The NBA's Eastern Conference Imbroglio
Why the East standings may be in for a sea change in the final stretch of the NBA regular season.
COVID-19 has made analyzing the NBA a challenge for the last two and a half years (in addition to having far more damaging effects, though those are not the focus of this particular work). Players have been absent for key stretches and playing conditions have varied significantly.
The teams that have emerged as champions don’t deserve asterisks next to their names, but to suggest that we haven’t had the clearest lens through which to assess the context in which they won would be fair. That’s been even more true in the current NBA campaign.
The league committed to keeping things chugging along even as significant portions of the player pool were sidelined by the virus and the NBA’s protocols related to exposure to it. The variability in availability has made it hard to determine just how good or bad teams “really” are.
The Eastern Conference is chock full of particularly tricky cases. The Atlanta Hawks, Toronto Raptors, and Boston Celtics have all underperformed against expectations heading into the year. The Cleveland Cavaliers and the Chicago Bulls are both ahead of where most prognosticators projected. The former by miles and the latter less so.
Things are all the more clouded by the fact that the standings are so tightly packed. The tenth place Hawks are only 7.0 games behind the first place Bulls. For context, last year the distance between tenth and first was 16.0 games. And the craziness doesn’t stop there.
Several teams at the top of the window of teams competing for postseason play have gone on recent skids, while teams at the bottom of that aperture are stringing together victories. The Milwaukee Bucks and the Bulls have been stuck at .500 since the start of the new calendar year. The Brooklyn Nets have been downright bad.
The Celtics, Raptors, and Philadelphia 76ers have been surging during that same time frame, and while the Hawks haven’t been good for quite as long, they’ve been absolutely on-fire in their last 10 games.
The net result is a bunch of teams that appeared locked into disappointing their fanbases a month ago looking ready to make a climb in the standings at the exact same time that several of the East’s presumed contenders are beginning to tumble. Take a look at the following charts. We projected out the final standings if every team replicates their calendar year 2022 winning percentage for the remainder of the season as well as their rate for the last 10 games.
There are obvious dangers to this approach. Using a smal portion of the season as the basis for future projection and ignoring the rest is very much not a sound mathematical approach, but there are also reasons to believe that some of what we’ve seen play out in January and (very) early-February is more than just a blip. And that applies for teams headed in both directions.
All of the Bulls, Bucks, and Nets - the three units facing the most precipitous fall should their losing ways hold - have been dealt blows caused by injury. Milwaukee seems a good bet to get healthy and keep itself in the upper half of the standings (and potentially ascend to the top spot after a bit of rest for the All-Star break).
The Bulls will be without the team’s defensive linchpins, Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso, for an extended period of time. The Nets are currently without Kevin Durant until at least mid-to-late February, are only able to deploy star point guard Kyrie Irving in road games, and may not get sharpshooter Joe Harris back any time soon after a setback in his recovery from surgery.
Those are prolonged and in some cases structural issues to be dealing with. They’re occurring at the same time as the Eastern Conference’s hottest teams are figuring things out.
The red-hot Toronto Raptors have successfully integrated a healthy Pascal Siakam into their rotation. The Celtics finally have all of their rotation players available again. The Hawks appear to have figured out how to play defense again (shoutout to you Clint Capela). And, perhaps most terrifying of all for those competing against him, Joel Embiid has been playing like the best player on earth for over a month.
All of this is happening as we approach a trade deadline in which multiple Eastern Conference teams are expected to explore deals. It’s possible this is all the result of viewing far too small a sample. We may be predicting a seismic shift in the standings that never realizes. But don’t be surprised if the stretch run in the East is a wild ride.