Check Yourself: These NBA Hot Takes Need Re-Thinking
The NBA offseason has a way of encouraging groupthink. We watch the draft and free agency play out, we absorb the grades on which teams got better or worse, and then we shelve our critical thoughts for three months.
Without actual games to reformat our opinions with new information, it's hard to challenge conventional wisdom. But as we get closer to training camp, the time is right to pick at a handful of widely accepted positions.
These aren't hot takes. We've all read enough of those.
Instead, think of what comes next as friendly nudges asking, "Hey, you might not be wrong, but have you considered this?"
Maybe Offense Isn't Enough
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Mike D'Antoni plus James Harden equals unstoppable offense and a sure playoff berth.
That's the idea anyway. But while it's easy to get caught up in one of the most highly regarded offensive coaching minds theoretically unleashing Harden's unparalleled scoring skills, the Rockets may have gone too far in their pursuit of points.
Houston ranked 21st in defense last year, and it'll be a minor miracle if it reaches that modest level again. Noted sieves Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon are now aboard, replacing Dwight Howard, who, for all his faults, was still a forceful presence on defense in 2015-16.
So, while the Rockets' scoring punch is undeniable and their personnel is built to put up points, it's not quite as simple as trusting the elite attack to compensate for the defensive holes. Much of D'Antoni's style depends on quick scores in transition (Jack McCallum's book isn't called Seven Seconds or Less for nothing), and you can bet Houston will push to exploit unsettled defenses as often as possible.
Do you know what makes transition opportunities scarce, though? Always having to inbound the ball after opponents score.
Even if we assume the best and peg Houston's offense as a top-three outfit, we also have to be realistic about the team's nonexistent stopping power. Generously projecting the Rockets' defense to be only as bad as it was last year might be enough to improve the 41-41 record to, say, 46-36.
That mark might be good enough to squeak into the playoffs. If the Western Conference is again at a point where it takes 50 wins to secure the eighth seed, or if Houston's defense slips another few notches, the postseason starts to look like a pipe dream.
Don't Give Up On 74 So Easily
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"Seventy-four isn't really a goal," Stephen Curry said in a video posted to the Golden State Warriors' Twitter account. "If it happens, it happens. But all of our energy will be spent on getting ourselves ready for a championship run. We want to have a great regular season. Obviously you don't want to have any slip-ups, but I don't think coming into the season with a goal of 74 is a good focus. It's about winning a championship."
Perfectly reasonable, right? Among the many painful lessons learned last year was the danger of chasing down regular-season goals at the expense of the bigger picture.
But let's consider this from another angle.
The Warriors lost themselves in the pursuit of a record 73 wins last year. Though they set the mark, they did it by relying on Curry's heroics, surviving for weeks at a time despite turnover woes and slipping defensive focus. They won games with harried fourth-quarter bursts after mostly mucking around. You could see it as it was happening: Golden State was letting the little things go.
The Warriors couldn't find those little things in the playoffs...and it cost them.
Coasting through the regular season could push them toward a similar destination via a different route. Maintaining an edge while trying to preserve energy is a delicate balance. It would be a mistake to dismiss the idea of Golden State losing itself again during the regular season with something less than full attention.
With so much talent on hand, it's hard to see things going badly for the Warriors. But it might not be the best idea to swing completely to the opposite end of the spectrum after last season.
Coasting could be as dangerous as blindly sprinting.
Tom Thibodeau Is Great...Mostly
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It's so easy to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves as this year's rising power.
After the Wolves' 13-win jump last season, Tom Thibodeau comes aboard and will almost certainly elevate the defense. Karl-Anthony Towns will swallow worlds, Andrew Wiggins will develop into a real star and Kris Dunn will supercharge the whole operation with manic competitive intensity.
Boom! The Wolves are a playoff team!
Except maybe the idea of trusting Thibs to immediately cure all ills (with the help of an obviously developing roster) is a little too simple.
Maybe we're mistakenly assuming Thibodeau's penchant for driving his players into the ground is gone and that his notorious impatience with young talent has disappeared with it. Perhaps we're also overlooking the fact that Thibodeau will wear two hats (coach and general manager) in his new position—something that seems almost impossible for someone whose time commitment to one job is legendary.
