NC Power Rankings: Early Year Shows East Resurgent

The Power Rankings are continuing with their third edition, and now the league is starting to take shape. There have been almost enough games – “almost” being the operative term, here – to disregard pre-season expectations entirely, and teams that got out to a blazing hot start are cooling off, and teams that got to a ludicrously bad start are figuring out themselves. In the meantime, teams like the Rockets, Bucks, and Clippers are starting to look like real, longer term disappointments in a worrying way.

Perhaps the biggest trend so far though has been the dominance of the East over the West, a huge reversal of role from the last few years. From this early season, the top 10 in rankings this week was 70% comprised of teams from the Eastern Conference, and they make up a whopping 80% of the top half of the league.

In some ways this feels like the fault of a few teams – Rockets, Clippers, Grizzlies – just underperforming, in other ways this feels like the fault of injuries – Pelicans, sort-of-Thunder – but realistically this is probably the culmination of years of quiet young talent accumulation in the East while the West got progressively, and perhaps preventably, older.

As a reminder in case you missed the last power rankings: the teams are ranked by a “RankScore,” a score that’s based on the team’s point differential per 100 possessions over their last 25 games and it’s adjusted by the team’s strength of schedule, whether or not the team suffers a sudden injury or has a player return from injury, and by the team’s “rate of change” over that same sample of games, or by how much the team improves or gets worse over a stretch of games. Since we still don’t have 25 games, the rankings now are based 2/3 off of their play from the early season and 1/3 their preseason expectations.

As of next rankings we should have 25 games in, which will make it easier to do the Power Rankings with a bit more regularity.

Here are the rankings from these last two weeks:

The Top 10

1. Golden State Warriors: The Warriors are literally twice as good as the second best team right now. They’re on their way to the best start in NBA history and maybe the best record of all time. There are no words for how good this team is and for how much better they are than anyone else, full stop.
2. Cleveland Cavaliers: Between the lack of Kyrie Irving and, frankly, a rather boring dominance in the East, the strength of the Cavs has gone relatively unnoticed so far. But the fact that they’re a ho-hum 11-3 and leading the currently-better-conference East without Kyrie and with LeBron grabbing Eastern Conference Player of the Month honors easily should be terrifying as they get even better and healthier.
3. San Antonio Spurs: There were concerns about the Spurs’ defense with all the changes this offseason, but the Spurs are the second best defense in the league by points allowed per 100 possessions right now, and Kawhi is casually putting up 20 point, 14 rebound, 5 assist, 4 steal lines on any given game. The Spurs have said that they’re not afraid of anyone, and rightly so: they’re awesome, and with a lot of room to get better,
4. Oklahoma City Thunder: Kevin Durant has been hurt, and it feels like the Thunder are a tier of talent below the top 3, but they’re an awesome team, and the differences between Brooks and Donovan are really starting to show, especially in the performance of Dion Waiters so far.
5. Boston Celtics: If the Celtics at 10 felt absolutely insane in the last rankings, the Celtics at 5 here is going to feel unforgivable. They’re not even in the Eastern playoff picture right now, and they’re barely a winning team. I’m about to preface the following explanation with the fact that this is just what the formula spat out at me, and I’m beholden to follow its results but: despite their poor record, they’ve killed the teams they’ve beaten and only lost by small margins, indicating that they’re likely t0 do much better in the future, and they’ve performed even better of late than before. They’ve had an easy schedule that they’re getting knocked for, so they could conceivably fold in the coming weeks, but it’s not impossible that this holds.
6. Toronto Raptors: The Raps are climbing in the rankings behind strong whole-team performances, a small resurgence from Kyle Lowry, strong pre-season expectations, and some indications that their .600 win/loss is a bit more likely to be maintained than that of their counterparts in Indiana or Miami. The loss of Valanciunas is going to hurt them really badly, so we’ll see how they look in a few weeks.
7. Indiana Pacers: The Pacers were projected to be mediocre at best, but they’ve leapt to a fourth-place-in-the-East start on a harder than average schedule behind some really impressive early showings from a gratefully healthy Paul George and some wizardry from the underrated Frank Vogel. The Pacers could very well keep this up, leaving them competitive in a conference that was supposed to be leaving them behind.
8. Miami Heat: The Heat were projected very, very poorly before the season – the likely reason they’re below the Pacers and Raptors right now despite their current 2nd in the East standing – in part because they had a lot of older guys and in part because a lot of their guys have skillsets that are very one or two dimensional, which doesn’t tend to do players favors in stats projections (unless the one dimension is three-point shooting). Whiteside has shown himself to be legit, though; Bosh and Wade are still very good and wily; and a lot of injured players like Josh McRoberts are showing themselves to be valuable. If they stay good, they could be a joy to watch.
9. Charlotte Hornets: The Hornets are looking like a much craftier, interesting offensive team as late, and while at 7-6 it’s a bit too early to dub them as seriously good, they’re marking up some good wins and looking good doing it. Adam Yudelman has a more in-depth breakdown on what happened to make the Hornets not-bad.
10. Chicago Bulls: The Bulls remain a confusing team. They’re racking up wins, but they’re barely beating opponents and are scraping up only a marginally good point differential, and when they lose they look utterly incompetent. They’re a good, albeit inconsistent team, but they climb in the rankings as they climb in the standings, inconsistency or no.

