The Inbound Stack 12/2
What's going on around the NBA under the surface
BRIDGES OVER TROUBLED WATER
“(Bridges’) shoulders sometimes slumped a bit after misses. The former DPOY runner-up was meekly dying on screens. Bridges made an inexcusably dumb turnover on an inbound pass at the end of the first half. He wasn't sprinting back after unsuccessful offensive trips.
For the first time, Bridges appeared to be letting his offensive ineptitude impact his effort/intensity on the defensive end.
Four of the Knicks' five starters posted positive plus-minus numbers Friday afternoon, but New York was outscored by 14 points in the 37 minutes Bridges was on the court.”
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Bridges’ issues have been bubbling under the surface and are getting louder. The Knicks’ defense is 12 points worse per 100 possessions with Bridges on the floor. This is not good:
If Bridges doesn’t bring you elite wing defense to help you be more switchable, then what did you give up five picks for?
Bridges had a bounceback offensive game Sunday against the Pelicans, but given that team is mostly dead instead of slightly alive, I’m not blown away.
BULL MARKET
I can relay that I have heard the same and even a confidence emanating from the Windy City that the Bulls believe they will strike at least one significant deal before the Feb. 6 trade deadline to shed at least one high-profile veteran from the roster.
As Fischer reported, Chicago is open to trading Zach LaVine, Nikola Vučević and Lonzo Ball before the deadline. Ball is on a $21.4 million expiring contract and thus theoretically the most tradeable, but Vučević — twice an All-Star previously — is playing at an All-Star level again at 34.
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The Hall of Famer Marc Stein with what everyone has assumed, that Chicago will still look to reposition their veterans. The Lakers are always going to be linked to LaVine but I’m wondering if the Magic, who the Bulls already did the Vucevic trade with, might be a better fit given their need for scoring and abundance of young talent. Making the money fit might be a challenge.
Vucevic is an even harder sell despite the bounceback season. You’d love to have Vucevic off the bench for Andre Drummond money, but finding a spot where a team wants to pay him starter money and therefore a starter role is much more difficult.
If you’re looking for Vucevic, why not go the much cheaper route and target Jonas Valanciunas?
THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!
So the idea is to try and add a linear component to counteract this. The NBA has 1230 games. What if we took $1.23B of league revenue from the national TV contracts, and instead of paying it out equally to each team, we paid each team $1 million for each game they won (taken out of the teams' share of BRI). So when a team is deciding how much they're going to try in some regular season game in late March, they have a pretty clear incentive (or rather, ownership has a pretty clear incentive) to try and win every game. There's no game that can be written off as "well, this doesn't matter for playoff seeding" anymore. There's always a force pushing a team to win every game.
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I love this idea. The problem with so many of the suggestions for changes to the competitive structure, whether it’s the regular season or the Cup, is that they propose solutions that involve opposing motivations for collaborative parties. Players don’t want their teams to get better picks to draft their replacements. Owners don’t want byes or given wins which reduce the regular season home gate. But this? This gets everyone on the same page. As always, it’s the money, stupid.
COMPLETELY UNSURPRISING NEWS
First thing is first, it has been communicated to me by various league sources that the expectation is for Brandon Ingram to sign with Klutch Sports after his 15 day waiting period is over. Zion Williamson, who also left CAA recently, is not expected to follow in Ingram's footsteps and go to Klutch…
Multiple league sources have relayed to me that the Pelicans and Jazz were deep in talks which were shut down by Ingram's lack of desire to re-sign in Salt Lake City.
This is important info, because it highlights that money is not presumably everything for Ingram…
I expect the Ingram situation to get “messy” in a public fashion.
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Oh, dear. If there was a combo that at once makes the most sense and also does not bode well for either side, it’s a marriage of Klutch and Ingram. Klutch remains imperious in their negotiations for their clients, which has led to several leaving the agency over the past 18 months.
My favorite tale is that Klutch made it known two years ago that OG Anunoby wanted to be traded to a major market as a superstar scorer, as they’ve done with several of their clients. Anunoby left Klutch and then told reporters in Toronto he never wanted that. He’s since become one of the best and most valuable role players in the league with the Knicks.
Ingram’s entire career has been one big case of the archetypical “If I were optimized, I could be great, but I’d rather hoop the most you can hoop,” which translates to mediocre defense, limited playmaking, and high volume on moderate to poor efficiency. Forcing your way to a bigger market to take up unnecessary usage while never maximizing what your team is capable of is essentially the Klutch Playbook at this point, which is funny since it’s the opposite of LeBron’s career.
