What an utterly fascinating Eastern Conference we have in front of us.
Surely, the bumper cars on this side of the NBA can’t continue to exist in such close proximity to each other. Surely, at the midpoint of the 82-game season, we won’t see the No. 2 through No. 8 seeds separated by one game, or teams 1 through 10 separated by only three games. However, what if the improbable continues to run its course without interruption?
We’re roughly at the quarter-mile pole, well past the first three weeks of the season. Teams are not finished products by any means, and injuries will naturally limit development in the earlier portions of a season, but in the middle third of December, we should begin to see the emergence of a defined identity for various teams. In much of the league, that seems to be rather elusive at the moment. In the East, it’s mostly because teams are overachieving instead of underachieving. In the West, it’s mostly (though not entirely) the opposite.
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Let’s examine where the Eastern Conference stood a year ago, on Thursday, December 11, 2014:
Toronto 16 6
Washington 16 6
Atlanta 16 6
Chicago 13 8
Cleveland 13 8
Milwaukee 11 12
Miami 10 12
Brooklyn 8 12
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Orlando 9 15
Boston 7 13
Indiana 7 15
Charlotte 6 15
New York 4 20
Detroit 3 19
Philadelphia 2 19
There are lots of stories to be found in a comparison with the current season standings. Start with this: Of the three teams in dumpster-diving position through 22 to 24 games in the East last season, two — New York and Detroit — have improved by at least 6.5 games this season, which can also be expressed as a difference of 13 games relative to the .500 mark. For the Pistons, it’s much more than that. The Knicks have made a 6.5-game leap (despite their recent struggles and a no-show in Utah on Wednesday night), but Detroit is 8.5 games better at this point in the season than it was on December 11 of 2014. The Pistons have therefore improved by 17 games relative to .500. They were minus-16. Today, they’re plus-1.
Continuing with the East today, compared to 12/11/2014, here’s the next big-picture statistic to keep in mind: Of all the teams in the conference, only one — Washington, from 6 losses last year at this time to 11 this year — has endured a decline of more than three games in the loss column. Toronto and Atlanta are not establishing the much more solid pace of the first weeks of 2014, but they’ve hardly fallen off a cliff. They’re very much hanging in there at 14-9 so far this season. This is especially impressive for the Hawks, given that DeMarre Carroll — a player who knitted them together in so many ways at both ends of the floor (especially on defense) — is now in Toronto.
Only Washington has appreciably fallen off the pace, and the Wizards have been ravaged by injuries so far this season. It’s been a season of noticeable improvement in the East — not just in the sense that more teams have winning records, but that the improvement is so consistent across the board. Nearly everyone’s in on the act.
The biggest examples include Detroit and New York, but right now, the Charlotte Hornets and Boston Celtics are the most prominent.
Steve Clifford and Brad Stevens are clearly the two coaches of the season in the Eastern Conference at this point in the season. They’ve taken rosters largely bereft of top-tier star power and have turned them into highly functional units with competent offenses and improving defenses which — in tandem — have produced per-game point differentials (plus-5.4 for the Celtics; plus-4.3 for the Hornets) higher than what the Cleveland Cavaliers are averaging (plus-4).
Joe Manganiello wrote about the Hornets not too long ago. He took you inside the metamorphosis at the heart of the Hive’s improvement in the Queen City. For the Celtics, well… Brad Stevens is Brad Stevens. He’s going to be one of the great basketball coaches of our generation as soon as he gets players with supreme skills. We’ll see what he does to try to stop the Golden State Warriors on Friday. In the meantime, Boston is on pace to win more than 48 games this season, which — given the development of most teams in the East — is mind-boggling.
Yet, a lot of Eastern teams are on pace to win more than 45 to 48 games right now. Can they all keep it up, and in the case of the Chicago Bulls — eighth in the East right now — is the unthinkable (missing the playoffs) more realistic?
Check back when we’ve hit the midpoint of the season — you know, that time last season when Cleveland was just 21-20 and entirely unsure of how its own journey would unfold.
We’ve hit the quarter-mile post. Let’s see where we are after the next half-mile.
That said, this first quarter-mile has offered us a conference-wide reality we realistically couldn’t have seen when the season began.
