The 2023-24 NBA regular season is over. If I tried to calculate the number of hours I have cumulatively spent watching, reading, listening, and writing about it I would be both impressed and saddened by the 20-unit class I snuck into my schedule. Who knows how much more produ— no! I do not care. The NBA is worth it.
This week I am dropping the hard-core analysis in favor of what my favorite surprises of the season were. This is not objective.
Memphis underperforming their Vegas preseason over/under by almost 20 games is maybe statistically the strangest thing to happen, but that is not what I am looking at. I am looking at Joe Ingles still putting in productive minutes in Orlando while moving with the agility of a 30-ton semi-truck. I am looking at the Bucks firing a coach who went 30-13 only to coast at 0.500 with Doc Rivers for the rest of the year.
I’ll start with the Milwaukee coaching situation as my No. 1 pick.
Mike Budenholzer, going an entire two years without winning an NBA championship, had to be booted out of the organization in the offseason. Adrian Griffin enters to begin the year as apparently a player’s pick, but somehow loses the locker room in 40 games, and is ousted with the second best record in the east. His replacement is a coach who, as far as I can tell, is Mike Budenholzer but worse in every respect: Doc Rivers, who has been handed maybe 10 different rosters full of All Stars at this point, only to hopelessly squander them in the playoffs.
Getting rid of Budenholzer because he’s a “bad playoff coach” to bring in a guy who has lost three 3-1 leads and has a 16-34 record in closeout elimination games is decision making only the highest paid executives in the association can understand.
A finer detail in the stretch run of puzzlingly bad basketball Rivers has brought to this very talented Bucks team is that they managed to lose to the tanking Wizards, Grizzlies, and Raptors — consecutively — while in the heat of a standings race that should have been over had they beaten teams that wanted you to beat them. Tough.
My second favorite surprise is just how amazing Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has been.
I didn’t really understand how good he was last year and probably still don’t this year. He has some of the less obvious MVP-level basketball traits that you find in top three MVP candidates, and after watching him so much this year, it still doesn’t totally compute how a guy can beat every defender in the league by confusing them with his dribble timing.
I also enjoy his devotion to scoring between 20 and 40 points in practically every single game he plays in. His career high is six points lower than Malachi Flynn’s, and Malachi Flynn’s career average is 5.5 points a game. Shai has averaged 30 two years running. How can these facts all be correct? “Consistency,” according to Gilgeous-Alexander.
Brooklyn’s sad mediocrity is getting the nod at third. Brooklyn has no reason to be bad, because they don’t have their own pick this year. They also have a lot of pretty decent NBA rotation players. The result, somehow, is a 32-50 season that gives them one more win out of 82 games than the Utah Jazz.
The Utah Jazz traded their season away in early February. Every team with a worse record than the Nets stopped bothering with competitiveness at least two months ago. It is pretty hard to actually try, when five teams in the league should be automatic wins, and not even be in contention for the play-in tournament at the end of the year.
My fourth favorite surprise is that Chicago, running it back with DeRozan, LaVine, and Vucevic, didn’t produce better results this time. Crazy. Hopefully they keep everyone together for the big push next year.
I’ll wrap this up with Orlando putting everything together into a decent playoff bid in the East.
They have occasionally jousted for the two seed with not one top 30 player on the roster, and an offensive strategy that mostly forgoes the strategical advancements made in the past 10 years. I enjoy watching them play and hope they can build this into a move to real contention in the next few years, though I think they are a couple personnel changes and unexpected player developments away from there. If Paolo Banchero can breach even league-average efficiency in the future, he may deserve the All-Star recognition the Duke brand has preordained upon him. Although, to be fair, the terrible midrange shots Banchero takes would probably just be substituted with shot clock violations if he was a little more judicious.
Alright! That’s been the 78th installment of the National Basketball Association’s regular season play. It is playoff time. My money is on the Atlanta Hawks making a miracle run from the 10 seed and beating the Nuggets in five in the Finals.
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