The Magic and Knicks Have Learned Nothing, Plus League-Wide Power Rankings
The early returns on the offseason from the other teams who see themselves as contenders in the Eastern Conference have been mostly positive from a Celtics point of view. The teams to make the most consequential decisions are the Orlando Magic and the New York Knicks. The Magic traded more or less all of their flexibility for Desmond Bane, and the Knicks fired their head coach with seemingly no plan whatsoever. Let's take a closer look at these transactions.
The Magic Still Can't Pass
The Orlando Magic can't pass, and they also can't shoot. At all. This is a known problem, going back a ways, but at the very least, it was a known problem before last season, when I wrote the following in my Season Predictions piece:
As I've thought more about this team, my opinion has changed on them quite a bit. A lot of the hope for this team is going to come down to whether Anthony Black can be an NBA point guard. That is, if he's given the chance. If I was a Magic fan, I would sure hope he is. Because otherwise, this team is a case study in whether passing matters. Last season, the Magic ranked 27th in the NBA in assists. And from that team they lost Joe Ingles and Markelle Fultz, who ranked third and fifth on the team in assists. The replacement for them appears to be Black.
One thing I am pretty sure of is that Jalen Suggs is not a point guard. Last season, Suggs was just one of 14 players to play more than 2,000 minutes, dish out fewer than 225 assists, and commit more than 100 turnovers. Six of the other 13 guys were centers. None were point guards. Orlando had a bad offense last season, and the improvement is going to have to be internal. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope may be a more consistent floor spacer, but really he's just going to be eating minutes from guys who shot threes well last season. Joe Ingles (.435), Black (.394), and Gary Harris (.371) all shot threes well last season. You could argue that KCP is going to earn more respect, and that will help the spacing, but I think the effect is going to be pretty marginal.
Guess what? The effect was pretty marginal! Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was a disaster with the Magic. The question is whose fault this was. Was this KCP failing to execute, or the Magic failing to put him in a position to succeed. In his two prior stops, KCP received the bulk of his passes from two of the greatest passers to ever grace an NBA court in LeBron James and Nikola Jokic. In Orlando, he received passes from Paulo Banchero and Franz Wagner, two burgeoning stars whose most notable trait is bull-rushing to the rim and then either taking out-of-control shots or throwing out-of-control kickout passes. Neither really helped KCP, nor the team as a whole. The Magic ranked dead last as a team in the NBA in both assists per game and three-point percentage in both the regular season and the playoffs.
The Magic have decided that the problem was specifically KCP, and shipped him off to the Memphis Grizzlies for Desmond Bane. Bane, no doubt, is a great shooter. But in Memphis, he's had the luxury of receiving passes from Ja Morant, Tyus Jones, and Scotty Pippen Jr., all of whom would immediately be the best passer on the Magic.
The full trade was Bane for KCP, Cole Anthony, four first-round picks, and a pick swap. And therein lies the other issue. Do you know who led the Magic in Assists Per 36 Minutes last season? Cole Anthony, and it wasn't close. He averaged 5.6 assists per 36 minutes. Wagner was second at 5.1. Bane himself averaged 5.3 assists per game last season, and 6.0 per 36 minutes, so on paper this seems pretty great. But the Grizzlies offense was pretty killer. It was stocked with players who could shoot well and who moved the ball in a democratic system all season. It eventually got their coach fired, because the players hated it. And Bane immediately reverted back to being more of a shooter.
The Grizzlies parted ways with Tyler Jenkins on March 28th. The Grizzlies were off that day. In the 61 games Bane played during last season before that day, he averaged 5.5 assists per game. In the eight regular-season games he played after, he averaged just 4.5 assists per game, and then he just 3.3 per game in the playoffs. On Bill Simmons' pod the other day, Memphis reporter Chris Vernon said that Bane did a lot more dribbling than he should have last year, and his hope for Bane on Orlando was that he would be more of just a shooting guard.
