Will it be Chicago vs. San Antonio in the NBA Finals?

As everybody knows, only 16 (or is that too many for some?) will qualify for the postseason, with the three division winners in each conference and – and this is important – the team from any of the three divisions with the best record outside of the three division champions getting the top four seeds.  

The rest of the four other qualifiers, meanwhile, will be the clubs with the next four best records regardless of division. This is why it’s possible that a division, as what happened last year – and what we project this year will happen once more to the Southwest Division out there in the West – can have four qualifiers, even five as may be the case if that fifth team in that division winds up with a better record than any other team in the other two divisions in the same conference.

For example, assuming that San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and Memphis, as we predicted in that order, make it to the postseason, it doesn’t necessarily mean New Orleans, the fifth team in the Southwest, would no longer have any chance of getting into the playoffs as long as the Pelicans have a better record than any of the remaining teams outside of the two other division champions in the conference, which we projected to be Oklahoma City and the LA Clippers.

The matchups as well as homecourt advantage, however, still follow the traditional best-against-worst qualifier format, No. 2-vs.-No. 7, and so on and so forth, regardless of a team’s status as division winner or not, although a division champion can’t go lower than the fourth seed. If that fourth seed, however, has a worse record than the fifth seed, homecourt goes to the fifth seed.

Having said that, we have come up with our 16 playoff teams for the forthcoming season along with their seedings. They are as follows:

East

1.Cleveland

2.Chicago 

3.Washington

4.Toronto

5.Miami

6.Brooklyn

7.Charlotte

8.New York

 

West

1.San Antonio

2.Los Angeles Clippers

3.Oklahoma City

4.Portland

5.Dallas

6.Golden State

7.Houston

8.Memphis

Sifting through the list of teams and determining who would be the last qualifiers, however, is not an easy process, as that is where the competition becomes either hotly contested or decided in a way some teams may deem to be in their best interest in the long term (hello, tanking?). In the end, however, we decided on the basis of the usual raw variables, like talent on paper, championship or playoff experience, current state of affairs (health, chemistry, etc.) and such intangibles as environment and tradition. We disregarded what may be extraneous factors as the desire to get out of limbo (read: perennial playoff contention and nothing more) and thus tank to get a high lottery pick and a possible franchise player. (We’ll discuss this next issue after a proposal to institute lottery reforms was unexpectedly turned down last week.)

New York, with Phil Jackson at the reins, will be back in the playoffs, holding off the Eastern finalist of the last two years, Indiana, which is expected to be without All-NBA forward Paul George the entire season and also lost Lance Stephenson to Charlotte as a free agent. The Knicks, besides, still have enough talent with Carmelo Anthony and a bunch of veterans to edge the Pacers in the end.

Memphis, meanwhile, will make it over Denver in the loaded West, banking on its reliable though aging core of Mark Gasol, Zach Randolph, Mike Conley, Tony Allen and Tayshaun Prince. The Nuggets will have its walking wounded of last year, Danilo Gallinari, JaVale McGee, Nate Robinson and J.J. Hickson, back, along with Kenneth Faried, Ty Lawson and prodigal son Arron Afflalo. But could they go all the way back to their perennial playoff-team status before last year’s snake-bitten season, particularly in a conference as deep as the West?

The issues at the fringes may be a little muddled but make no mistake, the outstanding teams this season are not hard to pinpoint, not at all, in fact. In the East, two ballclubs – Cleveland and Chicago – are obviously heads and shoulders above their counterparts. Out West, three – repeat-seeking San Antonio, the LA Clippers and Oklahoma City – are the standouts.

How these five teams will stack up against each other makes for an interesting and intriguing scenario.

The Bulls and LeBron James’ teams – Cleveland in 2010 and Miami in 2011 and 2013 – have faced each other in the playoffs three times in the last five years, with James getting the win in each of those meetings. The Cavaliers beat the Bulls 4-1 in the first round in 2010, the Heat prevailed by the same score in the East finals in 2011 – the year during which Derrick Rose won the MVP award and Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau was Coach of the Year after steering them to a league-best 62-20 record – and the Heat won again still by the same count in the conference semifinals in 2013.

