This time last year the Bulls were title contenders, the Wizards were set to make a run at Kevin Durant, and Brooklyn were a catastrophe.
A lot changes in the NBA in 12 months – except across the river from Manhattan, where ineptitude is as constant as the sound of the New York subway.
We’re only six weeks away from the NBA’s opening night, when the 2016 Champions Cleveland will take on a Knicks team constructed to compete for the 2011 title. We’ll be previewing the season in a six-part series, an instalment every Tuesday.
We start off today with the least of the lesser conference, beginning with the team that lives in the greatest city on earth, and breathes as the NBA’s greatest debacle.
15. Brooklyn Nets
Last season: 21-61, 14th in the East
Predicted record: 19-63
Congratulations, Philadelphia.
It’s rare that a team that went 21-61 can expect to get worse the following season. The NBA is structured so that such diabolical losing is almost always followed by at least a marginal uptick in wins, with losers being rewarded with young talent. That is unless you’re the Brooklyn Nets, the NBA’s anti-structure.
The Nets were god-awful last year and in the past 12 months they’ve lost Thaddeus Young, Joe Johnson, Shane Larkin, Jarrett Jack and Wayne Ellington. That’s not exactly a five-some to frighten the Warriors, but it does represent the semblance of competence, something largely eludes the Nets.
Free agent signing Jeremy Lin will offer that competence and so will a full season of dynamic youngster Rondae Hollis-Jefferson. Luis Scola and Greivis Vasquez couldn’t defend me if I was drunk, but they’re perfectly fine on offence.
Sean Kilpatrick and Randy Foye belong on NBA rosters, and maybe this is finally the year than Bojan Bogdanovic arrives (it won’t be). Brook Lopez is the team’s shining light, its bastion of respectability, sitting in the awkward NBA twilight zone between ‘very good’ and ‘star’.
When Lin and Lopez run pick and roll the Nets are going to look like a half-decent NBA team. When everything else happens, well, 2019 is only three years away.
14. Philadelphia 76ers
Last season: 10-72, last in the East
Predicted record: 21-61
Break out the champagne and cheese steaks, Philadelphia, somebody’s worse than you.(Click to Tweet)
2016-17 looks to be the season where the 76ers Project, the zombie love of Sam Hinkie, finally turns the corner on an upward slope. With Ben Simmons on board, Dario Saric finally flying over from Europe, and Joel Embiid – wood eternally knocked upon – healthy, joining Nerlens Noel and Jahlil Okafor, the Sixers have five top ten draft picks raring to go. The problem, of course, is that three of those guys play the same position, and Simmons, with his inability to shoot, is going to feel like a center at times too.
But poor roster fit only becomes a crippling issue when you’re built to win, which the Sixers still certainly aren’t. They should be much more respectable, though, with veteran reinforcements to complement the young core.
Brilliantly, Wikipedia says the Sixers made a ‘splash’ in last season’s free agency, and then proceeds to list the signings of Jerryd Bayless, Sergio Rodriguez and Gerald Henderson. That amounts to the splash a five-cent coin makes in the Atlantic Ocean.
Regardless, those three plus Robert Covington, Hollis Thompson, Jerami Grant and the young core means that Philadelphia suddenly goes 11 deep in players who are either functional or promising.
Even with that depth, the season will live and die with the performances of Simmons and Embiid, the two players with transformational talent. If those two can start to approach their ceiling, the Sixers could rival the Timberwolves for the brightest long-term future in the league.
If Embiid can’t stay healthy and Simmons fails to overcome his shooting handicap, though, Philadelphia will fall into that second-tiered prospective future with the likes of the Suns and Lakers.
13. Chicago Bulls
Last season: 42-40, ninth in the East
Predicted record: 30-52
Bring it on, Kanye.
The Bulls are going to be terrible. There are certain things you can’t do in basketball. Certain things like putting three ball-dominant alpha dogs who can’t really shoot and have totally overlapping skills in the same backcourt. Placing Rajon Rondo with Jimmy Butler was already worrisome. Adding Dwyane Wade, who turns 35 in January, into the mix is beyond incendiary – it’s something between a basketball farce and tragedy.