In other words, the Magic still don't have a point guard. And with Banchero, Wagner, Jalen Suggs, and Bane guaranteed to be starters, the only way they'll get more passing on the court is if they start Anthony Black and play small, which seems unlikely. More likely is that they'll start Wendell Carter Jr., Goga Bitadze, or a center to be acquired later. And if so, they'll once again struggle to move the ball, and Bane's effectiveness will be muted. Perhaps internal growth from Banchero or Wagner will help – it's not out of the question that they can become better passers – or that Jamahl Mosley will install a new offensive system that encourages more ball movement. But right now, it looks to me that the Magic have traded key depth and defense to once again chase a marginal improvement that is unlikely to vault them up the East standings, and now they have very few other avenues from which they can improve. Which is all great news for Celtics fans!
Do the Knicks Have a Plan?
It's hard to say definitively that they do. Katie Baker at The Ringer had a great piece on the situation, and I would encourage you to read that recap. What I want to focus on is just how much Tom Thibodeau juggled in his five years as Knicks coach, because I don't think people understand just how extraordinary it was.
The Knicks did have not have a great deal of continuity in Thibodeau's five years coaching the Knicks. Here's a chart of their five most frequent starters, by season:
You can see that there is not only very little continuity, but also not a lot of quantity either. The player who appears most is Julius Randle in four of the seasons (and in one of those four he started just 46 times), with just two players appearing in three (RJ Barrett and Jalen Brunson), and two others appearing twice (Josh Hart and Mitchell Robinson). This was the first season when the team had five guys start 60 times, and up until last season, a number of the starters were veterans just doing their best in roles for which they weren't suited.
Let's contrast this with Boston's last five seasons:
Here, you see a lot more color (colors are for players who appear two or more times). Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown appear in all five seasons, something the Knicks didn't have at all. Marcus Smart and Derrick White appear three times, and Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, and Kristaps Porzingis appear twice. Overall, there are just three non-repeats on this chart, compared with 10 on the Knicks' chart, and the C's non-repeats are all the fourth and fifth starter, whereas the Knicks' are all over the place.
Talent and coaching are important in the NBA, but continuity is paramount. We see it every single season. It's incredibly rare for a team to bring in big acquisitions and win it all that season. The last two examples you can find are both Jrue Holiday, who is A) a pretty rare player and B) had the luxury of not being his team's best (and most of the time, not even its second-best) player. The last time you could make the argument that a team acquired their best player and then won the championship in the same season is Kawhi Leonard in 2019, and that was a rare situation in which he was the final piece on an already-solid team and that they got lucky when the Warriors suffered multiple catastrophic injuries in the NBA Finals.
In other words, it was always a long shot that the Knicks were going to win it all this season. They made it to the final four, taking care of business against a young Pistons team and a hobbled Celtics team before getting beat by a team that may be more talented and certainly had better continuity.
That continuity was something the Knicks were likely to have next season. Despite Kevin Durant and his agent trying once again to gin up the Knicks as a stalking horse, it is likely to be a very quiet summer in New York by design. At least from a player perspective. Tom Thibodeau was going to finally have that continuity. He was going to finally have a full offseason to plan – to adjust to what he saw this season, adapt and make the team better. Don't forget, the Knicks didn't acquire Karl-Anthony Towns until Oct. 2nd last year, just before training camp. Thibodeau didn't have the luxury of planning an offense around him, he had to adjust on the fly, and he did. After a clunky 10-8 start, the Knicks rattled off a 30-14 streak through March 6th, when Jalen Brunson got hurt. They then limped to an 11-9 finish, but Brunson missed 16 of those 20 games.