Other Teams of Note

• Atlanta Hawks: Despite looking good really early and holding a solid seed in the East, the Hawks have decidedly fallen in the rankings, behind a trailing-off from their early season performance that hurt both their actual NetRating, and their Rate of Change that got added back into it. The Hawks are starting to look worryingly like the mediocre Hawks we were projected to get before the year started, but thankfully it’s still very early.
• Utah Jazz: The Jazz fell quite a bit from their early start, largely behind their defense slipping from “best in the league by a million miles” to 6th, behind the Heat, Spurs, Pacers, Warriors, and Celtics. Their offense has struggled, and Trey Burke, worryingly, has been their best perimeter shooter so far.
• Dallas Mavericks: The Mavericks’ last loss to the Thunder snapped a shocking 6-game winning streak, but one look at the Mavs’ roster prompts pretty serious and reasonable questions about how the team is 9-5 and 3rd in the West. The short answer is not to bet against the Rick Carlisle/Dirk Nowitzki pairing, but the Mavs’ point differential is far and away the worst among teams with a 64% win/loss percentage and per ESPN they’ve had the league’s easiest record so far, so we’ll see what happens moving forward.
• Phoenix Suns: The Suns struggled a lot early, but have looked much better since behind triple doubles (and near triple doubles) from Brandon Knight, who is meshing really well with Eric Bledsoe. Who knows if they’re a legit playoff team, but they’re fun to watch.
• Los Angeles Clippers: It took a few weeks, but the Clippers are falling apart, and it didn’t take a genius to see this coming. Reports of team meetings and players screaming at each other and Doc Rivers are really concerning though, and the Clips are dropping mightily winnable games fairly regularly. It’s getting late enough that it might be worth worrying about what’s going on, but this is also certainly reversible sooner rather than later.
• Detroit Pistons: After the last rankings felt disrespectful for keeping the Pistons out of the top 10, the Pistons have fallen pretty substantially as the team has dipped to .500 and the point differential has dipped below 0, on admittedly a still-difficult early schedule. Andre Drummond, however, is still a monster.
• Portland Trailblazers: The Blazers got out to a hot start but I predicted a regression to the mean, and lo and behold. The team’s offense is pretty solid despite having to rely almost entirely on Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, but the defense is towards the bottom of the league.
• Memphis Grizzlies: The Grizzlies appear to be at least superficially putting it back together as they scrape back to .500 ball, but Marc Gasol still seems a little out of shape, and their improved performance seems to be largely coming at the back of Mike Conley looking like an All-Star again. The team has a lot of work to do before they look like they did last year.
• New York Knicks: The Knicks haven’t grown at all in the rankings, but they do still have a solidly positive point differential and are just getting killed, still, by their preseason expectations. Carmelo isn’t scoring like he used to but he’s been crafty at sharing the ball, and I’ve officially caught Porzingis fever.
• New Orleans Pelicans: The Pelicans have gotten some of their injured players back, they’ve won a few games and looked great doing so, and Tyreke Evans should be back soon as well, but it’s hard to figure how much ground they can really gain back from this 3-11 start, especially with the injuries making training camp an exercise in futility.
• Houston Rockets: The Rockets look undeniably like a very incompetent basketball team, and they have an apocalyptically bad NetRating despite a middling record. They have the third worst offense and fifth worst defense in the league right now per NBA.com, and I for the life of me can’t figure out what happened between last season and this one to make them go from that good to this horrible with so little large roster turnover. It might be time to assume they’re a bad basketball team unless proven otherwise, though.
• Milwaukee Bucks: The Bucks’ win over the Pistons last night was emphatic and encouraging, but they’ve looked really bad so far, as their offense has struggled to click with almost no spacing to speak of (lookin at you MCW!) and behind the (surprisingly) worst defense in the league. There’s a lot of talent on this team, but they’re going to take a lot of work before they can put it together into something functional.
• Philadelphia 76ers: The 76ers are as bad as the Golden State Warriors are good, which is easy to say, and probably easy to read, but it takes a moment to fully digest the depth of how terrible that really is. Somehow, after accumulating something like NBA talent, they’ve gotten worse. On the bright side, Jamal Murray could look really good on this team.