Six Intriguing Things to Watch in the NBA's Homestretch

Players, teams and scenarios to keep an eye on after the All-Star break.

Good afternoon, basketball lovers. So good to be with you again as we head into All-Star weekend.

Last week, after witnessing basketball history in the form of LeBron James capturing the all-time scoring record, we saw fireworks in the form of one of the zaniest NBA trade deadlines we’ve ever witnessed. After watching Kyrie Irving get dealt to Dallas, we then saw his former teammate Kevin Durant land with the Suns. All possibilities we thought we might see last summer, but not necessarily right before the deadline, with the Nets still solidly in playoff position.

In any case, those things did happen. And now that the coast is clear, I thought it made sense to throw out six of the players, teams and scenarios I find most intriguing as we prepare for the homestretch.

Josh Green

The Most Improved Player award is likely spoken for already. Jazz star Lauri Markkanen looks to be in pole position, while Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has arguably made the incredibly challenging leap from star to borderline superstar for a young Oklahoma City club.

But if you veer away from guys who’ve made the leap to stardom or superstardom, and instead look at sheer improvement alone, you’d at least mention the progression of Dallas’s Green. In the span of just one season, the 22-year-old Mavs wing has gone from being a guy the Jazz felt completely comfortable leaving wide open (and weren’t burned by) last postseason to being a flamethrower and a threat to go off nightly as of late. Before his struggles Monday—six points on 3-for-11 shooting in a narrow loss to Minnesota—Green had outings of a career-best 29 points on 17 shots, 14 points on seven shots, 17 points on 12 shots and 23 points on 12 shots. Those four showings came in four consecutive games, and lifted his season-long shooting percentages to 57% overall and 43.1% from deep and a 68.6% effective field-goal rate that is more than 11 percentage points higher than last season.

His ascension—which coincided with him being forced into the starting lineup—could give the Mavs a valuable third wing threat alongside Luka Dončić and Irving come playoff time, one no one saw coming from a guy who averaged fewer than five points per game last year.

Mitchell Robinson

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It’s really tempting to point to newcomer Josh Hart, who’s already won over the team’s passionate fans with his nose for the ball, despite standing 6'5". But for all the things Hart does at his best—rebound out of his zone, knock down jumpers the way he did Monday night, be a one-man band in transition and defend—the presence the Knicks can use most is Robinson’s.

At 7–6 since he exited the lineup, the Julius Randle– and Jalen Brunson–led Knicks have managed to stay afloat without Robinson. But in surrendering 120.1 points per 100 possessions, fifth worst in the league, the defense hasn’t been nearly as good since Robinson left the lineup beginning with New York’s Jan. 20 loss to the Hawks. (The Knicks were the 11th-best defense, giving up 112.2 points per 100 possessions, before that.)

Cleveland’s fifth starter role

As teams that haven’t made the playoffs in their current form yet, it’s unclear just how much damage the third-place Kings and fourth-place Cavs can do upon reaching the postseason.

Both clubs are formidable, with red-hot Cleveland owning the best net rating in the Eastern Conference and the league’s best defense statistically, and the Kings being a tenth of a point per 100 possessions behind Nikola Jokić and the Nuggets for the NBA’s best offense.

Even with those lofty realities, it’s worth wondering how the teams will do come playoff time when it comes to their sensitive spots: the backup center role in Sacramento and the fifth starting position for Cleveland, which has been held down by Isaac Okoro since the start of the new year.

Okoro, who has the defense the Cavs need at that spot but has looked unsure of himself from a shooting standpoint, has been making the most of his chance since the start of January, shooting 46.7% from the arc on 2.7 tries per night, an enormous turnaround from just 24.6% on two attempts per game before the new year. Can that hold up the rest of the way, so Cleveland has a sizable stopper on the wing to throw at Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jayson Tatum types come playoff time? (The club, which exhausted its assets in dealing for Donovan Mitchell last summer, opted against dealing at the deadline.) If not, big man Evan Mobley may be tasked some with the responsibility. Caris LeVert and Dean Wade remain other options.

Sacramento’s backup bigs

When watching the Kings, it doesn’t take much to see that their starters—who’ve logged the most minutes of any five-man lineup in the NBA—are doing the job on a night-in, night-out basis, outscoring foes by nearly five points per 100 possessions. The wide-open offense is stellar, and even that group’s defense performs at an average level. Domantas Sabonis, long criticized for his lack of rim protection, has held opposing shooters more than four percentage points beneath their averages around the basket while defending nine shots there per contest.

Issues have often cropped up on defense when Mike Brown is forced to turn to his rotating cast of bigs off the bench—Chimezie Metu and Richaun Holmes, among others—a group he’s admittedly cycled through in hopes of finding a more consistent answer there.

