The Biggest Questions in the NBA’s Wild West

Today’s Playmaker newsletter looks ahead to the Association’s second half.

Howdy, y’all.

If you’re anything like me, you are extremely ready for the NBA season to resume. But if I’m being real, I’m not sure if that’s because the All-Star Game felt so uncompetitive that I really just need something else to erase it from my mind, or that I’m just that hungry for basketball.

Either way: I was prepared to write something on the most noteworthy story lines throughout the entire league for the final two months of play. Then I realized: Just about all the stuff I’m most curious to watch stems from Western Conference clubs. So instead of casting a league-wide net, I scaled back to just the questions currently hovering over the wild Wild West.

Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports

How will the Los Angeles Clippers—and Sacramento Kings—fare against good competition?

With the addition of Russell Westbrook, Bones Hyland and Mason Plumlee, the Clippers’ makeup has changed enough to where it’s fair to place slightly less emphasis on this question.

But even with the new-look roster, and the fact that Los Angeles has often held out one or both stars, the fact remains: The Clippers have been world-beaters (23–8) against sub-.500 competition, but performed poorly (10–20) against teams above .500. And with the Clippers playing the West’s hardest schedule the rest of the way, something has to give.

To be fair, the third-place Kings have the same approximate profile: They’re 21–8 against sub-.500 clubs, and 11–17 against ones at .500 and above. And they have the West’s second-toughest slate the rest of the way, after the Clippers. But the difference here is almost no one would consider the Kings—holders of the longest playoff drought in NBA history at 16 seasons—title contenders just yet. That’s in stark contrast with the Clippers, who many picked as the West favorite before the season because of their depth.

With regard to the team’s Jekyll and Hyde splits, keep an eye on Robert Covington, who has shot almost 40% from three against losing teams, but just 28.3% against winning ones to this point.

Will Nikola Jokić win a third MVP?

It sure looks that way if he manages to stay healthy the rest of the way. As always, injuries have whittled the field down some, with Steph Curry and Kevin Durant having missed considerable time. Giannis Antetokounmpo now looks like he’ll perhaps miss some time, too, just as Milwaukee was potentially on the cusp of closing in on first place in the East.

Luka Dončić deserves consideration, but his league-leading scoring numbers—one of the strongest cases he has, in light of his enormous usage rate—figures to possibly take a step back now with Kyrie Irving sharing the floor with him.

It may turn out Joel Embiid is again Jokić’s biggest competition. You may remember that Embiid, who has finished as the MVP runner-up in back-to-back years, lit up Jokić and the Nuggets for 47 points in a victory when they matched up on national television back in January.

But in a year when Embiid has been merely decent defensively relative to his own lofty standards and expectations, it seems unclear—perhaps unlikely, even—that the Sixers big man would win the award while producing so much less total offense than Jokić. Meaning: It will be difficult to make a strong case for someone averaging four assists per night when Jokić—also a center who doesn’t necessarily possess the ball each play—is averaging 10 in a triple-double season, and doing so on better scoring efficiency. On a first-place team, no less.

The race certainly isn’t over, but Jokić looks likely to join a historic list of players to win the award three consecutive times.

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Which team gets its superstar back the soonest?

This is quietly one of the biggest questions, one that involves the defending champions, a club that was absolutely humming at midseason, and a squad that almost has to reach the postseason, if only to justify an enormous offseason trade.

The Warriors (29–29) had finally gained some momentum before Curry was sidelined, but then lost three of four to head into the break without their superstar. The team said it would reevaluate the partial tears to his lower leg ligaments after All-Star weekend. It should go without saying that the sooner they get him back, the better: Golden State finds itself in a logjam with several other clubs—six in the West are within a game, up or back, of the Warriors. There are heavy implications for every win and loss, especially over the next two and a half weeks, a span in which the Dubs play four of those six teams.

Don’t expect the Pelicans to be the answer to this question, by the way.

They were showing subtle title-contender vibes for a brief stage, even without Brandon Ingram in the mix. But that simply doesn’t seem the case without Zion Williamson, who looks to be quite a ways off from returning. Executive VP of basketball operations David Griffin said earlier in the month the star would miss “multiple weeks” after a setback with his hamstring recovery—the last thing you want to hear about a player who has been dealing with constant injuries throughout his career.

New Orleans has certainly struggled without Zion; earlier this month, it had a 10-game skid (one that it helped snap upon Ingram’s returning and thawing out a bit after a few contests). The 30–29 club will almost surely take a cautious approach with Williamson’s return—he’s been out since Jan. 4—even if it means holding him out until closer to the postseason, just to be safe.

There’s also the question of how things look when Karl-Anthony Towns returns to a Minnesota team that’s performed marginally better record-wise since he left the lineup. The Timberwolves were 10–11 at the time of Towns’s injury and went 21–19 since without him. Shams Charania of The Athletic reported Towns might come back with 10 or 15 games remaining.

