My, my, my — we know that early-season basketball is tumultuous, but the 2015 portion of the new NBA season is giving us a November to remember in this regard.
Last week, we mentioned how many teams had already managed to fit a three-game losing skid into two weeks of basketball. Teams basically played well in one of those weeks and poorly the next. The ability to finish games existed… until it didn’t… or vice-versa.
Simply stated, that tendency is still evident in the NBA — nay, more than that, it remains pervasive.
The Houston Rockets started the season 0-3. Then they were 4-3. Now, on Monday afternoon, they sit at 4-6 after a second three-game downer. The Rockets are bipolar, but worse, they’re showing that a week of good basketball doesn’t necessarily translate to a sustained transformation. Having overcome that 0-3 start, Houston had reason to think it had turned a corner — not THE corner, but one corner out of many which lie ahead.
Nope.
Losing at home to Brooklyn (even though the Nets very nearly defeated the Warriors in Oakland late Saturday, and frankly should have delivered the dagger to the Dubs) represented a low point in the young campaign for Kevin McHale’s team, and after that slice of humble pie, the Rockets could not expunge the negative vibes from their system. Another futile defensive showing Friday in Denver led this team even deeper into the dark tunnel of despair.
The Rockets, as Western Conference finalists last spring, represent the biggest crisis point in the early stages of the NBA season. The Washington Wizards are only 4-4 (i.e., not two games under .500), and the Bradley Beal injury is a problem more than any team dynamics. With Houston, the issues are more concerning, particularly in terms of James Harden’s defense, which improved last season. (Was the bar set at an absurdly low level? Sure. Did he still improve to a noticeable degree? Yes he did.)
Matt Moore of CBS Sports lays out the grisly details here:
OK, #Rockets fans. I have good news, and I have bad news.
Deep dive on defense with quotes and video:https://t.co/N7MLwG4pAB
— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) November 15, 2015
If there’s an emergent (and perhaps very temporary — it’s November) story in the East this week, it’s not the Wizards; it’s those Detroit Pistons. One week ago at this time, they were 5-1 and reveling in their 24-0 run over the Portland Trail Blazers in the Pacific Northwest.
A mere 168 hours later, they’re 5-5 as they finally head back to the Palace of Auburn Hills. The Pistons spent 48 miserable hours in Los Angeles and five particularly agonizing hours inside Staples Center over the weekend. They got swept by the wounded Clippers and the Byron Scott-coached Lakers in a same-building back-to-back. All the hype surrounding Reggie Jackson and especially Andre Drummond was warranted at the time. The reaction to Drummond’s start was not a bunch of unmerited hype; Drummond was drumming the opposition on the glass at a level not commonly seen in this league. Drummond was doing things only Wilt, Kareem, and a few select others had ever done before. Bloggers were not pulling a quick trigger in their effusive praise.
Yet, here we are, a week later, and Detroit is diminished — perhaps the product of youth, perhaps the product of a sudden surge in scrutiny and expectations, perhaps the product of fatigue on a long Western swing, and likely the product of all those things in some kind of combination. Maybe home court and shorter flights will repair this team, but scoring just 85 against the Lakers is a bit of an eye-popper. Detroit, like Houston, is riding a rollercoaster and not enjoying the ride.
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All of this leads to a noteworthy discovery, which one can call “The 10-Game Rule,” roughly three weeks into the season:
Of all the teams in the NBA which have played at least 10 games, only two — the Cleveland Cavaliers (8-2) and the Golden State Warriors (11-0) — have fewer than four losses. Three teams — the San Antonio Spurs (7-2), the Chicago Bulls (6-3), and the Miami Heat (6-3) — have lost fewer than four times but have not yet played 10 games.
Both conferences are, in a word, muddled.
How muddled?
Two facts:
1) In the East, the two teams tied for 12th place (New York and Orlando) are two games behind the teams tied for third (Chicago and Miami).
2) In the West, the 4-6 Rockets, for all their woes — the Timberwolves join them at 4-6 — are only two games out of third place.
The disruptions and distortions of November basketball have touched nearly every team in the league. Miami’s 6-3 and Chicago’s 6-3 have been serviceable starts, but not “guns-blazing” demonstrations of overhwhelming firepower. The three teams expected to lord themselves over the rest of the Association — the Dubs, the Spurs, and the Cavs — are the only ones which look better than the rest. Yet, even then, all three teams were not exactly convincing in their most recent performances, the Cavs eating a loss in Milwaukee on Saturday night.
“The 10-Game Rule” is a manifestation of how unstable this season is. The key takeaway is not that the instability exists, but how prevalent it is — the reach and scope are near total in the league thus far.
Will Houston and Detroit go in the right direction? That’s the biggest “micro” question of the moment in the NBA.
Will teams other than the top three (GSW, SAS, CLE) get themselves sorted out? That’s the “macro” question everyone’s asking right now.