But James, whose history against Thibodeau goes a longer way when the latter was Doc Rivers’ assistant in Boston, was also winless against Thibs when he was on the bench of a more experienced Celtics team.  It was Thibodeau who designed the defense against James when the then-title-bound Celtics beat James’ Cavaliers in seven games in the East semifinals in 2008 (that was the series where James and Celtic star Paul Pierce engaged each other in a Game 7 shootout, where James fired 45 points in a losing cause to Pierce’s 41), and in six in the East semis in 2010.

Now, James will likely be facing a team similar to those Celtic squads – experienced, defensive-minded, well-balanced, and hungry for redemption after all those playoff losses. He’ll no longer be facing those ill-equipped Bulls clubs of recent years that either were not experienced enough (2011) nor offensively stacked or complete (2013, when Rose missed the entire season because of an ACL injury he suffered in the playoffs the previous year).

Now, Rose is back, more mature and savvy if not explosive, and a star who knows what it takes to win championships, Pau Gasol, a two-time champion with the Lakers, as well as sharpshooting big men Doug McDermott and Nikola Mirotic also join a team that already is teeming with defensive bulwarks in All-NBA First Team center Joakim Noah, Jimmy Butler and Taj Gibson.

The question with this Cavaliers team that stars James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving is not whether it has the personnel or the firepower to compete for the title but how it can gel quickly and play the defense necessary to win a championship.

James himself, before the Cavs beat the Bulls in a preseason game 107-98 last October 20, downplayed his new/old team’s chances due to familiarity and chemistry issues.

“(The Bulls) are a team that’s much better than us right now just off chemistry,” James said before scoring 18 points in 32 minutes in his first start together with Irving, who led the win with 28 points, and Love, who chipped in 13 rebounds despite scoring just nine points on 2-of-10 shooting. “They’ve been together for a while; we’ve got a long way to go.”

The Bulls, of course, are breaking in new personnel themselves, but integrating Gasol, McDermott and Mirotic, among others, into their system is like putting the perfect fillers in the holes the team previously needed to cover, unlike the Cavaliers who have to create a more different system to accommodate such a major change in personnel.

First-year coach David Blatt also said he still has to find out if his own blueprint will work with his powerhouse team. “I have an idea in my mind. I have a feeling about it. Is that tried and true? Up to this point, honestly, it’s not,” said Blatt, a Boston native who has won 16 championships in Europe and was European Coach of the Year this year. “But I see them at practice and I obviously know the players, their skill set and their basketball IQ and their willingness to play together, so I’m pretty optimistic about it.”

But as we said in a previous column, these Cavs obviously have to go through the process, the crucible, if you will, for them to make their hoped-for ascent to the throne and give Cleveland its first championship of any kind in 50 years (the city last won a title when the Browns won the Super Bowl in 1964). Miami, when the Big Three of James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh came together in 2010, had to go through some struggles itself before finding its rhythm, going 9-8 out of the gates before winning 21 of 22 games and eventually going to the finals, where it lost to Dallas in six games.

“You’ve got to go through something to create a bond, that means for the worse,” James himself said.  “We’ve got to lose ballgames that we think we should’ve won, we’ve got to get into an argument every now and then just to test each other out.”

“If we’re excluding injury and the Chicago Bulls, I’d argue the Cavs have all of the human resources to get to wherever they are aiming to go this season,” Sekou Smith of NBA.com says. “Still, there are chemistry concerns for this group headlined by LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving that still bother me just days away from the start of the regular season. The sacrifices that will have to be made by not only the marquee stars but also role players like Dion Waiters, Tristan Thompson and others should not be overlooked.”

Lang Whitaker of NBA.com’s All Ball blog also points out the other major concern, the lack of the requisite defensive moxie without which any team would find it hard to succeed on the highest level.

“Defense is the one place where they can’t just get by on talent,” Whitaker notes. “They don’t have a rim protector, and other than LeBron, none of their starters are really known for his defensive ability.  Time will tell if they’re able to implement a system where they’re able to cover for each other.”

Last year, San Antonio made a shambles of what passed as the Miami defense to almost score a shutout in the NBA finals. That would again be the case if anything short of the required defensive toughness is thrown against a Spurs offense that is built around excellent ball movement. The Spurs, with their ageless trio of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili functioning seamlessly with their younger counterparts, are the standard against which other elite teams are judged, and the Clippers and the Thunder will likewise have to be measured against this same Spurs club.

