Dunk Base

The Western Conference looks to be slightly open ended.  The Eastern Conference cannot have the same thing said about it.  The Eastern Conference at this point in the season has a very definitive hierarchy.  The Cavs are the clear favorite in the conference, the Magic, Celtics, and Hawks are vying for second place, the Raptors bridge the gap between the contenders and the bottom rung playoff contenders, the Bobcats, Heat, Bulls, and Bucks are playing for the final three playoff spots, everyone else is jockeying for lottery positions, and the Nets are bringing up the rear.

The top four spots and the bottom six spots in the Eastern Conference standings are essentially determined at this point.  Theoretically there’s still time for a lot of those positions to change, but knowing how each of these teams play, it’s unlikely that the top four teams fall or the bottom six teams rise to challenge for playoff positioning.  Also what makes this less interesting is that each of the five teams in Eastern Conference quagmire are all fairly flawed and haven’t shown that they have a realistic chance of challenging one of the top four teams and going deep into the playoffs (like say, winning a round).  Still, four out of the five teams discussed here are going to be in the playoffs and even if they aren’t going to make a mark, they should probably be discussed.

The Toronto Raptors right now have a fairly decent hold on the fifth spot in the Eastern Conference.  It’s sort of a tenuous hold considering how easily they could give up.  They’re far enough behind the Hawks that they won’t really challenge there and they’re ahead of the Bobcats enough that it’s likely to assume that they can hold them off there.  Of course the fact that the Raptors are there are all is surprising enough considering how poorly they started of the season.  At the beginning of the season the Raptors weren’t just a bad defensive team, they were a historically bad defensive team.  They were giving up points per 100 possessions like no other team since that became a viable statistic (put it this way, they made the ’91 Nuggets look like defensive stalwarts).  The main reason for this was playing three players who were beyond atrocious defenders for more than 30 minutes a game.  Playing Jose Calderon at point assures that they weren’t going to stop the ball and having Andrea Bargnani behind him assures that nothing is going to stop that player from getting to the rim.

The only thing that kept them from falling off the face of the Earth was Chris Bosh’s inspired play and the fact that they could score.  Once they inserted Jarrett Jack into the starting line-up, giving opposing ball handlers at least an obstacle to overcome, they’ve been playing 50 wins ball.  Make no mistake here, they’re still a bad defensive team, but at least they’re making teams work a little for their points.  On top of that, they’re still one of the best offensive teams in the league, meaning that they should have their playoff ticket already stamped.

Where does that leave them for the future though?  Not a particularly enviable spot, that’s where.  They still have no idea what Chris Bosh is going to do this summer (all signs point to him leaving though).  They’ll be in cap hell regardless of what Bosh does and realistically if Bosh does decide to stay, this kind of season is their best case scenario.  Mainly because they won’t get a decent draft pick this year, Bargnani has proven to be a solid scorer but he still can’t rebound or even think about protecting the rim.  DeRozan looks to have some promise but unless he jumps absolutely out of the stratosphere, he’s not necessarily the solution at the wing.  And they still have to pay Hedo Turkoglu that enormous contract for another four seasons.  As it stands now, the room for improvement for the Raptors is fairly limited.

The Charlotte Bobcats seem to be in the exact same boat as the Raptors as far future development is concerned.  This season though they’re having one of the better turnarounds in recent memory (shades of the Grizz).  At the beginning of the season it looked as though it was going to be the same old, same old for the Bobcats, but as Larry Brown has shown time and again, when given more than one season, he can turn almost any team into a playoff contender.  And like most of Brown’s playoff caliber teams, they’ve been doing this through defense.  Another big helping hand this season has been the addition of Stephen Jackson, who they gave up for relatively nothing for.  What Jackson gives this Bobcats team that they didn’t have before a reliable scorer (even if he’s inefficient in his scoring, at least they know the points are coming one way or another), which they really didn’t have before this season.

The Bobcats have also been getting solid, if unspectacular, play from other areas on the team.  Felton has been having the best season of his career.  Nazr Mohammed has somehow resuscitated his career, being the interior presence they were expecting Tyson Chandler to be (who was a giant whiff this season, like a number of other Bobcat moves the last few seasons).  Gerald Wallace hasn’t been playing his best offensive basketball, but he’s helping out an undersized Bobcats front line (or at the very least rebounding challenged without Mohammed) by crashing the boards like no other small forward in recent memory (honestly I can’t remember the last time a small forward was rebounding this well).  So as long as they continue this sort of consistent play and excellent defense they should be easily bound for the playoffs.

