Statement Wins and Loser Statements: The Drama continues in Week 3
Plus, the introduction of Panic-o-meter!
Dear Readers,
Ah, the NBA. This early season feels like a serene fall morning, sipping on coffee surrounded by bright foliage. The smell of the morning dew upon the grass and the cool air fills your lungs. It’s all so peaceful.
Just kidding.
We had our first Woj bomb of the season today, with ESPN’s senior NBA insider announcing that Steve Nash was out of Brooklyn. Nash’s firing overshadowed Kyrie Irving’s tweeting of an anti-semitic film, which overshadowed Ben Simmons’ early-season struggles, which overshadowed Kevin Durant’s trade request, which… you get the point.
The NBA is in mid-season form chaos-wise. Let’s get into it.
Cavs cut their way through the East
The Cleveland Cavaliers’ last five games: wins against the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards in a back-to-back, win over the Orlando Magic, overtime win over the Boston Celtics at TD Garden, and win over the New York Knicks. That’s five wins in eight days, two of those over playoff teams, one against the conference champs in their building– a statement week if I've ever seen one.
The streak is even more impressive when you consider that the Cavs were without their all-star point guard Darius Garland, who is out with an eye injury he sustained in their season opener against the Toronto Raptors.
Leading the way for the Cavaliers is their newly acquired combo guard Donovan Mitchell. Mitchell arrived in Cleveland via a trade with Utah over the summer and has had no trouble fitting in so far. Over their five-game win streak, Mitchell is averaging 32.4 points, 7.0 assists, 5.0 rebounds, and 1.6 steals. Mitchell at his best is an electric scorer and secondary playmaker. With Garland out, he’s had to step in and do more facilitation work than he ideally would, but he’s filled in nicely as Cleveland’s lead guard so far this season without losing any of his scoring burst.
I’m writing this just after watching Mitchell torch the Knicks for 38 points on 60% shooting. From the start, Mitchell had the look of someone who took this particular matchup personally. Over the summer, it was widely rumored that the Knicks were Mitchell’s preferred destination should he be moved, and while the two sides were supposedly close to a deal at several points, it was Cleveland who ended up getting a trade over the line. In his opening press conference, Mitchell even admitted that he thought he was going home to New York (Mitchell grew up in Westchester county, just north of New York City).
In his first matchup against New York since that trade, he showed the Knicks what they were missing by hitting eight of his thirteen threes and dunking all over their second unit.
Though beating New York might have been the sweetest win of this stretch, the Cavaliers’ topping the reigning Eastern Conference champs in Boston was the most impressive. Caris LeVert and Mitchell scored 41 points apiece, with the pair combining for 28 in the fourth quarter and overtime to put the Cavs over the hump.
While Mitchell and to a lesser extent LeVert garner the headlines as offensive engines, Jarrett Allen, Evan Mobley, Dean Wade, and Kevin Love are locking down the defense and doing the dirty work. Allen remains an elite rim defender while Evan Mobley has picked up in his sophomore season right where he left off– a premier defender all over the court. Mobley’s offensive productivity has barely changed other than becoming more efficient and showing improvement from three (up to 33.3% from 25.8% last year). Dean Wade is this team’s best-three-and-D guy this year while last year’s Sixth Man of the Year runner-up Kevin Love continues to do what he does best: hit threes and rebound.
Going into the season, people around the league expected Cleveland to build off its surprising eighth-place finish last year and go from firmly in the play-in to firmly in the playoffs. If their early season success continues, the question will soon become not how high they finish in the regular season, but how far they can go come playoff time.
Spurs of the Moment
After trading away Dejounte Murray following his first All-Star campaign, the chatter around the league was that San Antonio was taking a step back, acquiring future picks, and looking to turn this season into Victor Wembanyama (if you are unfamiliar with the name, see “other notes”). As it turns out, they were making room for Keldon Johnson to follow in Murray’s footsteps and make his first all-star game.
The Spurs are one of the league’s great feel-good stories of this opening stretch. Like the Jazz who I wrote about last week, they are a feisty mix of good role players, performing better than the sum of their parts so far in this young season. Through seven games, San Antonio has five wins– and not against bottom-feeders. Two of those came against the Minnesota Timberwolves (who some idiots thought would take a big step this year), one came against the Chicago Bulls, and another against the Philadelphia 76ers (who they torched in Philadelphia).
Keldon Johnson, a fourth-year forward, looks to be making a leap. He’s upped his scoring average from 17.0 points per game last year to 23.7 this year so far, an improvement consistent with his career so far. Importantly, he’s shooting a career-best 42.3 percent from three. In Murray’s absence, Johnson has become this team’s de facto leader. He’s playing with a higher level of aggressiveness than ever has in his young career, using his 220-pound frame to out muscle opponents, and his new found three-point stroke to keep defenders honest.