Off hand, the Thunder may be losing ground even before the season could start with the broken bone that was found in the right foot of Kevin Durant, who underwent surgery last October 16. If the Thunder are to get the all-important homecourt, Russell Westbrook, Serge Ibaka and the rest of the ballclub have to step up and compensate for Durant’s expected one-month absence, which in the ultra-competitive West could be an eternity.

All that the Thunder can think of right now is to live at the moment given the circumstances.

“First of all, we just need to get our minds right just knowing that today, the only thing you can control is what happens today,” Durant says. “If we start thinking down the line too much about championships, then that’s when we take our focus off today.”

“We are not focused on the preseason,” Thunder GM Sam Presti himself says. “We’re focused on doing things on a day-to-day basis that help build our habits so that if we do get to the postseason, it transfers and we’re playing our best basketball at that point in time. I think the way that happens is that you don’t focus on the postseason. You focus on the things that are in front of you and making those decisions on a daily basis that help build your standard of play.”

A team that’s certainly focused on the present is the Clippers. There’s no other team in the West outside the Spurs that inspires awe but Doc Rivers’ charges, who are even more loaded than last year’s group that stumbled against OKC in the conference semifinals. Almost every preseason prognosticator has tabbed these Clippers as ready to go as far as no other past Clippers team has gone before.  

This year’s club not only has its triumvirate of Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan but a bench further fortified by Spencer Hawes, one of the best-shooting, if not the best-shooting center in the league, period. The 7-1 Hawes gives Rivers an additional weapon he can use when the matchup calls for more floor spacing, a luxury hardly any other team has and which can free up the paint for Griffin, who led the NBA in scoring inside last season.

We ourselves see a Clippers-Spurs matchup in the Western finals, and if this is the case, the Clips would have gone farther than they ever did in their often-dolorous history whose low point (in terms of legacy, that is) may have been former owner Donald Sterling’s racist remarks that paved the way for Steve Ballmer’s takeover.

The question is, how will these Clippers fare against the defending champions, who are seeking a first-ever repeat victory?

The league’s general managers see San Antonio being able to do just that, with 46.2 percent of them picking the Spurs to make it two in a row in a recent poll conducted by NBA.com.

And not without reason either. The GMs know that there’s no team that plays quite like the Spurs, as they showed in breaking up the Miami Heat in the last NBA finals and sending back James to Cleveland. The Spurs did it without any single player averaging as much as 30 minutes all season long, the first team in NBA history to do so!  Parker, with 29.4 minutes per game, Duncan (29.2) and Kawhi Leonard (29.1) were the players that logged the most minutes last year for the Spurs in a masterful rotation and conservation of players by coach Gregg Popovich, and it figures to be no different this time.

Two things going for the Spurs are the improvement a number of their young players are bound to undergo as well as the internal issues affecting the other top contenders.

Leonard, the Finals MVP, figures to get even better particularly if Pop gives him more floor burn than he got last season.  The 6-7 forward himself feels it’s only playing time that may be holding him back.

“In the finals, I’m playing 35 minutes a game, so I’m on the floor more and able to score the ball more and get more rebounds,” Leonard notes. “I’m going to have to get consistent minutes to play at a consistent level like that.” 

“He knows he doesn’t have to take a backseat anymore,” teammate Danny Green agrees. “Offensively, he’s a lot more comfortable, a lot more assertive, making plays and looking for his shot. And doing it confidently.”

The other elite teams, on the other hand, have to contend with a few other issues than playing time alone.  The Bulls look good, but will Rose be back all the way? Will he be healthy the whole season, as will Gasol? Will the Cavaliers be able to find enough shots for James, Love, Irving and Waiters, much less play elite defense in order to break championship ground?

How about Durant? Will he be the same after the first injury of his career, or will the Thunder find enough middle ground between playing their meal ticket too much and playing him too little? Will OKC not fall too far behind in the time Durant will spend on the sidelines? The Clippers, of course, just have to integrate a couple of pieces, but they will also have to outdo themselves to get to where they’ve never been before, and that could be a challenge, especially against a San Antonio team that knows how to get anywhere.

When all is said and done, the Bulls may eventually get out of the East this year, but in the end, the Spurs may still be holding the Larry O’Brien Trophy and savoring their second straight title. And that won’t be an entirely shocking development if it happens. – Rappler.com