The State of the NBA as We Approach Christmas Day 🏀🎄
Checking in on the NBA championship odds, MVP race and other big leaguewide developments one-third of the way into the season.
On the NBA calendar, Christmas Day — with its ever-growing slate of marquee matchups and made-for-TV star duels — is generally as good an occasion as any to look around and survey the landscape of the league. That might be especially true this year: In addition to the usual early season data on new faces in new places, we’ve also seen teams play with a surprising facsimile of playoff intensity during this past month’s In-Season Tournament, which potentially provided more of a postseason preview than the usual November and December fare.
With all of that in mind, then, let’s look at the biggest trends of the early season — including the things we already thought we knew, and the developments that have taken us by surprise over the past two months.
(All statistics in this story are as of Thursday morning, Dec. 21.)
The Celtics and Nuggets are (still) NBA Finals favorites.
In the inaugural edition of The Messenger’s 2023-24 NBA forecast back in October, we listed the Boston Celtics and Denver Nuggets as Nos. 1-2 in our championship odds, far from the rest of the field. A little over eight weeks later, not much has changed: While the Philadelphia 76ers and Milwaukee Bucks have closed the gap some, Boston and Denver are still solidly leading the NBA title chase at the season’s one-third mark.
It makes sense. Neither Denver nor (especially) Boston has shown particular reason to downgrade their Finals potential, with both teams ranking among the league’s top half-dozen squads by record early on. Any worries that the Celtics’ offseason shakeup might need a period of adjustment were dispelled by three separate win streaks of at least five games so far — Boston also hasn’t lost consecutive games since Nov. 8 — and the contributions of newcomers Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis (when healthy) next to Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Derrick White. The Nuggets, meanwhile, weathered the absence of Jamal Murray for nearly all of November with the help of another monster statistical season from Nikola Jokić.
Philly and Milwaukee have gained ground by answering questions of their own. We went into the season wondering what the Sixers would do about their James Harden problem; they ended up trading him to the L.A. Clippers, but that may have been addition by subtraction in the sense it helped unlock new performance levels for Tyrese Maxey and De’Anthony Melton while also enabling Joel Embiid to put up even bigger numbers. And the Bucks have been refining the potency of their Giannis Antetokounmpo-Damian Lillard duo, with each producing a 40+ point game in the past few weeks. They still need to figure out how to properly hide Dame on defense — Milwaukee hasn’t ranked as low as 19th on D since the underachieving Jason Kidd era — but the star-powered Bucks have flashed enough potential to justify ranking among the title favorites.
The T-Wolves and Thunder have entered the chat. (Sort of.)
It takes a while for the betting odds (or statistical models like our forecast) to come around on regular-season wonders in the NBA, since the real crucible of the postseason is still many months away. But there’s no denying the Minnesota Timberwolves have been maybe the league’s most impressive phenomenon in the early part of 2023-24. Minnesota has posted the league’s second-best record so far, with former No. 1 overall pick Anthony Edwards continuing his ascent to superstardom — and just as importantly, Karl-Anthony Towns is healthy again while Rudy Gobert is exerting his influence on the league’s top defense.
Fair or not, though, the T-Wolves — who haven’t won a playoff series since 2004 — still need to offer more proof that they truly belong in the top tier of contenders. The same goes for the Oklahoma City Thunder, who rank third (just ahead of Minnesota) in net rating, powered by the outstanding play of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren and others. OKC has a future dynasty written all over it, and there’s a 91% chance it makes the playoffs for the first time since 2020. But in terms of playoff experience — which matters a lot for a Finals run — this Thunder roster has less of it than any team in the entire league except the lowly Spurs. That’s a hurdle OKC must overcome when we talk about the teams to watch next spring.
Jokić and Embiid may have company in the MVP conversation.
According to the betting odds, the men who have won each of the past three league MVPs (Jokić and Embiid) are the front-runners yet again in 2023-24. That’s plenty fair; Embiid in particular has been incredible in recent weeks, making an aggressive case for back-to-back Michael Jordan trophies. But there’s still plenty of room for counter-candidates who can crash the MVP party.
By the odds, that player might be Dallas’ Luka Dončić, who is putting up downright silly numbers right now. During his recent streak of 11 consecutive 30+ point games, Dončić averaged 35.8 PPG, 10.4 APG and 8.9 RPG with a 60.4% True Shooting mark. (He also recorded multiple 40-point triple-doubles in the same span, passing Wilt Chamberlain for fourth all-time in that category.) If there’s a bone to pick with Dončić’s candidacy, it’s his suspect defense on a Mavs team that ranks just 23rd at that end of the court. So a counter-counter case might be made instead for Gilgeous-Alexander, who leads the NBA in Estimated RAPTOR WAR and has excelled on both sides of the basketball so far this season.