Also showering signs of improvement in this young season for San Antonio is Devin Vassell. He’s averaging just a hair under 20 a game, and like Johnson, he’s improved his marksmanship from deep. With Vassell and Johnson manning the wings, the Spurs have two high-level young guys at the games’ most valuable positions.
Anchoring the Spurs’ defense is Jakob Poetl. Beloved amongst NBA nerds as the league’s most underappreciated center, Poetl is continuing to live up to his reputation as an elite rim protector. He’s off to a great start this year, putting up 15.8 points per game to go along with 11.0 rebounds, and looking nimble in defending the pick and roll.
Those three, along with Josh Richardson and Tre Jones deserve praise for their individual contributions, but the Spurs are as good as they are because they are buying into playing basketball the right way–as you’d expect a Popovich-coached team to do. They lead the NBA in assists per game despite only having one player in the top 50 (Tre Jones ranks 38th).
Panic-o-meter
Last week I wrote about the slow starts of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. In this day and age, where analytics are immensely important to measure success on the court, I've decided to implement a new tool to measure how much teams should be panicking: Panic-o-meter. The Panic-o-meter is on a scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating that the team has absolutely no need to panic and is probably enjoying a peaceful zen moment and 100 meaning that the team should be in a state of frenzy comparable to the opening scene of World War Z.
Minnesota Timberwolves: 35.6
The Timberwolves are struggling to get into gear following the marquee addition of Rudy Gobert in the offseason. As critics of the deal predicted, Minnesota’s spacing has been atrocious. Gobert is clogging up the lane, pushing Karl-Anthony Towns away from the rim and making it harder for Anthony Edwards to attack. Edwards even went as far as to admit in his postgame comments following their overtime loss to Utah that “[t]he smaller we go, the better it is for me”. That statement does not mesh well with the over 300 million dollars they have committed to KAT and Gobert.
Head coach Chris Finch has a tough job ahead of him to get these pieces to gel, but if anybody is up for the task it’s him. Finch is considered one of the league’s brightest and most creative offensive minds. He needs to find a way to get this team to gel.
It’s worth noting that Minnesota got off to a middling start last year as well before coming on strong later in the season. I think that we may see a similar story this year, and for that reason my panic level is still relatively low.
Brooklyn Nets: 87.8
Ben Simmons has yet to score in double-digits this year, serious people are calling for Kyrie Irving to be cut following his sharing of anti-semitic media on Twitter, Kevin Durant looks exhausted– it’s all going wrong in Brooklyn. Not to mention a report coming out that they have the lowest number of season ticket holders in the NBA.
The Nets held a players-only meeting after Tyrese Haliburton and rookie phenom Benedict Mathurin combined for 58 points en route to a 125-116 Indiana victory Saturday Night. That players-only meeting likely would have been the disaster story of the night for Brooklyn had Kyrie not stolen the show with a postgame presser that was so horrendous people on Twitter were sending support to the Nets’ public relations staff.
Though the Nets would go on to win the second leg of their pseudo-back-to-back against Indiana on Monday night (only to then lose on Tuesday at home to the Chicaco Bulls), it would not be enough to spare Head Coach, Steve Nash, who “mutually parted ways” with the Nets, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
Edited by Ryan Quinn
Other Notes
The NBA announced that it would stream the games of 18-year-old Victor Wembanyama, who currently plays in France for Metropolitans 92. Widely expected to be the number one overall pick in the 2023 Draft, Wembanyama is being heralded as the best prospect since Lebron. The decision to stream the games is not without irony, as Commissioner Adam Silver has made curbing the practice of tanking for higher draft picks a priority, only to then promote the guy every team is tanking for.
Demar Derozan of the Chicago Bulls became the latest member of the 20,000-point club this week against his previous team, the San Antonio Spurs. Spurs coach Greg Popovich called timeout immediately after the bucket and congratulated his former player.
The frontrunner for the newly vacant Brooklyn Nets head coach position? Last year’s Boston Celtics’ head coach Ime Udoka, who was suspended for a year by the team for violating team policies. ESPN reported that he “used crude language in his dialogue with a female subordinate prior to the start of an improper workplace relationship with the woman”. EDIT: The Athletic’s Shams Charania is reporting that a plan is in place to hire Udoka.
Only one undefeated team remains in the association: the Milwaukee Bucks. After being presented with his early season numbers, Giannis accurately assessed his play “I’m balling man”. Despite not having Khris Middleton, who remains out with a wrist injury, Milwaukee remains perfect heading into the second game of home-and-home against the Detroit Pistons.