Win, lose or draw, I wonder whether Minnesota would even consider making a big move to shake anything up roster-wise. While some have talked of a potential Towns deal if the experiment with Rudy Gobert doesn’t work, there has been too little time, even if Towns comes back, to fully have an answer about whether it can work from this season alone.

Rick Scuteri/USA TODAY Sports

The Suns’ health?

Of course I’m interested in how the offense looks, mostly because I like to watch elite offensive players line up alongside one another and see how the different pieces fit together. But there’s so much talent here, particularly on offense. There’s a fair amount of depth, too.

My real question is whether the Suns—Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Chris Paul, Deandre Ayton—stay healthy the remainder of the year. If they do, I fully understand the idea of them becoming most people’s favorite in the West. I’m far more curious about the health aspect than any questions regarding fit.

Rapid fire: Grizzlies on the road? Mavs on D? How will the new-look Lakers perform?

It wasn’t long ago that a Reddit post had the NBA nerd community in a bit of a chokehold. Specifically, a user called into question Jaren Jackson Jr.’s defensive home and road splits, suggesting there might be some home cooking from a scorekeeping perspective.

While that controversy didn’t hold water for even a day, the home-road disparity is apparent on a teamwide scale, with Memphis being great at home (24–5) but subpar on the road (11–17) and defense being partially to blame.

Opponents hit four more threes per contest against the Grizzlies when they aren’t playing at FedEx Forum, and Jackson, for whatever reason, goes ballistic in terms of collecting blocks and steals while playing in front of his home crowd. (Noteworthy: Brandon Clarke’s rim protection numbers at home versus the road are wildly different.) There does just seem to be a greater intensity at home for the Grizz, which may not bode well if they lack home court advantage in a series.

The Mavs, who are still working toward a healthy roster, should have a decent runway to allow Dončić and Irving to formulate chemistry. They own the NBA’s easiest remaining schedule. And even in the pair’s short time together, the team has put up nearly 127 points per 100 possessions with those two on the floor—an astoundingly high number. The key for them, aside from Josh Green’s continued development, is whether they can also defend well enough to contend at a high level. So far, the answer has looked like a no. (They’re giving up 124 points per 100.)

That’s without big man Maxi Kleber, who hopes to be back from injury soon. Kleber aside, I sort of feel like the Mavs need more plus defenders in those lineups along with the two stars to make it all work. We know the offense will be a sight to behold at times. Still, Dallas looked like a true threat last season—during the season, and especially against Phoenix—when it defended well.

With the Lakers, it was just one game with the whole band together, but wow, did that look different.

I won’t even pretend to know what comes next for this team, other than to say they have a shot to look far more consistent from game to game now as the roster makes more sense. They finally have more shooting, in D’Angelo Russell, Malik Beasley and Mo Bamba. They have a relentless rebounder in 6'9" Jarred Vanderbilt. They have more reliable ballhandling, and fewer players who can essentially be ignored from outside of 15 feet—stuff that matters when you have an offense that already can’t breathe from a spacing standpoint.

We’ll see whether there’s enough time for L.A. to turn this around. If not, it will merely make me wonder why the team waited so long to wheel and deal (yes, I know they got Rui Hachimura a little bit earlier) when they could’ve done it sooner.

Better late than never, though.

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

Christopher Creveling/USA TODAY Sports

• Rohan Nadkarni wrote on the All-Star weekend winners and losers and had a feature on unexpected All-Star starter Lauri Markkanen.

• Chris Mannix went to Phoenix for Kevin Durant’s intro presser, and declared in his column that it’s title or bust for the Suns. He also penned a piece about the Celtics’ removing Joe Mazzulla’s interim tag, which means Boston has officially moved on from Ime Udoka.

• Woo, our draft analyst, has a Daily Cover piece on Victor Wembanyama out Tuesday. Last week, he wrote a primer on what to expect from the NBA’s race to the bottom now that the deadline has passed.

• The Washington Post’s Ava Wallace had a really good feature on Wizards guard Anthony Gill, who she deemed Washington’s “culture guy.” It lays out the intangible value those sorts of players have in an NBA locker room.

• HoopsHype’s Michael Scotto had a great Q&A with Thunder rookie Jalen Williams, who told Scotto he had no clue who Thunder coach Mark Daigneault was as he orchestrated Williams’s draft workout. (An aside: I love rookies, because only rookies are green enough—real enough—to share these sorts of details with you as a reporter.)

• FiveThirtyEight’s Jared Dubin had a really solid, outside-the-box season awards column, to mark the three-quarter mark of the campaign coming up.

• Yahoo Sports’ Dan Devine had a really good look at Evan Mobley, who he believes is a lot closer to becoming “the guy” on offense than you think.

• Bomani Jones telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth around the uncomfortable Karl Malone tributes and appearances at All-Star weekend in Utah.