The telling stories in the west so far have been:
- Draymond might actually be really important to what GS does. He might be the second most important player for them? Ultimately he’ll get healthy and they’ll win around 60 games, but it’s an interesting dynamic and I’m not sure he got enough credit.
- For Denver, I feel like Jokic is getting a lot of attention, but his offensive game hasn’t really changed or improved. Offensively, they are mostly the same team. It’s defensively where they’ve made massive strides. Hard to pin point exactly where that’s coming from, but we are past just small sample size luck (although they’ll likely regress some, but might still be top ten?).
- the team that’s most likely to tumble is LAC. Maybe Gallinari is going to have a career year at 30, but I doubt it. I’m also assuming BOBAN won’t shoot 70% all season long. Harris has also cleaned up his game. That’s a lot of things going right. I’m just not sure this is the fifth best offensive team in the NBA.
- Houston is interesting, too. Why has Dantoni suddenly slowed the pace way down? Why did Capela stop playing defense? Was Ariza the glue holding that team together?
- The resurgence by Conley and Gasol is pretty cool. My guess is it’s about half that they underachieved last year and about half that it’s the first part of the season and their legs aren’t heavy yet
- Most of the other teams are about where you’d expect. OKC maybe doing slightly better? Haven’t seen enough of them to really say. Lakers, Blazers, Minny, NO, and Utah are all around the same level.
Should be a fun ride the rest of the way. Or at least I imagine it will be until I think about how it’s actually all irrelevant because Warriors in five