Ingram’s actually been a sneaky great passer the past two seasons. But I question the inevitable move for him to become a heliocentric focus of a team.
DEMIN ONE, MR. GRINCH
He wasn’t the biggest riser in terms of the raw number of places higher he is on my personal board, so I struggled a bit with this one, but Egor Demin had the most monumental rise on my board. Going from “probable lottery pick” to “clear Top 5 selection” is a bigger leap than going from “undrafted” to “second round range” in my mind, so I feel like Demin has to be the pick for me here. His playmaking has been sensational for BYU in the early going, as has his staggering efficiency with his own scoring. Demin has been the brightest star of the first month of the season; he’s running out of room to climb in terms of his acclaim, but it’s hard to bet against him after this start to the campaign.
Jonathan Wasserman over at Bleacher Report moved Demin over VJ Edgecomb in his mock draft. I’ll be curious if this is a momentary dip for Edgecomb and whether the rocky start for Ace Bailey (especially compared to Dylan Harper) shakes up the top five even more.
TAKEN FOR GRANTED
Jerami Grant. He’s the one that checks two important boxes:
He’s definitely not a long-term building block here, being so much older than everyone else in the rotation.
Despite his contract, he’s good enough and productive enough to have a real market at the deadline, meaning they won’t be trading him just to trade him, at neutral or negative value.
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The Lakers remain the most likely team to nab Grant. Yes, the Klutch thing matters, but there’s also just a natural fit there. The Rui Hachimura Fad has faded, the Lakers badly need anyone who can defend wings — “and take a lot of that burden off LeBron,” he muttered— and Grant can play next to Davis just fine.
But it’ll be interesting to see what other teams decide to pursue Grant. Grant had an opportunity to be a focal point of the Nuggets; they wanted him to play the Aaron Gordon role and believed in him enough to invest a first-round pick to the Thunder. He chose to walk for the same amount of money to Detroit so he could be “the guy,” and it did not work out well for him or Detroit. (Grant also made it known he wanted an opportunity to work for a black GM with a black coach, perfectly understandable and net good motivations.)
Grant has two more seasons after this one in the $30-plus million range. If a team is going to inquire, they need to have a big role and the ability to flirt with the tax.
TOP(PIN) OFF
To an extent, just as he featured heavily in that end-of quarter sequence, arguably no player has been as affected in impact by the changeover in what has been lost and not yet gained, nor replaced, as Obi Toppin, who flourished last season building out the team's strengths but didn't exactly address the team's weaknesses.
Now, with portions of the team playing fast for portions of games and other portions of the team not playing as fast for portions of games, he's arguably building out the team's weaknesses while not always playing to his strengths.
Nothing nails the Half-Measure Pacers like this example from Caitlin on Toppin. The Pacers are somehow worse defensively than last year — 27th in schedule-adjusted def rating at DunksAndThrees vs. 24th last year — and are no longer the most awe-inspiring offense.
Rick Carlisle begged this team for some offense-defense balance last year and they have managed to give him something closer to that by being worse offensively. It’s not just Tyrese Haliburton’s struggles on offense, either. The Pacers are 17th in location-expected eFG% after being 2nd last season. Indiana’s process isn’t right, either.
The Pacers threatened the Celtics, by the Celtics’ admission despite the sweep, with an offense that was so good and aggressive simultaneously you couldn’t get them out of their comfort zone. You couldn’t make Indiana do anything but score. But now, they’re just a slightly-above-average offense that can’t stop anyone. It’s time to open the gates and let the horses run, Rick, including Toppin.
CASTLE ON THE HILL
Pair that screening and slashing with strong transition play and some ballhandling creation in the pick-and-roll, and yeah, the scoring has been better than expected from a rookie guard.
Castle is a point guard at heart, though, and he has been good enough running the position that Johnson chose to close their most recent game with Castle instead of Chris Paul. While the rookie certainly isn’t on the Point God’s level as a passer, he’s behind only Washington’s Bub Carrington in assists per game for rookies.
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Shearer is genuinely one of my favorite writers right now, and if you’re not subscribed to Basketball Poetry, you’re missing out. I still think Castle’s going to wind up winning Rookie of the Year. Knecht had a nice hot shooting stretch, McCain has benefited from the Sixers’ wheels falling off, but I think Castle is actually the player playing the best right now out of the rookie cast.
Thanks for the shout-out, and glad to have you here on Substack!