That 30-14 stretch was no joke, good for a .681 winning percentage that is a 55-win pace. The Knicks have won more than 55 games just five times in 79 seasons. Combine that with a trip to the Conference Finals, and I'm not exactly sure how much better Thibodeau was supposed to do, again, especially given how late they acquired Towns. Tom Thibodeau certainly did a lot of things I didn't agree with, and I wasn't shy about saying so. And if the Knicks had a handpicked successor, or if the behind-the-scenes stuff with Thibodeau was so bad that the organization risked a player's mutiny by keeping him, you could make the argument that they had made the right decision here. But I don't believe either thing was true, and it's clear that anyone they bring in at this point will be at best Thibodeau's equal. I'd have voted for continuity.
League-Wide Power Rankings
This is mostly an off-the-cuff snapshot, because I have not been meticulously researching potential moves. Partially that's because I'm tired, but partially it's because the NBA has made trying to game out potential trades and signings especially onerous. I wonder how long it will be before the league or players come to the conclusion that the new salary rules were a massive mistake. I think for the players that realization may be mere months away, as I think a lot of players are going to take a bath this offseason. Anyway, rankings!
30 - Charlotte: So bleak I don't see any upside at all.
29 - New Orleans: Bleak because there is upside but I have no faith in them achieving it.
28 - Washington: They're managing the process correctly, but they're still a year away from even trying.
27 - Phoenix: They might be the dumbest franchise (it's them, New Orleans, or Sacramento), but at least they have Devin Booker and Kevin Durant...for now.
26 - Utah: Trying again, but building up from nothing.
25 - Brooklyn: I know they at least have the right coach and attitude.
24 - Philadelphia: I couldn't believe I put them this high.
23 - Sacramento: A classic "less than the sum of their parts" team, and they're going in the wrong direction based on their front office hires.
22 - Miami: I have a hard time believing they'll stay this low for long, as I think it will be a busy offseason for them.
21 - Toronto: Ditto.
20 - Dallas: I'm not sure where they go from here. On talent, they should be up a few spots, but without Kyrie Irving, they have an uphill battle.
19 - Chicago: The only thing you can really expect is mediocrity.
18 - Portland: Moving in the right direction, and I think they can upset the balance of power in the West, but it's hard to peg precisely who they'll jump in front of at this juncture.
17 - Memphis: Ditto, at least until we see how they're going to fill out the roster after the Bane trade.
16 - Atlanta: This is, I think, the year for them to finally make progress or trade Trae Young.
15 - San Antonio: Them getting the second pick is really going to vault them up the standings, even if they don't consolidate Harrison Barnes and others to get another star-level player.
14 - Milwaukee: Keeping Giannis keeps them in the top half of the league, but not by much.
13 - Orlando: As stated above, I don't think they're much better – good enough to squeeze into the top six, and that's about it.
12 - Boston: I got ready for the biggest season of Jaylen Brown's career by getting a pair of White Noise Rovers.
11 - Houston: Yes, they were the two seed, but three wins was the difference between the two and six seeds, and the Rockets fell apart offensively in the playoffs.
10 - LA Clippers: This may be their high-water mark, but after hanging tough all season, they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
9 - Golden State: Ditto for the Warriors, who play hard but also proved again they're still just a Steph Curry injury away from being a horrible team.
8 - LA Lakers: It will never be more fascinating than it will be this season to see what kind of shape Luka Doncic shows up in.
7 - Detroit: I'm apparently very high on the Detroit Pistons!
6 - Cleveland: I don't think I'll be able to put them higher until they make a Conference Finals.
5 - Denver: I bagged on this team and Jokic all season, but they earned my utmost respect with their playoff performance.
4 - New York: It'd be impossible to put them higher without knowing who the head coach is.
3 - Minnesota: This team could have a lot of changes in the offseason. If they're not going to run it back, I would prioritize keeping Nickeil Alexander-Walker over Naz Reid and Julius Randle, but hopefully they can afford all three.
2 - Indiana: They're perfectly capable of replicating this performance next season, and their playoff run this year makes Boston sweeping them last season all the more impressive.
1 - Oklahoma City: No matter what happens in Game 6 (and potentially Game 7), OKC will have to enter next season as the favorite, which annoys me greatly.