The Windy City is where spacing has gone to die. Butler is a below average three point shooter, a career 32.8 per cent mark from deep (and worse than that last season), and he’s by far the best shooter in the starting backcourt. If the Bulls start Taj Gibson and Robin Lopez alongside the bricklayers, they might have the worst shooting starting line-up in NBA history.
The defence, while respectable in the frontcourt, is also going to be an issue. Rondo hasn’t defended in half a decade and Wade only locks in when the lights shine the brightest.
Butler’s star, the reliability of Gibson and Lopez, and the promise of Nikola Mirotic, Bobby Portis and Doug McDermott will make the Bulls interesting. Rondo and particularly Wade both still have something to offer, on offence at least, as two of the niftiest, most cerebral players in the league.
While they’re both adept at leveraging the tiniest of openings with their smarts, their vision and their back-cuts, with these teammates, and mainly each other, those tiny openings are not going to exist.
12. Orlando Magic
Last season: 35-47, 11th in the East
Predicted record: 36-46
The NBA is high on the past.
The Magic echoed the Bulls in the off-season, or vice-versa, constructing a team that might have made sense going up against Pat Riley’s Knicks. Orlando will be better than the Bulls on defence, but on offence their floor is going to be similarly cramped.
The Magic are heavily committed to four players who play two positions. That’s bad.
In the right environment, Serge Ibaka, Aaron Gordon, Nikola Vucevic and Bismack Biyombo can all be excellent players. When they’re in the same environment though, that hope becomes a pipe dream.
Orlando are talking of starting Gordon at the three alongside Ibaka and Vucevic, which is the rare ‘sounds bad on paper and in reality’ idea. Gordon is the brightest prospect on the team, and he’s a four in the modern NBA, maybe even a five. His presence on the roster transformed the curious Ibaka trade from ‘weird’ to ‘really bad’ in itself. And then the signing of Biyombo completed the trade’s descent into ‘were they drunk?’ territory.
The Evan Fournier contract was savvy and Mario Hezonja should take a leap. The team will hope Elfrid Payton does too, although we’re getting to the stage where he might just be what he is – a much more likeable, slightly less brilliant Rondo.
Under new coach Frank Vogel, the Magic are going to defend like hell. They’re long and disruptive everywhere. They could easily finish with a top 10 defence, but with that comes an offence almost assured to be in the bottom 10.
Orlando are going to play a lot of 88-82 games. The problem is they’re going to be the 82 more often than not.
11. Milwaukee Bucks
Last season: 33-49, 12th in the East
Predicted record: 36-46
The 2016 offseason loomed as a seminal one for the Bucks and they came away with… Matthew Dellavedova, Mirza Teletovic, 39-year-old Jason Terry and the eternal love and gratitude of Miles’ Plumlee’s family, set to rejoice in Miles’ four-year $52-million contract, which I initially read as having a decimal point in between the 5 and 2, which would have made more sense.
The problems for the Bucks are the same as the other lower teams in the East – they can’t shoot. Dellavedova addresses that problem (if you can find somewhere, anywhere, that allows you to place a wager on Delly replacing Michael Carter-Williams as the starting point guard at some stage, put down everything you own) and so, I guess, does Terry. But beyond Khris Middleton there’s no foundational piece who’s a threat from deep. In the Stephen Curry-Klay Thompson-Kevin Durant league that’s a problem.
This team will ultimately ascend or burn on the talent of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jabari Parker. Both, especially Giannis, took strides last season, and given how the Bucks have never recruited star free agents and are likely too good to be picking at the top of the draft, their future rests on one or both of Parker and Giannis becoming a top 15 player in the league.
That’s eminently possible, but it’s not going to happen this year. All that’s going to happen this year is Milwaukee paying a combined $34 million to Miles Plumless, Mirza Teletovic and John Henson. Fear the deer, indeed.
https://twitter.com/KatieMox/status/1780695947481174464 https://twitter.com/CWilliamson44/status/1780696642917994703
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