Lowe on C's

[Eddie20]

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/our-annual-tiers-of-the-nba/

Solid Playoff Teams, But Nothing More

Boston Celtics: The snark brigade likes to mock Boston’s cute little rebuild by noting Danny Ainge has put together a star-less team with a bunch of seventh men and no realistic path to a championship. That’s partly true; there’s no universe in which the current group of Celtics, even with above-average improvement from every player, wins an NBA title.

But calling these guys “seventh men” shortchanges them. Boston has a lot of good NBA players, and there is a hard-to-quantify power in giving all your minutes to average-or-better players — and none to bad ones.

That said, projection systems pegging them for 50 wins might be overdoing it. A lot of that is based on Boston’s strong play after the trade deadline, when Brad Stevens played a ton of small-ball units around Isaiah Thomas’s go-go pick-and-roll game. Those units scored well and juiced up individual player stats — numbers that figure into some of those projection systems spitting out gaudy win totals. It’s unclear if Boston can keep up that production playing with bigger groups, especially when teams wise up and drop far back on David Lee pick-and-rolls, so that he isn’t starting at an easy 4-on-3 whenever a point guard slips him the ball.

Boston doesn’t have a single ball handler that scares you as both a shooter and a driver, though Marcus Smart’s playmaking in the preseason was super-encouraging; getting more from Smart would allow Boston to cut Evan Turner’s minutes and slide Avery Bradley into spot-up corner-shooting mode. The C’s compensate with constant cutting and ball movement that puts a defense on its heels, scrambling to catch up with all the directional changes. It’s hard to guard, but smart teams might succeed by forming a shell and forcing Boston to kick it around the perimeter. Kelly Olynyk is the one Boston big who can bust that strategy with his passing and shooting; he is poised for a breakout season.

In the big picture, Boston is in the happy position of not banking on any one method of advancing to the next level. The Celtics will have cap space, they could net a game-changing star in the lottery with one of Brooklyn’s picks, and they’re gathering the goods to make a Godfather offer for any disgruntled star.

The league is entering an interesting phase of team-building — and maybe of stasis in lots of places. Lots of teams talk about accumulating assets for that sort of Kevin Garnett– or James Harden–style trade, but they must face the hard reality that Boston, Philly, and even Phoenix can outbid them.7 Teams selling the hope of cap space are pedaling false dreams in a league where almost everyone — including good teams in attractive cities — has max-level space. Even trades might become harder to pull; teams figure to hoard first-rounders after a bunch zoomed around the league last season, and there just aren’t a lot of multiyear contracts attached to solid players who teams are anxious to dump.

Where does that leave teams in the middle, or at the bottom, and without a trade war chest to rival those in Boston, Philly, and Phoenix?

Our draft picks...

Out of the Playoffs, Murky Future Division

Brooklyn Nets: Yes, the Nets could have enough cap space to fit two max contracts this summer. Guess what? [dang] near the whole league will have max-level cap space, and most of those teams can offer better basketball situations than Brooklyn. The Lakers will come calling with that same double-max cap ammo, only they also have Los Angeles and four interesting players age 23 or younger — including two top-10 picks. The Nets have zero such players and they don’t own their own pick until 2019. This is so depressing. Let’s move on.

Dallas Mavericks: If Chandler Parsons and Wesley Matthews were humming, you could envision a top-10 offense, rich in shooting, carrying a blah defense to the back end of the Western Conference playoff race. Sadly, those guys aren’t 100 percent; Matthews is game to play in the season opener, because he’s a bad-ass MFer game to play anytime and anywhere, but history suggests it will take him months to rediscover his top form.

Mark Cuban’s free-agency adventures haven’t yielded a win at the highest levels yet, and Dirk Nowitzki’s clock is ticking. If Matthews and Parsons recover by the end of the season,10 you could envision a star free agent — perhaps Howard, still a Dan Fegan client — seeing himself as the missing piece between the Mavs and a title run. But that looks like a hard sell from here, especially with Howard on a contender already, and the Mavs are out a key draft pick via the Rondo deal. The post-Dirk landscape is a complete unknown.

[Eddie20]

Lowe has us ranked in the 2nd tier of groups that include...

Championship Contenders
Solid Playoff Teams, But Nothing More
8-Seed Battle Royal — East Version
8-Seed Battle Royal — West Version
Out of the Playoffs, Murky Future Division
Out of the Playoffs, and Happy-ish

[jpotter33]

Pretty high praise for where we are in the rebuild. TP for the find.