Key NBA Storylines for 2023-24 — And Introducing My NBA Forecast Model
Everything we're excited for this season, including Victor Wembanyama, ageless LeBron James... and the Boston Celtics as title favorites.
(Note: This was originally published on the ill-fated Messenger site.)
It’s time once again to tip off the NBA’s regular season, and that means there’s a fresh batch of juicy storylines to keep tabs on as the action gets underway. To help manage it all, we’ve pulled together what we think are the league’s most pressing questions going into 2023-24 — and we’re also introducing our new NBA forecast model, which updates every morning with power ratings and probabilities that track who is most likely to make the Finals and win the championship. (You can read about how it works here.)
So in the spirit of a classic lapsed-fan’s guide, let’s dig into what’s going on around the league, starting with…
How good will Victor Wembanyama be?
It’s no exaggeration to say that we’ve never seen a player like Victor Wembanyama, the San Antonio Spurs’ 7-foot-4 phenom. (At least not outside of NBA 2K’s create-a-player feature.) Wembanyama is lanky as hell, but he’s capable of playing game-changing defense — he averaged 1 steal and 2.8 blocks per game during the preseason — while displaying absurd skill on the offensive side of the ball for his size. Add in the coaching of Gregg Popovich, and it’s hard not to be excited for Wembanyama’s future as a potential all-time great.
Surely, there will be growing pains along the way. Remember, the history of such “supertall” NBA players is not as filled with sure things as you might expect based on the simple fact of height being a big advantage in basketball. Of the 24 retired players in NBA history listed as 7-foot-3 or taller, only three — Yao Ming, Arvydas Sabonis and Ralph Sampson — made the Hall of Fame. Of course, there’s a good case to be made that Wembanyama is too different from any of them for such comparisons to be valid. But at the same time, it’s a good thing to recall any time the hype around Wemby starts getting too out of control this season.
How much of a threat are LeBron and the Lakers?
In our default composite model, the Los Angeles Lakers have the seventh-best title chances of any team (though some of that is being driven by their fifth-place ranking in the betting odds component of the forecast). Any team featuring LeBron James and Anthony Davis is sure to get its share of hype going into a season — even if it all ends up falling apart. But whatever you think of the Lakers, they will probably be one of the league’s most compelling — and confusing — teams throughout the season.
If we look at value added versus subtracted over the offseason according to my Consensus Plus/Minus wins above replacement statistic (which blends together multiple different advanced metrics into a single figure), L.A. ranked third-to-last, with the metrics panning pickups such as Gabe Vincent, Taurean Prince, Cam Reddish and Jaxson Hayes. (For what it’s worth, Christian Wood is more well-regarded statistically, at least.) All of that was on top of a 43-win squad that spent most of 2022-23 below .500 and whose best player is pushing the boundaries of NBA aging.
And yet, there’s no denying that the Lakers were impressive in dispatching the Memphis Grizzlies and (especially) the defending champion Warriors in the playoffs, before running up against the Denver Nuggets’ machine in the Western Conference finals. There’s also no denying that young players such as Austin Reaves and Rui Hachimura have the promise to keep improving and elevate this team’s ceiling. As long as James and Davis are together and healthy — which, we’ve seen, is no guarantee — the Lakers can always exceed expectations when they need to.
Can the Celtics finally reach their potential?
As evidenced by our forecast table, the Boston Celtics are NBA title favorites going into 2023-24. In large part, that’s a product of Boston having been the league’s best team on paper in both 2021-22 and 2022-23 — but neither of those seasons ultimately yielded a championship, as the Celtics lost the ‘22 Finals to the Golden State Warriors, then failed to come back from down 3-0 against the Miami Heat in the ‘23 Eastern Conference finals. It’s a team that historically has failed to live up to the expectations of us stat-nerds.
What might make this season different? Well, Boston is rolling with a pretty substantially different group now. Yes, they still have the star tandem of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, owner of the newly minted richest contract in the NBA, but gone are Marcus Smart, Malcolm Brogdon, Robert Williams III and Grant Williams. Instead, the Celtics acquired Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis, both of whom will add a new element to Boston’s offense in coach Joe Mazzulla’s second season at the helm. But we won’t know exactly how the new mix is going to work — and if it can bring Boston any closer to an NBA title — until we really see it in action in games that count.
Which new faces will make the biggest impact?
