NBA Power Rankings: Offseason’s good, bad and ugly

With Las Vegas Summer League concluding with today’s championship game, we can start to put a bow on teams’ performances over the 2014 offseason. NBA power rankings for all 30 franchises (or really 29) is a bit difficult because any predictions about rookie performance or internal improvement of young players is pure speculation at this point. Plus, different teams have different goals. Philadelphia might not win many more games this year, but that’s kind of the point. Still, most of the free agent moves have shaken out, Orlando and Vegas summer leagues have given us a hint about this crop of rookies and there have even been a few trades made.

So without further ado, here’s a completely unscientific but mostly unbiased look at where each NBA team stands in terms of their moves from the end of the season until now.

First, the one glaring incomplete, the Minnesota Timberwolves. They’ve done very little so far. They drafted Zach LaVine, which is a strange choice if they are in win-now mode with Kevin Love. They sold one of their second round picks, always an odd and usually bad (though unfortunately extremely common for Minnesota) move. Really, though, their offseason is going to be judged on the one major domino still to fall: Love himself.  If the Wolves trade him for a poor offer like the Klay Thompson/David Lee-based offers coming from Golden State, they get a D-. If they can flip him to Cleveland for Andrew Wiggins, they get no worse than an A-, while simply holding on to him delays any sort of reckoning at least until the 2015 trade deadline.