason trades and even the stretch provision for Rose, who's been much better of late. Cutting ties at the end of his healthiest season in a while might seem strange, but the Bulls can't ignore the fact that Rose's productivity has his value higher than it's been in years.
If a rebuild were to take place, the Bulls would be in better shape than most. Jimmy Butler is a cornerstone, and supporting talents like Doug McDermott, Nikola Mirotic and Bobby Portis offer hope for an instantly viable rotation.
It feels like Chicago needs a new identity, and it might be best to start thinking of ways to make that happen now. And if those ways include mailing in the final quarter of the season, so be it. The Bulls aren't scaring anyone if they grind their way into the postseason, and it's hard to imagine many fans are clamoring for another few years of fourth-seed ceilings.
Why Did We Ever Buy the Rockets?
There's a decent chunk of season left, and we could still see the Houston Rockets use it to push up as high as the fifth seed in the West. But little of what we've watched to this point makes that feel likely.
In hindsight, much of what we saw last year should have dampened expectations to the point that this season's efforts wouldn't feel like such a disappointment. A conference finals berth in 2015 made Houston a strong pick to occupy one of the top four spots in the West, but advancing that far shrouded the truth: The Rockets weren't ever all that great.
Houston won 56 games last season with a plus-3.4 differential that ranked fifth in the conference and suggested the victory total should have been closer to 50, per Basketball-Reference.com's Pythagorean estimate.
Beating a Dallas Mavericks team that gave serious minutes to Amar'e Stoudemire and dismissed Rajon Rondo halfway through the series may have been a smoke screen.
Knocking off the exhausted Los Angeles Clippers (who'd used up their best shot against the San Antonio Spurs in the previous series) was another. Remember, too, that Houston was down 19 points in what should have been L.A.'s decisive Game 6 win in that series.
The Rockets won Game 7, of course, but they were almost statistically certain to lose that sixth game.
None of this is to say we should have expected Houston's collapse into dysfunction. But we should have seen decline coming.
What matters now is Houston being more realistic about its own future. It must acknowledge chemistry and fit matter, which, encouragingly, it seems to have done by buying out Ty Lawson, per Calvin Watkins of ESPN.com. Next up is finding another star who'll fit with James Harden and replacing Dwight Howard in the middle (assuming he bolts as a free agent).
Houston hasn't reined in expectations in a while, and general manager Daryl Morey always thinks big in free agency. Hopefully, a humbling year will force a more honest assessment than the one we all made this past offseason.
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Stats courtesy of NBA.com and Basketball-Reference.com.
