We’ve barely gotten two weeks into the NBA season, and already it’s looking like a sure thing to turn into a truly goofy year.
I mean, just look at the current standings. If the playoffs started today, the Philadelphia 76ers, who were supposed to be the team leading the charge in the Riggin’ for Wiggins race to mediocrity, would be the second seed in the Eastern Conference, above the Heat. In fact, only three teams in the East are above .500 right now, with preseason favorites Chicago, Brooklyn and New York not even making the playoff cut.
Sure, things are going to turn around — the first few weeks of a season are hardly indicative of how the year will play out. But when the clearly rebuilding Celtics are taking down Miami on a miracle game winner by Jeff Green and the Charlotte Bobcats are one of the best five teams in the Eastern Conference, the first two weeks of the season deserve a mention.
The NBA is in full-on bizarro mode, and it’s definitely worth watching.
Let’s take a look at what we’ve gotten from the league so far: Possibly the most exciting game of the season so far was between the Sixers and the Cavs, a double OT thriller in which Evan Turner was a major factor. If someone had told me three weeks ago that I’d be writing that sentence, I’d probably think they’d been hit in the head recently and called a doctor.
Of course, even the things we expect from this season seem pretty wacky to the long-time NBA fan. Two of the most impressive teams of the season, at least according to predictions, are the Clippers and the Warriors, perhaps best known as the teams other sports fans use as examples of hopeless franchises. They’ve already played each other once, and it was definitely the best-played game of basketball I’ve seen in this young season so far.
And then we have the Morris twins. In case you don’t remember them, because you would have had almost no reason to do so before this year, Markieff and Marcus were drafted 13th and 14th in 2011, which led to more jokes than might have been appropriate about whether the teams drafting were completely sure that they’d drafted the right twin. Now, barely two years later, the twins are sitting pretty as capable members of a Phoenix Suns rotation that has the desert team that was supposed to be terrible at 5-2 and third place in the West.
But wait, there’s more! Right now, the team leading the league in rebounding is the Orlando Magic, led by a man named Nikola Vucevic, also known as one of the “nothing” pieces the Magic got back for Dwight Howard in that mega-trade that really didn’t work out very well for anyone except Orlando.
Pretty much the only thing happening this season that people expected to happen is the continuing rise of the Indiana Pacers, who have the league’s best defense and are currently undefeated. In this season of crazy happenings and unpredictable outcomes, they’ve been the closest thing to stable, although Roy Hibbert is making greater and greater strides toward become the wackiest post-game interview.
Considering Metta World Peace is still in the league, saying that the wackiest post-game interview in the league might be on the most stable team should really show you that you don’t want to miss a beat this season. Anything, and I mean anything, can happen in the NBA on any given night, and I can’t wait to see it.