Here’s the rub though, this season doesn’t necessarily feel like a continuing trend but more of a one and done type deal.  If they make the playoffs this season they’ll be denied getting a blue chip player on a team sorely lacking in blue chip talent.  Jackson seems to be their best player at the moment, but he’ll be 32 in April.  Everyone knows what they’re getting from Wallace and Felton at this point, and it’s doubtful that they’ll enhance their games enough to push the Bobcats to the next level.  They don’t have any legitimate young players who look like they’re going to push their way into the starting line-up.  So at best it looks like they’ll be treading water until they fall back into oblivion.  The frustrating thing about it is, it would’ve been easy for them to go a different route.  How much better would their team be if they’d taken Brook Lopez instead of DJ Augustin, if they’d taken Ty Lawson instead of Gerald Henderson, and if they’d taken a two guard like Chris Douglas-Roberts or Courtney Lee instead of Alexis Ajinca (this being the biggest stretch)?  None of those picks effect their ability to acquire Jackson or Diaw, and they probably don’t give up Okafor for Chandler (Okafor being the perfect foil for Lopez).  This would’ve given them a starting line-up of Lopez, Okafor, Wallace, Jackson, and Felton with Mohammed, Diaw, CDR or Lee, and Lawson coming off the bench.  It wouldn’t have been too difficult to get that team, but instead they’re stuck with a team that doesn’t seem to have much of a future.

The Miami Heat are almost exactly the same team they were at the end of last season.  The one minor difference is that Dwyane Wade isn’t playing as well as he did last season (not really a surprise, his play last season was rather inhuman and he was bound fall to Earth eventually) and he’s a little disgruntled because he has no idea where the Heat are headed.  Which is a fair question, the Heat aren’t play for this season.  They don’t really care about this season, they have their cap space cleared and aren’t looking to clear anymore (unlike the Bulls and Knicks).  They aren’t going to improve internally this season and they don’t want to add any contracts, so they’re stuck as a middling .500 team with Dwyane Wade regularly playing brilliantly.  And there’s nothing more to say about this team.

The Chicago Bulls much like the Bobcats and Raptors, did not look like a playoff team at the beginning of the season.  They couldn’t hold on to any sort of lead to save their life.  A lot of this had to do with their up and coming superstar Derrick Rose, who was banged up to start the season and it showed.  He didn’t have the same explosiveness that he had last season and if he doesn’t have that, Rose is a very average player.  Another reason they haven’t noticeably improved from last season is they still haven’t found a replacement for Ben Gordon’s scoring.  Luol Deng’s healthy again this season and he’s been playing well, which is where the Bulls were expecting to pick up the scoring from.  The only problem is, while Deng is picking up the clip from Gordon’s departure, Salmons, who was instrumental in their playoff run last season, has regressed significantly.  All of the bad things that have been stated about Salmons game since he came into the league have been rearing their head this season.

All of this is sort of irrelevant to the larger narrative in Chicago.  Like several teams, they’re not really playing for this.  The fact that they’re in the playoff race is sort of just gravy.  What they’re really angling towards is free agency this summer.  They have an exceptional amount of cap space to land one of the major free agents and they’re looking to make even more headway in that area by pawning off Salmons to someone and ditching Hinrich’s rather ridiculous contract.  Even if they can’t move those contracts they’re still going to have about $20 million to play with this summer.  They probably have their sights on a player like Dwyane Wade, but even as disgruntled as he is, it seems unlikely that he’ll leave the warm confines of South Beach (even if he is from Chicago), not to mention there’s a possibility that his style could be a detriment to the development of Derrick Rose.  There was an idea proposed a few days ago that sounded interesting.  Instead of going after James, Wade, or Bosh, they might be better off going for slightly smaller targets.  Two players that would enhance Chicago are Joe Johnson and David Lee.  Johnson is the perfect outside shooting, ball handling guard to play alongside of Rose and Lee would finally give Rose a solid pick and roll option to play with (assuming the Bulls are capable of running an offense along those lines).  Plus those two pick-ups don’t upset the chemistry to development that adding a true alpha dog to the mix would.

Now the Milwaukee Bucks are a team that is desperate need of a swing player alpha dog.  Despite relying on a center that might rather remain in the background and a rookie point guard, the Bucks seem to find themselves with a reasonable shot at the playoffs.  At the start of the season they looked like they were on par with the Nets (i.e. they were going to suck), but after a quick start to the season, based on defense and quality play of Brandon Jennings (capped off by his 55 point outing), they got the momentum they needed to be relevant this season.  Adding to that is the stellar play of Andrew Bogut, who is finally earning his contract and draft position.

Although they are going to be a tough team to play, because almost any Skiles team in the first three years of his coaching tenure are tough teams to play, they just don’t have the offensive firepower to really make a push towards the playoffs.  Like the Bobcats and the Raptors thought, this team kind of feels like they’re caught in a tough spot.  Although unlike those two teams, they do have two players in Jennings and Bogut who could conceivably get significantly better (or more consistent).  Not many teams have a center with the talent level of Bogut or a quick point guard who can score, much less two, but it’s questionable whether either them will be good enough to build a legitimate contender around them.

So four of these teams are going to make the playoffs (my guess is the Bucks are going to be the team on the outside looking in).  Unlike the Western Conference there’s a lot less tangible potential here.  The Bulls and Heat are probably the two in the best situations but they’re clearly not as good as the team’s in similar situations over in the other conference and while they both have players who are either in the top 15 (Wade) or a player that could crack the top 15 (Rose), it’s unclear whether they have the pieces around them to really be potential contenders.  Granted all of that could change with free agency, but that’s not something that’s easy to grasp at the moment.

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