The NBA season has reached its home stretch, with important storylines left to follow.
Many teams will use their remaining games to get healthy, as injuries remain a defining factor around the league. Others need time to gel, especially those who made moves at the deadline.
The most obvious example is Cleveland adding Harden, which has already paid dividends. But just how real is his recent stretch, and where do they stand in the East?
Let’s find out.
How real are the Cavs?
After a slow start to the season, Cleveland has gone 5-1 following the Harden trade with a +9.0 net rating (5th league-wide) and the second-best offensive rating at 124.3. However, the turnaround actually happened before the Beard’s arrival, as the Cavs are 14-2 over the past month with a +11 net rating and have been good on both ends: during that span, they have a 121.1 ORTG (2nd) and 110.2 DRTG (8th). Their offensive improvement is very real, given that Harden is both a better player and more available than Darius Garland, and his playstyle naturally raises the floors for bigs like Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen.
On the other hand, Cleveland’s recent defense has been propped up by shooting luck. During their hot streak, opponents are making just 33.5% of their triples, which is the 3rd lowest mark in the league. Conversely, they hit 38.9% of threes (the highest percentage) prior to this stretch, so the Cavs were due for some shooting luck anyway. A positive is that Cleveland’s rim protection has been elite all season, so they could still be a very good defense even if the opponent shooting normalizes. I’d currently put Cleveland under Detroit in the East’s hierarchy, but they could definitely rise into that top tier if their dominant play continues.
Tatum’s potential return
Boston’s inspiring season could get even better if Tatum returns, as they’re already close to locking in a top-4 seed in the East. Assuming he does come back, Detroit might be the only team I’d be more confident in making the finals, and that’s accounting for him being at 75% too. Even a lesser version of Tatum is enough to be a good starter/elite role player, and having him focus just on rebounding, shooting, and defending will be a huge boost. Boston will be especially lethal if Tatum can work his way back to guarding centres, as this would mitigate some of Vucevic’s defensive issues and let him play more. The Celtics could always have one guard (White/Pritchard), one wing (Brown/Tatum), and one big (Queta/Vucevic) on the court, allowing Joe Mazzulla to play any style given the polar opposite skillsets of their bigs.
The Nuggets’ injuries
I picked Denver to win the title coming into the season, and nothing has swayed me since — assuming they’re healthy, of course. Unfortunately, that’s a big if given how banged up they’ve been. You know it’s bad when Joker misses a month!
Amazingly, their presumptive starting lineup of Murray-Braun-Johnson-Gordon-Jokic has played just 324 possessions together (less than 6% of the team’s total number of possessions on the season), and their most used lineup isn’t much better, logging just 357 possessions as a unit. However, Denver’s ludicrous +23.7 net rating (130.2 offensive, 106.5 defensive) with Jokic, Murray, and Gordon suggests that they’re a juggernaut waiting to be unleashed. A lot of that is due to defensive shooting luck, but given that the Nuggets are only reliable in their own end when Gordon plays, it’s not hyperbolic to say that his health could be the biggest X-factor in the title race. Whether or not that’s a good bet to make is up to you — his longest streak of games played the past two seasons is last year’s playoff run at 14, which ended in injury — but I have no doubt that Denver should be co-favorites with OKC if he’s able to make it through a long postseason run.
Wemby’s minutes
San Antonio has proven to be legit title threats this season, but they won’t be able to make a long run if Wemby can’t ramp up his minutes. The Alien started the year averaging over 34 minutes a game in October and November, which dropped down to 23 in December when he returned from a calf strain. January saw his playing time increase to 27 minutes per game, which is now over 29 in February. The Spurs won’t suddenly increase Wemby’s minutes to the mid to high thirties come playoff time, so he’ll have to make that adjustment in the last two months of the season. Moreover, Wemby can only miss four of the Spurs’ remaining 25 games in order to qualify for end of season awards, which could be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, that could help his body acclimate to heavier loads, but it might also wear him out and increase the odds of injury. Either way, both the Spurs and Wemby are incentivized to increase his minutes, which should terrify the rest of the league.
Tanking is out of control!!
The discourse surrounding tanking has gone into overdrive, and rightfully so: there are more teams than ever purposefully losing and countless stars have ended their seasons because of it too.
However, the amount of tanking changes yearly, depending on the strength of the draft. The current tankathon race is out of control since the 2026 class has three players who could all go #1, but the 2027 and 2028 drafts all lack franchise players at the top. Thus, we don’t want to overcorrect due to this season and end up creating unforeseen consequences for years to come.
With that said, something has to change since this has been an ongoing issue for decades, but there is no magic bullet that’ll fix everything. Adam Silver is already looking at potential solutions, but the ideas proposed will only lessen tanking, and not get rid of it completely. That’s because the NBA still wants to keep its socialistic design in place — having the worst teams draft highest to even out the playing field — while incentivizing every team to compete. It’s impossible to square those things when losing gives teams the best path at drafting highest, so the league will need to sacrifice some of its ideals if they want to eliminate tanking.
The best solution I’ve heard is the Gold Plan, where teams earn draft ranking points for wins after they’re eliminated from playoff contention. Unfortunately, teams would just start tanking earlier so that they can get eliminated as soon as possible and have more runway to rack up draft wins, and it could lead to stars getting traded to bottom feeders and result in less intriguing postseasons.
If we truly want to abolish tanking, the Gold Plan can be tweaked by only counting wins, including the ones before teams are out of playoff contention. In other words, teams that just miss the play-in would be catapulted straight to the top of the draft standings since they have the most wins, and they’ll continue accumulating points by winning even after missing the playoffs.
The glaring issue with this idea is that some teams might intentionally miss/lose the play-in because they want better odds of picking high in the draft than getting shellacked in the playoffs by a high seed, and that’s where certain incentives could come into play: perhaps every team that misses the postseason would be ineligible to use their mid-level, or will start the following season operating like a second apron team no matter where they stand in the tax. Regardless of what the punishment is, it has to be so damaging that teams are all motivated to make the playoffs, even if they can’t legitimately compete for a title.
Does that sound like a good plan? It might abolish tanking, but the actual worst teams will have the lowest lottery odds and make it harder for them to become relevant. This is precisely why it’s impossible to get rid of tanking while also keeping the NBA’s current socialistic system in place: the concepts are mutually exclusive, and it’ll take something so radical that fans might start clamouring to go back to the way things are now. So if you truly want changes, be prepared for the league to get flipped on its head, and don’t pull a Mark Jackson.
Be careful what you wish for.
This week, please check out Eric’s article on postseason runs following playoff droughts! He does a great job of laying out the historical context, and you’d be surprised how many teams made deep runs even after breaking a long drought.
Thanks for reading!
All stats courtesy of Cleaning the Glass and NBA Stats.