NBA Quarter-Pole

First and foremost, I have to admit I’m surprised how little we at the BWC have said about the NBA this season. Other than the Fantasy Draft article with Dave Azuma, we offered no season predictions and no analysis. It was as though our thoughts on the NBA went down for the season along with Greg Oden.

But it’s December now, and we’re almost at the season’s quarter-pole. By now, there are significant trends that may hold true throughout the season. And also, perhaps most importantly, there’s analysis of my predictions on Bryan Allain’s website.

As I type this, the San Antonio Spurs super-duper star Tim Duncan has left their game against the Portland Trail Blazers. By the time you’re reading this, we’ll know how long the Big Fundamentaltron will be out. I’m going to go out on a limb (not very far out) and say that it’s serious. Duncan is not a shrinking violet. Any player that has played as many games as he has, with that level of consistency, has played through the kind of nagging injuries that force lesser men (like, say, Vince Carter or T-Mac) out of the line-up.

If Duncan is done for a long stretch, it drastically changes the NBA’s landscape. If you were reading pre-season reviews, you would have been hard pressed to find people who didn’t pick the Spurs to repeat. But without Timmy in the middle, you can’t expect the Spurs to win it all. He’s the cog that turns the wheel, he’s the guy that makes it work for them at both ends of the floor.

Which leads me to…the Boston Celtics. I realize that I’m not the first to talk about the Celtics this season; ESPN, Sports Illustrated, SLAM, The New Yorker and Oprah’s magazine all featured the Celtics on their respective covers this September. I picked the Celtics to win it all this year (over the Mavericks), not because I really believed in their troika of superstars, but because I have always loved KG and feel he deserves a ‘ship.

Now, the Celtics are 14-2 and running roughshod over all-comers in the NBA. This summer, I wrote about the KG trade and how I saw this trio shaping up on the court. Here’s what I wrote:

Garnett, Allen and Pierce should be able to complement each others strengths. Imagine an offense where you could kick the ball inside to Garnett on the block, wait for the opposing team to double (because they’d have to double Garnett or he scores) and then let Garnett (a very good decision maker) choose whether he wants to score, kick it out to Ray (the best spot-up shooter in basketball) or Pierce (who can shoot or penetrate and finish in traffic). Those three could play with Bryan Allain and Jordan Green and they’d still make the playoffs and probably win the East.

Like any big move, immediately following the deal is the voice of the skeptics. People who say things like, “Well, they’re one ankle sprain away from being back in the lottery.” And those people are absolutely correct. But every team in the NBA is in the exact same situation. The Mavericks without Dirk? Still a playoff team, but not a championship contender. Same goes for the Suns with Nash, the Spurs without Timmy D and the Cavs without Lebron. The Raptors would be lost without Bosh, the Nets are hapless without Jason Kidd and I’m pretty sure Utah would be ruined without Rafael Araujo (okay not the last one). But you see my point; no team in the NBA is a championship contender without their best players. You can’t let an ankle sprain stand in the way of taking a chance at a championship.

I don’t put that in the article to brag; when I wrote that I was playing the role of ultimate optimist, attempting to comment about what would be the best-case scenario for the Celts. But now, 16 games into the season, they’re doing just that to everyone. They’re impossible to stop on offense and the three stars are playing off each other perfectly. And no sprained ankles yet (knock on wood).

I have the overwhelming feeling that we’re witnessing something very special. For every team that has tried to mash some super-stars together in the hopes of immediate tangible results only to have the experiment disappoint; this could be the first time a chemistry experiment like this actually bears fruit.

The difference between this scenario and others in the past is that these three players came together at the perfect time in their careers. I believe it was Ray Allen who commented, and I’m paraphrasing, that earlier in his career he couldn’t have done this. He, like most young NBA stars, couldn’t have sacrificed the individual stats or his spot in the limelight. Nothing like a few years of mediocrity to re-adjust that mindset. Now, the Celts are rolling, and I’m hoping it’s for real.

Now, so that I don’t jinx the boys in green, here’s some other NBA thoughts, that I’ll break into point form notes for more enjoyable reading.

- The Orlando Magic, now 14-4, are awesome. In that same KG article this summer, I poked a little fun at Rashard Lewis for getting PAID, saying that he’s only good at basketball when he feels like being good at basketball. He’s not blowing anyone away right now, but he’s fulfilling a key role on a good basketball team. His averages of 19, 5 and 2 aren’t worth $120 million, but what is worth $120 million? Oh, and Dwight Howard is a beast. But you already knew that.

- All hail the trendy predictions of the summer, the Chicago Bulls, New York DisasterBockers and the Houston Rockets, who are a combined 18-29 so far this season. I’m shocked about the Bulls, but the Rockets don’t surprise me. I watched Tracy McGrady emerge as a Toronto Raptor and kept a close eye on him in Orlando. In Toronto, he had that great post-season, signed big money and has been injury and ego prone ever since. Tracy McGrady will never be an NBA Champion. He’s not tough enough, and despite an outstanding performance in the playoffs last season, he couldn’t step up that fourth quarter like Carlos Boozer did.

- It’s time for a fantasy update: My team, Canadian Bacon, is in last place in the BWC fantasy pool. Luckily, I don’t care. You know why I don’t care America (and Canada)? Because I didn’t draft any of my players. This simple truth robs me of the only joy that can come from fantasy basketball; pretending a player’s great statistical performance reflects my own intellectual prowess. Unfortunately, due to my lack of technological prowess, I missed the draft and my team was auto-drafted. I have good players - T-Mac, Carmelo, D-Wade - but I didn’t pick them, therefore I feel no affiliation to their successes and failures. I get beat pretty consistently every week, but luckily, it’s not keeping me up at night. Not yet anyway. That might change when Bryan Allain and Chad Gibbs start sending me anonymous taunts online.

The players I am rooting for? Jamaal Tinsley and Udonis Haslem. The Iowa State and Florida products respectively were the only players I’ve bothered to pick up off waivers (I dropped Mike Conley Jr. and David Lee). My personal pride is riding on the shoulders of these two regularly mediocre players. Update: Jamaal Tinsley has 29, 7, 7 and 3 steals against the Clippers tonight! See that good feeling? That’s what I’m talking about. Tinsley success = intellectual prowess. However, I do remain in last place.

It’s time now for me to add up my prediction numbers. Yes, I decided to compare the combined record of my selections to Gibbsy, Bryan Allain, and 5-year-old Parker Allain. I need to beat Parker, the 5-year-old, in what has become my own version of, “are you smarter than a 5th grader.” Though in my case, to be safe, I went with, ‘are you smarter than a 5-year-old,’ because some 5th graders are actually really smart. However, there is some risk involved; if Parker does defeat me, the shame and humiliation that would follow would surely sabotage my career as a sports writer/broadcaster guy. There is much at stake.

Lucky for me, the kid picked Portland (pre-Oden pick perhaps?) and Minnesota in the West. Unlucky for me, I picked Chicago, Washington, Cleveland and Miami in the East. I may be saved only by Parker’s selection of the New York Knicks (I bet he was reading those pre-season predictions as bed-time stories!). Here’s our combined records to date, which I’ll be updating throughout the season.

Parker Allain: 56-63 in the East, 64-67 in the West = 120-130 Overall

Bryan Allain: 76-55 in the East, 85-51 in the West = 161-106 Overall

If this experiment has proved anything to me just now, it’s that the Western Conference is not as unpredictable as it seems. I always tend to think that any thing is possible in the West, because there are more good teams, but each year the same teams (with the exception of Utah recently, and New Orleans even more recently) fall into about the same spots. The East is where the crazy is at.