The upside here, of course, is that starters almost always play longer minutes come playoff time, so the problem can likely be neutralized some by then. Still: For a physical, battering-ram player like Sabonis, who leads the league in offensive fouls, it wouldn’t hurt the Kings to find something of an answer at the backup spot before that point, just in case. Otherwise, when Sacramento does break its historically long playoff drought, it could be a quick exit.

Derrick White

If Josh Green can get a mention for the way he’s stepped up in a big way for Dallas, did you really think we could avoid mentioning Mr. White? In recent weeks, in the absence of the injured Marcus Smart, you could argue that no role player has cooked more than White, who over his last nine games has averaged just over 20 points per game, five boards and five assists on 50% shooting overall and 46.8% from three. This is all while playing great defense, too.

He was already hugely impactful in last season’s playoffs. But White developing this level of confidence is an enormous win for a deep team like Boston, which already has him, Smart and Malcolm Brogdon to flank star wings Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

Deandre Ayton

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The Phoenix situation becomes arguably the most fascinating thing to watch for the remainder of the season. Yes, the Suns might have more sheer talent than anyone out West now. But yes, there is also a handful of ways in which this doesn’t work for them. For starters, top-end health is a concern with all three of Durant, Chris Paul and Devin Booker having missed considerable time this season. Beyond that, Phoenix gave up a pair of really good defenders, including an elite one in Mikal Bridges.

And for all the scoring talent the team possesses, it’s fair to wonder exactly how things will look on offense. Paul has always been intentional about making sure his teammates get touches to feel involved—a necessary trait here, given how ball-dominant the three ballhandlers can be—but it wouldn’t be all that surprising if Ayton feels relegated to some extent.

Because of all the team’s injuries, Ayton has been able to enjoy the best scoring average of his career, at 18.6 points per night, albeit on lower efficiency than he’s used to. (He’s been fantastic lately—he was just nominated for Western Conference Player of the Week—with back-to-back games of 13-for-15 and 31 points and 14-for-18 and 35 points, respectively.)

One of the things I grow curious about is whether Ayton’s touches dwindle a bit with the addition of Durant and recent return of Booker: Does the big man stay equally committed on defense if and when his shots aren’t as plentiful? If he doesn’t hold up that end, Bismack Biyombo stifles rim shooters to perform 15.3 percentage points beneath their averages. By contrast, Ayton holds them about 1.5 points below their average.

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Meat and potatoes: Good reads from SI and elsewhere this past week

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• Howard Beck opined that it’s still a superstar league, as evidenced by Kyrie, and then Durant, ending up elsewhere midseason. He also handled Sports Illlustrated’s news story on James breaking the scoring record last week. Beck spoke with Candace Parker about being the first woman to call an All-Star Game, and he had a piece laying out the fact that the Nets lost a star but gained ample stability by dealing him away.

• Rohan Nadkarni laid out the trade deadline’s winners and losers Thursday, while also individually grading a handful of the day’s biggest swaps. He also put into words what makes LeBron a once-in-a-lifetime athlete, while taking aim at who, potentially, could break LBJ’s scoring record someday. (Draft analyst Jeremy Woo took a crack at grading the James Wiseman swap that also involved the Warriors’ getting Gary Payton II back, one that grew downright awkward over the day or two that followed the agreement.)

• Chris Mannix wrote on the deadline help the Lakers acquired, and wrote a couple of stories about LeBron, one laying out that he stands alone in his greatness, and another putting his evolution as a scorer under the microscope.

• Robin Lundberg, a Nets fan himself, wrote about the disastrous end of an era for Brooklyn.

• I wrote twice: Once, explaining that KD and the Suns seemed to quietly need each other, and a separate column in which I said LeBron is the greatest all-around superstar to ever play the sport.

• Kyle Wood handled our NBA power rankings for the week, and our staff had a roundtable discussion about our feelings around the Durant trade. Our Zach Koons wrote on the latest Zion news for us yesterday: The star forward is going to miss more weeks of time after suffering a setback in his recovery from a hamstring injury.

• The Ringer’s Mirin Fader had a really unusual, well-reported piece drawing a number of comparisons I never would have thought about between LeBron and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

• ESPN’s Zach Lowe sat and spoke with LeBron about the false notion so many fans have about being a “pure scorer.” And as James sat and watched clips with Lowe, he told him which baskets of his were most meaningful throughout his career—a really solid piece that stood out in a busy week where so many of us wrote about him.

• The Orange County Register’s Kyle Goon wrote a really smart piece on Russell Westbrook: the difficult dichotomy of squaring how poorly Westbrook performed in Los Angeles with the sort of person and teammate he is.

• ESPN’s Kirk Goldsberry had an amazing shot-by-shot chart prepped for when LeBron broke the record. Take a look at it for yourself; it’s good stuff.

• The Athletic’s Fred Katz wrote about Josh Hart, and how he manages to track down rebounds despite being much smaller than the guys he grabs them over.