Goeiedag, enchantée and welcome to this week's episode of Eight 2 Four presents: All-NBA Team of the Week. The teams and players all come off a well-deserved break after the All-Star weekend so we haven't seen much basketball yet this week. That's why this episode we're going over 5 of the biggest storylines we've seen so far this season. Get ready for your All-NBA Team of the Week!
STORY #1
The Brooklyn All-Stars, I mean, Nets. Their general manager, Sean Marks, has pulled off an incredible stunt this season by bringing FOUR of the biggest stars of the last decade together in Brooklyn. It was already an amazing stunt to attract Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving during free agency 2 years ago, but he has added to it this season. We all know that James Harden wanted to leave Houston this season, he made that painfully clear. Didn't show up for training camp and when he did, he seemed well and truly out of shape. He wasn't interested in playing for the Rockets and gave them some very poor performances on the floor. He expressed that he wanted to go to Brooklyn, but it seemed unlikely that they would find the pieces to trade him. Sean Marks made it happen anyway.
Since Harden joined the Nets, the big 3 have instilled fear into every team around the league. Early February they dominated some of the biggest West Coast teams, including the Warriors, the Lakers and the Clippers in a 5-day road trip. And most of those victories came without Kevin Durant, who hasn't played a game since mid-February who is out with a hamstring injury. Harden and Kyrie are playing some of the best basketball together they have ever played. Especially Kyrie is having an amazing season, with 27.7 points per game he is scoring more than ever. Mostly because James is very happy to be playmaker for the team. He is averaging 11.3 assist per game since playing with Brooklyn, the highest average of his career in assists.
Earlier in the week, Blake Griffin signed for the Brooklyn Nets. The six-time All-Star was bought-out by his former team, the Detroit Pistons and was able to sign with the Nets on a veterans' minimum contract. Now, Blake hasn't played at his All-Star level in years and has been struggling a lot with injuries so we'll have to wait and see how he will fit into the team. But so far, all the moves that Sean Marks has made, have turned out really well. This team is an offensive force and it will be difficult for any team to keep up with them. It might not even matter that they're one of the worst teams in the league defensively, especially if they will outscore everyone. My only concern is that 3 out of the 4 stars have struggled with injuries and this could catch up with them during a Play-Off run. Only James Harden, mister consistency, is going to be reliable for every game in every series. Will we end up with a Brooklyn Nets version of the James Harden - Houston Rockets show we have seen so often in the last few years?
STORY #2
LeBron James will miss out on the MVP title this season yet again. This is becoming a reoccurring storyline in the league. LeBron hasn't won an MVP since 2013, when he won it for the fourth time. Since then he finished three times in 2nd place. Last year LeBron lost the MVP against Giannis and most people are still debating whether or not that was deserved. LeBron was really angry with that result and is doing everything he can this season to prove to the world that he is the one and only MVP in this league as long as he steps onto a basketball court. The 36-year old is averaging over 34 minutes per game and has only missed 1 game so far this season. There are only three other players this season that have played more minutes than LeBron in the same amount of games, or more. Buddy Hield is 28, Julius Randle and Nikola Jokic are 26.
According to Basketball Reference, LeBron is only fifth in this years' race, behind Jokic, Embiid, Harden and Giannis, and he has only 3% probability of winning it. Basketball Reference uses a model they have build themselves using previous voting results. The one thing that this model can't take into account, though, is narrative. And that is where LeBron shines. Since his loss last year, the LeBron marketing machine has been driving the narrative that he has been overlooked all these years, simply because he is LeBron. He is so good that the expectations for him are always higher than for everyone else. What is considered normal for LeBron is considered exceptional for everyone else. And I believe that he has a point.
The MVP voting leans towards young and coming stars that still have everything to prove. Giannis won it the last 2 years, before him came James Harden and Russell Westbrook. The last four winners of the MVP haven't made it past the Conference Finals and haven't played on the biggest stage yet. Players that put up the biggest show during the season get rewarded over truly the best players in the league. It is a sign that the league is moving more towards highlight-consumption instead of fans watching games in full. And unfortunately for LeBron, losing AD to injury will mean that the Lakers will lose some more games between now and the Play-Offs, hurting his chances for the MVP. He is stuck between a rock and a hard place: does he go all-in on the MVP race and play every game to win, with the chance of being too tired when it counts or worse, get injured? Or does he focus on getting another title and let the MVP race slide?
STORY #3
The Jazz have ruined their own Cinderella story and can forget their happy ending. They were the epicentre of the Coronavirus outbreak and the following shutdown of the league in March last year. Superstars Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell didn't get along anymore and rumours had it they didn't even want to play together anymore. Those fences were mended before they returned to the bubble but you could tell that something was off. They only won 3 of their 8 games in the wind-up to the Play-Offs. In the first round they had to play Denver and we saw a completely rejuvenated team. Donovan Mitchell was fantastic and the Jazz were up 3 games to 1, only needed 1 win to progress to the 2nd round. But Denver turned it around and a missed 3 point shot of Mike Conley in the final second of game 7 sealed the deal for the Nuggets and the Jazz had to go home.
