Join us as we look at who might threaten to come out of the West as a potential obstacle to Boston hanging Banner 19.
With the NBA draft and the league’s 2024 free agency period over with for all intents and purposes, we know what every team in the league is going to look like on opening night. With that knowledge, we can begin to project how the order of each conference will come together once the games start getting played as the Boston Celtics pursue another title.
And with an eye to how the Association’s Western Conference is likely to look come the 2025 NBA Playoffs, the hosts of the CLNS Media “Celtics Lab” podcast linked up with Thunder Wire editor Clemente Almanza. We of course talk about how the Oklahoma City Thunder have reshaped their roster, and who else might threaten to come out of the conference as a potential obstacle to Boston hanging Banner 19.
We also get caught up on what little news there is from Las Vegas Summer League, Team USA, and the usual grist of the offseason beat. Check it out!
The Celtics Lab podcast is brought to you by Prize Picks and Gametime.
“We’re going to get a play-in game,” Rockets star Jalen Green said after Wednesday’s victory in Oklahoma City. “We’re going to keep winning.”
Even with 10 straight wins and an NBA-best record of 12-1 in March, the Houston Rockets (37-35) still have plenty of work to do to qualify for a potential Western Conference postseason berth (starting with the 2024 play-in tournament in mid-April).
Houston remains one back of Golden State (38-34) for the No. 10 spot in the West standings, which represents that final postseason spot, and the Warriors own the tiebreaker. One silver lining is that the Rockets do have a head-to-head matchup with Golden State still left (April 4, in Houston) to potentially make up ground quickly.
But even if the Rockets win that game, they will still need to outplay the Warriors by at least one more game over their final 10 outings of the 2023-24 season, in order to qualify for the postseason.
It’s still a small margin of error. But in the aftermath of Wednesday’s thrilling victory in Oklahoma City, rising star Jalen Green made it clear that he’s a believer that his team can defy the odds.
“We’re going to get a play-in game,” Green said with a smile during his postgame interview, as captured by Space City Home Network, the team’s TV broadcast network. “We’re going to keep winning.”
The complete interview can be viewed below. As for Green and the Rockets, they will continue their push when they resume play Friday at Utah (29-44), where tipoff is set for 8:30 p.m. Central.
We don’t just mean if they happened to have the same commanding record they have now, just out West.
Where would the Boston Celtics be seeded if they played in the NBA’s Western Conference? We don’t just mean if they happened to have the same commanding record they have now, just out West, but if they had to play the same murderer’s row of ball clubs the rest of the Western Conference does.
With ball clubs as good as the Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors, and the Los Angeles Lakers barely even in the range for the play-in tournament, there is a case that the mighty Celtics might get knocked down a peg or two if they had such tough competition on a more regular basis.
The hosts of the popular ESPN “NBA Countdown” show weighed in on this very question on a recent episode.
Check it out above to hear what they had to say about it.
Their stingy defense, wealth of offensive talent, and championship poise make this Boston team a frontrunner to win it all.
The Boston Celtics’ recent success on their annual West Coast swing has not only solidified the Celtics’ position as a force to be reckoned with in the league this season but has also ignited conversations about their position among championship contenders after a bit of slippage early in the season.
The team’s recent string of victories against formidable opponents like the Sacramento Kings and Los Angeles Lakers offset a stumble vs. the Golden State Warriors at the start of the road trip, the team’s sole loss since a long December home stand. The road trip provided an excellent barometer for just how good this Celtics team is.
Their stingy defense, wealth of offensive talent, and championship poise make this Boston team a frontrunner to win it all.
The hosts of the CLNS Media “How Bout Them Celtics!/ Talkin’ Cs” podcast weighed in on the road trip and what it means in a season-long context with plenty of focus on the Christmas Day win over the Lakers. Check it out above!
With Boston among the most likely ball clubs to come out of the East, there’s a good chance the teams we picked as contenders could face the Celtics in their first return to the NBA Finals since 2022
With the offseason just weeks away from training camp, most of the teams around the NBA have pretty close to the version of their roster that will be taking the floor on opening night under contract, even if they may need to make a few more moves around the margin to get to that point.
That makes league analysts and fans of the Boston Celtics and the rest of the league able to get a pretty good idea about just how likely each team in the Association is to winning it all, tearing it down, or living in the spaces between those two poles. So with that in mind, the hosts of the CLNS Media “Celtics Lab” podcast linked up with Spurs Wire editor Jack Simone to project the order of the NBA’s Western Conference for the looming 2023-24 season.
