Around the Arc - Playoffs Without LeBron, Playoff Race, Giannis & Paul
Hi, and welcome to your weekly dose of basketball, Around the Arc. Each week, I’ll be going through some of the things that I’ve found interesting — this simply is me rambling my thoughts in a free, random way.
These topics will vary from thoughts during games, tweets I’ve seen, articles I’ve read, videos I’ve watched — literally anything. This will be split into the main topics, film breakdown section, and the Around the League section.
The Playoffs Without LeBron:
Writing this heading felt weird. It doesn’t happen often where James isn’t one of the better teams in the league.
Injuries played a big part — James played only 56 games and Anthony Davis played 38! But this team has been pretty bad even when both were on the court.
Per Cleaning the Glass(CTG), with both on, the Lakers are minus 2.5 (39th) percentile. We should have known that this team probably wasn’t going to be anything special.
The signs were all there — they traded for Westbrook, let go of multiple key guys, plus defenders, and replaced them with old, big all negatives on defense.
I actually thought they’d be significantly better than this, especially in the regular-season. My thought process was we saw what Westbrook did in Washington and now you pair him with Davis.
The issues with the Lakers — and to be honest, with most James’ teams — last year was the team sucking when James went to the bench.
Well, now you add one of the best floor raisers to take care of that problem.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and this is where we’re at. There is high chance that the Lakers will miss the playoffs. They’re currently the 11th seed and one game behind the San Antonio Spurs.
And this sucks a lot. Not having LeBron James in the playoffs feels strange, especially with the season he’s having.
But this also raises a lot of questions regarding the Lakers. What happens if they don’t make the playoffs or manage to get in only to get swept in the first round? What can you even do with the way this roster is constructed?
Will James even want to stay or could he demand a trade?
Regardless the outcome, the off-season for the Lakers will be fun and interesting.
Playoff Talk:
How we ever been around five games away from finishing the regular-season and still have nothing certain?
Eastern Conference
1st and 4th seed are separated by 2.5 games
2nd and 3rd are still all for grabs
5th and 6th can go either way
The play-in can absolutely go any possible way
Western Conference
1st and 2nd seed are the only locks
3rd and 4th are 1 game behind
4th and 5th are tied
10th and 11th seed battle for the last play-in spot
There is still so many different scenarios that can happen and it’s making what matchups we’ll get in the playoffs difficult to predict.
I don’t even know where to start when making my playoff predictions, as every series is match-up dependent and no match-up is certain yet.
With all that said, this just makes the next couple of games more fun and it will make these playoffs a lot more fun too.
Can you imagine each round being a must-watch series?
Film Breakdown:
https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1510618893525606401
- bulls
https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1509639630630658048
- Celtics
https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1508789895233482754
- Kings
https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1509202750206353418
- Bucks vs 76ers
https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1508830488307326981
- Suns vs 76ers