Like most NBA offseasons, there was no shortage of big names exchanging uniforms — or at least trying to do so — this summer. According to Consensus Plus/Minus WAR, here were the most valuable players from 2022-23 who will be on different teams in 2023-24:
The most coveted star on the move was former Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard, and the potency of his pairing with Giannis Antetokounmpo in Milwaukee is a big reason why the Bucks are among the championship favorites this season. Based on his 2022-23 performance, No. 2 on the list might be 76ers malcontent James Harden, whether he lands with the L.A. Clippers or elsewhere. Lillard and Harden may not be at their career peaks anymore, but they are still capable of helping win a title.
The rest of the list is filled with fascinating situations. As previously mentioned, the Celtics did add two of the best newcomers of the offseason even if they paid a steep price for it. Veteran point guards Fred VanVleet and Chris Paul moved to teams at different phases of success — the former signed a massive deal with Houston, an incredibly young team that has won fewer than 20 games per season the past three years; the latter was dealt to Golden State, where the fit will be a work in progress but the upside could be tremendous. And the Phoenix Suns made some additional moves to complement the midseason acquisition of Kevin Durant last year, adding Bradley Beal (a bona fide No. 3 on a title team when healthy) and the underrated Grayson Allen.
What about the coaching carousel?
In addition to all the players on the move, it was an active summer for coaching changes as well. Among the six coaches leading new teams are two former NBA champions (Nick Nurse, now with the Sixers; Frank Vogel, now with the Suns), a former NBA Finalist (Ime Udoka, now with the Rockets) and a former Coach of the Year (Monty Williams, now with the Pistons).
How much will any of them move the needle? A coach’s fate is driven by expectations as much as by performance, and the expectations are high with many of these clubs. Among teams that fired their previous coaches, the Bucks, Sixers and Suns all won at least 45 games, and the Raptors were .500. Most of the coaches at new posts have previous track records of success, which should make for an interesting experiment in how much of that can be ported over to a new destination with different players.
Which other teams are confounding us?
In its “Messenger-only mode”, which removes any blending between pure mathematical power ratings and implied betting-market odds, the model’s ratings — especially the regular-season version — are high on the Cleveland Cavaliers, assigning them the fifth-best title probability of any team. Given their stellar defense and abundance of young talent, it’s not hard to get excited about the Cavs, but it’s also hard to forget how soundly Cleveland was beaten by the New York Knicks in last year’s first round.
The Grizzlies are in a similar situation, with loads of young talent headlined by (but not limited to) Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. But with Morant suspended for the first 25 games of the season, it’s hard to say how good Memphis can be early on — nor can we truly rule out future incidents from Morant that might derail this team’s potential. And speaking of team-derailing incidents, you can’t talk about maddening squads without highlighting the Dallas Mavericks. The Mavs reunited Kyrie Irving with Luka Dončić, which sounds good on paper, but Dallas somehow went 5-11 with the two stars playing together last season. (And now Luka is out with a calf strain, and has no timetable to return.)
Who will win the new in-season tournament? (And will anyone care?)
One of the biggest new NBA twists this season will be the in-season tournament, featuring group stage games (which also double as regular-season games) on Tuesdays and Fridays throughout November, and a knockout round in December that will culminate in a championship game for the new NBA Cup on Dec. 9 in Las Vegas. Here are the odds from our composite model, based on 5,000 simulations of the new tourney format:
It’s not surprising that the list of NBA Cup favorites pretty well matches what we see from the overall NBA title odds, but is just flatter — the in-season tournament format has many fewer games to determine knockout qualifying than the actual NBA playoffs, as well as a single-elimination format rather than a series. There’s at least a plausible chance that we’ll see a somewhat strange team emerge and capture the title in the first year of this experimental project.
It may also come down to whether the players — let alone the fans — actually care about winning this thing. Each member of the championship squad gets $500,000, with the runners-up getting $200,000. But the periodic nature of regular-season contests that get designated for the group stage might make it hard to keep track of this game-within-a-game in the standings, and the perceived relative value of an NBA Cup (versus the Larry O’Brien Trophy) is sure to be low at first.
But as someone who is in favor of anything that gives more meaning to the regular season, I’m all in on this new, weird idea. And that should be a theme for the 2023-24 season overall: After an exceptionally rare stretch of NBA history with five different champions in five years, anything truly does feel possible. So it’s time to embrace the different and the strange — and we’ll be there as your guide throughout the journey.
Filed under: NBA