With sportsbooks like Fan Duel predicting Boston as among the most likely ball clubs to come out of the East, there’s a good chance the teams we picked as contenders could face the Celtics in their first return to the NBA Finals since 2022 — and even if they don’t, it’s good to know a bit about the teams Boston will face in their push to get back there.
The Celtics Lab podcast is brought to you by FanDuel and AG1.
There is no better person to ask than someone who was actually on those teams playing the games, and NBA legends Bob McAdoo, Michael Cooper, and Cedric Maxwell did just that.
Which NBA conference was the better of the two in the 1980s? The league’s Eastern Conference had the Boston Celtics of course, as well as the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons, and at different parts of the decade, dangerous New York Knicks and Chicago Bulls teams.
The Western Conference had the Los Angeles Lakers, the Houston Rockets, Utah Jazz, and Seattle SuperSonics (today’s Oklahoma City Thunder for you younger fans) as a few examples, with the Lakers and the Celtics dominating the postseason runs of the early to mid-1980s in particular. There is no better person to ask than someone who was actually on those teams playing the games, and NBA legends Bob McAdoo, Michael Cooper, and Cedric Maxwell got together to talk it over for the CLNS Media “History and Legends” YouTube channel in a recent clip.
Take a look at the video embedded below to hear their perspective on whether it was the East or the West reigning supreme in the eighties.
The playoffs are nearly upon us, but there are still a few things that need to be ironed out when it comes to seeding.
The Eastern Conference is locked up and finished. We know who will be in the play-in tournament and where everyone stands in the standings. But the west? Whew. Y’all. That’s an entirely different story.
The Western Conference — for the first time in over two decades — was the weaker of the two conferences in the NBA. The parity was certainly there. The 4 through 12 seeds have been jockeying for position for most of the year.
The teams are still not done. And it has come down to the final weekend of the regular season. Here’s everything you should be paying attention to for the Western Conference playoff picture.
Let’s take a look at where things stand as of Saturday afternoon and see what the possibilities are.
Welcome to Layup Lines, our basketball newsletter where we’ll prep you for a tip-off of tonight’s action, from what to watch to bets to make. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox every afternoon
Howdy, folks. Welcome back to Layup Lines. It’s Sykes, once again, here to talk hoops with you. Let’s talk about the Western Conference.
The West just isn’t quite what it used to be, is it? Once upon a time — not too long ago, honestly — the conference was an absolute powerhouse.
High 50 and 60-win teams at the lofty top of the conference looking down upon teams that needed to win 48 games to sniff the playoffs. That’s the West everyone remembers. That certainly isn’t this West, though.
The top two teams in the Nuggets and Grizzlies are certainly on 60-win paces with their respective records. But their point differentials of 4.5 and 4.2 pale in comparison to what we saw from those peak Warriors teams or even, say, the best of James Harden’s Rockets.
Meanwhile, throughout the entire conference, there are only currently 6 teams above .500. Many of them are just making the cut — the Pelicans’ are the conference’s 4 seed with a 26-23 record.
So the question is what happened? How’d the West fall so far from grace? The answers are pretty simple. The teams that were dominating the conference have mostly broken up.
The Warriors lost Kevin Durant to the Nets in the East. The Rockets lost James Harden to the same team. Kawhi Leonard left the Spurs for the Rockets and then came back to the West to play with the Clippers, but he hasn’t been healthy.
That’s the other factor here: Health. The Clippers’ two best players in Paul George and Kawhi Leonard, for example, have only played 20 games together. Chris Paul and Devin Booker have been in and out of the Suns’ rotation because of injury. Same with Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram in the West. The only two teams that haven’t had many injury troubles are the Nuggets and the Grizzlies, and they’re at the top of the standings.
So, yes, the conference is a bit worse because of it. But it’s not the end of the world. In fact, things might actually be a bit more fun this way.
Think about it. Only 3 games separate the Pelicans from the 13-seeded Lakers. That could easily change by next week. That’s where we are at the end of January — who knows what things could look like by the time we get to April?
The standings are going to come down to the wire this year and for a league struggling to bring meaning to a sometimes drab regular season, this is an absolute gift.
Maybe we won’t need that mid-season tournament after all.
The Tip-Off
Some NBA goodness from around the USA TODAY Sports network.
(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
We finally got our first look at the NBA’s All-Star Starters on Thursday and I don’t have too many complaints. But if you’re curious at all about how the fan voting separated from the media voting and player voting for the starters, FTW’s Bryan Kalbrosky has a thorough breakdown of who voted for what.
For The Win separated the publicly-available data and isolated how every player in the league performed in each category using the exact number of votes received rather than rank, then sorted the results to determine where individuals tended to perform better than they did in other categories.