A guy who spends hours after every game watching film and poring over on-court clips is somehow supposed to handle the cutthroat, minutia-riddled task of managing personnel, too? Maybe Thibs' work ethic makes him exceptional, but there's a reason the coach/GM dual role is so rare in the modern NBA: Both gigs are full-time, and both are ridiculously hard in different ways.
Preaching caution about a team as exciting as the Timberwolves feels icky. The franchise needs optimism, and there's more reason to feel it now than at any point in the recent past.
But just keep the trickier-than-you-think Thibodeau in the back of your mind if things go sideways.
The Risk of Expecting Unchecked Progress in Portland
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Ask the Milwaukee Bucks if upward trajectories are always straight lines.
After surging to the playoffs ahead of schedule in 2014-15, Milwaukee dipped last year, missing the postseason and dampening enthusiasm.
The Portland Trail Blazers—more talented, equipped with a star in Damian Lillard and seemingly even more capable than that Bucks team of two years ago—could still wind up taking a step back in 2016-17. That understandably feels mean, blasphemous or overly negative to many observers—particularly those stationed in the Pacific Northwest.
But here's the thing: Portland got performances from a number of key players last year that seemed an awful lot like anomalies. C.J. McCollum hit 44.3 percent of his long twos, a fantastic conversion rate out of step with league norms and his own history. Al-Farouq Aminu suddenly became a reliable three-point shooter after four straight years clanging at a sub-28 percent rate.
Key players improved old skills, flashed new ones or both. Now, oddly, we're assuming all of these surprising developments will continue. That's what ESPN's Summer Forecast and RPM-based projections (both of which have the Blazers winning more games than last year) suggest, anyway.
It's entirely possible last year's unexpected leap was real and Portland won't be the latest ahead-of-schedule surger to come back to reality. But if we price in slight regressions from guys like McCollum and Aminu, and if we anticipate some defensive slippage as Meyers Leonard takes on a bigger role and Evan Turner slots into the rotation, it's fair to be skeptical.
Remember, too, that squads like the Utah Jazz and Denver Nuggets are on the rise. Even another 44-win season from the Blazers might not be enough.
Everybody likes the Blazers, and that's fine. But let's pump the brakes a little.
The Pacers: Not So Fast
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If you think this is about unabashed fanboy appreciation of George Hill...you're partially right.
The Indiana Pacers will miss their former point guard, who was traded to the Jazz in a three-way swap that brought Jeff Teague into the fold. But Indy believes Teague and just about everyone else it added in this summer's re-tooling—Al Jefferson, Thaddeus Young, even Jeremy Evans, I guess—better fits the uptempo, score-first mandate laid down by team president Larry Bird.
Teague is more dynamic than Hill. He's a better passer and he spent the past few years at the helm of an Atlanta Hawks offense that always harmonized and occasionally hummed perfect symphonies. Jefferson has always scored, and Young is a solid offensive power forward. With Paul George securely a star, the Pacers have the ninth-best title odds in the league (ahead of Utah, the Detroit Pistons, Hawks, Memphis Grizzlies, Rockets and Blazers), per OddsShark.com.
That enthusiasm and ESPN's prediction of a repeat 45-win season overlook the defensive toll of losing Hill and Ian Mahinmi—not to mention emerging playoff stud Solomon Hill.
The biggest issue is an ill-fitting coach-philosophy pairing. Nate McMillan will replace Frank Vogel as head coach of the Pacers, and it would be difficult to find a stranger pick for a team looking to run up the score. McMillan's Blazers teams finished either last or second-to-last in pace during his last four full years in Portland, according to Matt Moore of CBSSports.com, who elaborated:
"Jeff Teague isn't a roadrunner, he's a moderate pace point guard. Thad Young seems like the incumbent power forward, which means Paul George won't be taking that role, and even if they both play combo forward, that's not a perfect fit because part of the benefit of moving George to the four is to free up another shooter. Myles Turner is a pretty standard center, and free agent addition Al Jefferson isn't exactly a gazelle, bounding down the hardwood.
"
So, at best, we can say the Pacers' philosophy and personnel don't exactly sync up. At worst, it almost looks like they don't know what they want to be at all. Expecting real progress from the Pacers, who swapped defense for offense and hired a coach whose history doesn't fit the organization's stylistic demands, feels like a stretch.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com and Basketball-Reference.com.