During the off-season, plenty of experts speculated that the Jazz were going to blow it up. Especially when it took them a while to offer Rudy Gobert a contract extension but they did, he signed it and the Jazz started the season with almost exactly the same team as they finished the year before. They started a bit up and down but in January they went on what's currently the biggest winning streak of the season. They won 11 games in a row and won 25 of 30 games in January and February. They distanced themselves from everyone in the league with the best record by at least 3 games. They were considered the biggest outsider to take out the Western Conference Finals and maybe even the big prize at the end, something they have never managed to do in their franchise history.
The Jazz were on top of the standings, playing the best basketball in the league, nothing seemed to be going wrong for them. The Jazz are not usually a popular franchise among fans in the NBA but this season was different until they changed their attitude. They started complaining about referee-calls, Donovan Mitchell even got ejected for it in the overtime loss against Philly. They felt disrespected, deservingly so, when LeBron and KD left their stars last to be picked for the All-Star game. Even when Mike Conley was picked as a injury-replacement for Booker as the third Jazz star in the All-Star game, they still didn't seemed pleased. All this complaining has moved the Jazz from hero to villain in the league. Hopefully they can turn this around because the Jazz are not cut out to be the villains. When Mitchell was ejected, he kicked a drinks trolley that hit a security guard. He was over there immediately to apologise and make sure the guard was ok. A real villain would have kept walking.
STORY #4
The future is now. The time that it took teams years to develop their young players into stars is over. Young players walk into the league as stars and perform at the highest level from day 1. Because of the lottery system these players usually end up on bad teams so it looks like these guys just put up good stats on bad teams but the opposite is true. These kids are dominating early on and if their teams play their cards right, it will break through the domination of big market teams. The Milwaukee Bucks and Giannis are only the tip of the iceberg, there's more small-market teams with future superstars that will push aside some of these big market teams. As long as they can hold on to their golden geese.
OKC, New Orleans, Memphis sit at the bottom of the top 50 sports markets in the NBA, with all 3 cities having less than 700,000 homes to market their teams to. In comparison, New York and LA have over 5 million homes. But those 3 cities are home to some of the biggest superstars of the future. SGA of the Thunder, 22 years old, Ja of the Grizzlies, 21 years old and Zion of the Pelicans, 20 years old. These three players are already irreplaceable for their teams, leading their teams in stats and on the court. SGA has taken over from Chris Paul as the playmaker for the Thunder and is winning important games for them, ruining the game their GM has been playing with the lottery odds. The Pelicans only win games when Zion is on the court and dictating the play and the Grizzlies thrive when Ja gets to fly up and down the driving lanes.
Milwaukee was able to resign Giannis for another five years, which means he will have played at least 13 years for this small market franchise, if they don't trade him before his contract runs out. It is incredibly hard for small-market teams to keep their superstars, because they usually like to leave to bigger markets. Last time OKC had a superstar, he left them to join the Warriors in San Francisco and is in Brooklyn, New York right now. With Giannis, the first step to breaking the pattern has been made. If OKC can hold on to their star this time around and New Orleans and Memphis can do the same, it could spell a much brighter future for small market teams. Because young players are more developed, it seems, than in the past, it should be easier for teams to build around them earlier. A star on a winning team is less likely to leave.
STORY #5
The big guys are back! In basketball, size matters. That's pretty obvious. Yet, since Shaquille O'Neal has retired, we haven't really seen any really dominant centers in the league. Of course, we had Kevin Garnett at the Celtics and Dwight Howard during his time at Orlando but over time, the center position has become less and less important. It had to make way for the forwards and guards that love to drive to the basket. The center would be standing in their way and was banished to the corner, to shoot a 3 whenever they got the ball, so rarely. I suppose I'm exaggerating a little bit but you can't deny that we haven't had the calibre of players like Kareem, Wilt, Russell, Shaq, Olajuwon, and all those other though guys that dominated the paint up to the early 2000's.
If you would compose a list of the 20 best players of the last 20 years, I bet you would be able to count the big guys on one hand: Shaq, Garnett, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Howard. Anyone else? And at least 2 of these guys weren't even real centers. The evolution of the game required players to be more skilled. Bully-ball didn't win games anymore. The rules changed, protecting the smaller guys more in the paint and it took a whole generation of big guys to finally catch up with the new style of basketball in the NBA. And watch out, these new centers can do it all, they dominate under the basket, they can shoot from beyond the arc, they can pass and some of them can handle the ball better than some point guards. The personification of this revolution is no other than Nikola Jokic, the big man of the Denver Nuggets.
Jokic, alongside Anthony Davis of the Lakers, Joel Embiid of the Sixers and Karl-Anthony Towns of the Wolves, is leading a whole new generation of Bigs that will change the way the game is played again. He is a walking triple-double, impossible to defend. He is too good for your average big man defender and too big for the highly-qualified perimeter defenders, like Kawhi Leonard and Jrue Holiday. He has too many tricks in his bag because if he can't score, he will just dish out an impossible pass to a team mate who will make the shot for him. The last decade, we have seen more and more smaller players come into the league and dominate. I believe that in the future we will see it shift back towards bigger guys but with better overall skills. Imagine someone the size of Shaq with the skills and flexibility of Kobe. Or maybe I am just too excited for the new Space Jam movie?
This is our All-NBA team of the Week. Please share our podcast and give us 5 stars. If you have any questions, you can contact the show on eight2fouroffice@gmail.com. Thank you for listening, ballers out!
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