What stuck out to me was how much love Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic got from the players. They had the biggest discrepancy from the player vote to fan vote, which isn’t all that surprising. But it’s pleasant to see the players taking this stuff seriously.
Grizzlies (-3.5, -105) vs. Timberwolves (+135), O/U 237.5, 7:30 PM ET
Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
This is going to be a fun one. The playoff series between the Wolves and Grizzlies was pretty incredible. Everyone isn’t healthy for this one with both Karl Anthony-Towns and Steven Adams sitting this one out. Still, there will be lots of energy between these two sides and lots of scoring. The Grizzlies are on a 4 game losing streak and I think it continues tonight behind the brilliant play of Anthony Edwards. I’m taking the Wolves +3.5.
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The Warriors might be in trouble and the Celtics might have their scouting reports out in public
Welcome to Layup Lines, our basketball newsletter where we’ll prep you for a tip-off of tonight’s action, from what to watch to bets to make. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox every afternoon
Howdy, folks. Welcome back to Layup Lines. It’s Sykes, once again, here to usher you into the weekend.
The Warriors are in some real trouble right now after Steph Curry injured his shoulder late in the game against the Indiana Pacers. Luckily, Curry won’t need surgery. He’ll be out for a few weeks, but it’s not something that will sideline him for the long term.
Still, the Warriors are in some peril here. Not only did the team fall back below .500 again, but it also lost the engine that makes the entire operation go. The Dubs are a -11.1 when Curry is off the court. He was a legitimate MVP candidate and arguably the best player in the league this season.
Meanwhile, they’ve yet to catch their stride this season and are putrid on the road with a 2-13 record. Things won’t get any easier anytime soon for the Dubs. They have four straight road games coming up through December 21 against the 76ers, the Raptors, the Knicks and the Nets. Then they return home for Christmas day against the Grizzlies. That’s a pretty tough 5. This stretch could determine the shape of their season.
Luckily for the Warriors, the NBA is jam-packed with a bunch of good-to-average teams and most of them are in the West. The Grizzlies are the No. 1 seed in the conference now and they’re fantastic. But the 13th-place Oklahoma City Thunder are just 8 games back of 1st.
Should the Warriors slip during this Steph-less stretch, it isn’t the end of the world. There’s still a chance they can go on a run and get right back into the thick of things.
But that’s not a situation anyone wants to be in. Especially considering how essential having homecourt advantage can be in the playoffs and how putrid the Warriors have looked on the road.
That’s why their title defense isn’t starting when May rolls around — it’s starting right now.
The Tip-Off
Some NBA goodness from around the USA TODAY Sports network.
Somebody may have figured out the Boston Celtics’ secret sauce for this season. Well, actually. They didn’t figure it out. It was essentially just found on the internet.
“Twitter user @groovyk8 said she was using Quizlet to prepare for a Suns game at Footprint Center. She believes that she may have unexpectedly uncovered the Quizlet account of Celtics interim head coach Joe Mazzulla.”
The scouting reports have been deleted, of course. But someone over on Reddit archived each of them and they’re unbelievably detailed.
Kalbrosky logged all of them in the story above. Go see what the Celtics think of your favorite player. Kyle Kuzma was the only Wizard who made the list and his file finished with “he is not passing.” And, yeah, that tracks.
Celtics (-12.5, -110) vs. Magic (+550), O/U 225.5, 7:30 PM ET
This game isn’t one that’s going to stick out on anybody’s radar. The Celtics at home against the Magic should be a pretty clean blowout — at least on the surface.
But the Magic have won four straight games and are one of the hottest team’s in the East. Plus, they’ve got Bol Bol who is playing absolutely insane basketball right now. Robert Williams is returning for Boston and they’ll have to integrate him. I don’t think he’ll get off to the quickest start.
The Celtics will win, for sure. But will they beat the Magic by 13 points? I don’t think so. Give me Orlando +12.5.
The Celtics look to have their work cut out for them this season.
For almost as long as most of us can remember, the NBA’s Western Conference has been the dominant conference, with some seriously awful ball clubs making the playoffs in some of the more pronounced seasons serving as an example of the talent imbalance in the league’s Eastern Conference.
Now, at the start of the 2022-23 NBA season, it is looking like the tables have finally turned in terms of the distribution of star players. Is it finally fair to say that the Boston Celtics’ conference is the better of the league’s two conferences after decades of the opposite being the case?
The hosts of the ESPN “Hoop Collective” podcast put their heads together to try and answer that question on a recent episode.
Take a look at the clip embedded above to hear what they had to say.