LeBron continues to be an ageless marvel.
Another viable name on the list of MVP candidates should be LeBron James, who is averaging 25, 7 and 7 and claimed In-Season Tournament MVP honors after leading his Lakers to the event’s inaugural championship.
But the most impressive — and improbable — thing about LeBron’s 2023-24 season is his age: He’ll turn 39 the day before New Year’s Eve, yet is still playing pretty much as he did roughly a decade ago. You can easily make the case that this is LeBron’s best season in many years. By WAR, his current pace (12.6 wins added) would beat any season he’s had since 2017-18 with the Cavaliers, when he was a spry 33 years old.
Going back to the 1976-77 ABA merger season, no player has produced more than 11.4 WAR at age 39 or older — John Stockton did that in 2001-02 — so it is unprecedented in the modern era for a player to be as good as James has been at his advanced age. And for a player who likes to measure himself within the broader context of basketball history, this is another unique item to put on his résumé in comparison with the game’s other greats.
The Clippers, Suns, Lakers and Pacers remain a mystery.
Although James’s individual consistency has been at an MVP level this season, the same can’t be said about his team — and the Lakers are far from alone in that regard among quasi-contenders.
Los Angeles stormed through the In-Season Tournament with a perfect 7-0 record and a +135 point differential, but in all other games this year, the Lakers are 9-13 with a -128 margin. The optimistic spin might be that the Lakers’ tourney fire will carry over to subsequent clutch games in the playoffs, but it’s easy to be skeptical after the team immediately started losing again after the IST final.
Speaking of which, the team L.A. beat there, the Indiana Pacers, are just as confusing. Led by Tyrese Haliburton, Indiana burst onto the national scene with their own undefeated run leading up to the final, providing hope that the Pacers can make the playoffs for the first time since 2020. But just like the Lakers, Indiana has struggled in non-tourney games (8-12, -19 differential) and the Pacers also have massive issues on defense, where they rank third-to-last in the NBA. It’s hard to see this team making a deep playoff run on the strength of Haliburton and the offense alone.
Then there are the Clippers and Suns, who round out our model’s top list of title contenders on paper. The Clips have been winning a lot recently, seemingly validating their James Harden experiment, and they should be well-positioned for the playoffs based on their roster’s league-leading level of postseason experience. Then again, these are the Clippers — a franchise notorious for its playoff flops, and a team led by stars who are either fragile (Kawhi Leonard, Paul George) or fragile and prone to big-game letdowns (Harden). You’d be forgiven for reserving judgment. Finally, for the Suns, it would be nice if their signature Big Three of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal could play more than one game together before someone gets hurt.
Wemby and Chet are locked in a two-player Rookie of the Year battle.
Again consulting the Vegas bookmakers, it’s clear that we have a very exciting Rookie of the Year fight brewing between Chet Holmgren of Oklahoma City (-130 odds) and Victor Wembanyama of San Antonio (-110). Both players have strikingly similar builds — each is rail-thin while standing in excess of 7 feet tall — and games, with the versatility to shoot and pass on top of traditional big-man tasks such as rebounding and rim protection.
Look at the numbers, though, and the two prospects’ rookie narratives start to diverge. Wemby has an edge in all of the conventional stats such as PPG, RPG and APG, to go with slightly more blocks per contest (even after Holmgren’s block party against Denver last week). Holmgren’s case comes more in the way of efficiency — his shooting numbers are far better than Wembanyama’s — and advanced metrics. According to WAR, not only does Holmgren hold a sizable edge over Wemby, but there are four other players (Dereck Lively II, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Cason Wallace and Brandin Podziemski) sandwiched on the rookie leaderboard between Wemby at No. 6 and Holmgren at No. 1.
The Pistons are making their WOAT case. 😢
The other dominant story of the season to date has come far away from the ranks of the contenders and award front-runners. As my colleague Jared Dubin recently put it, the 2023-24 Detroit Pistons are a disaster. In fact, it’s getting to the point that they might make a credible case as the worst team in NBA history.
Detroit actually started the season winning two of its first three games. That’s amazing in retrospect because the Pistons then dropped each of their next 24 (and counting). That already ties them for the fourth-longest losing streak in NBA history and sets them four more losses shy of the all-time record (28, set by the tank-tastic Sixers across the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons). At 2-25, Detroit is also tied for the third-worst start to a season in NBA history, and its -321 scoring margin through 27 games ranks seventh-worst all-time. There have probably been worse teams in the long annals of league history — the 1992-93 Mavs and 2011-12 Bobcats come to mind — but it’s tragic to see a team that seems like it should be better (featuring former No. 1 pick Cade Cunningham and ex-Coach of the Year Monty Williams) struggle this much.
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