The NBA season is just over a month away, and we're ramping up our season preview offerings with a look at the most important players on every team, division by division. These aren't necessarily the best players on each team — they're the pivot points, the ones who could make the biggest difference between success and 82 games of grinding frustration. Check out the Central and Southeast, and stay tuned for the Western Conference next week.
Boston Celtics — Anfernee Simons
There doesn't seem to be a lot of mystery to the Celtics this season. The rough outlines are the same, but they're almost certainly a lesser version of what they have been — Jayson Tatum is likely out for the season, Kristaps Porziņģis and Al Horford have been replaced by Luke Garza and Chris Boucher and Jrue Holiday has been replaced by Anfernee Simons.
It seems very unlikely the Celtics will be better than they were last season, but Anfernee Simons gives them an opportunity to be different. All the other new additions and rotation shufflings are players filling the same roles this team has come to rely on. Simons is the only player that presents something completely and meaningfully new.
He's nowhere near the defender that Holiday was but, at this point in his career, he's a more dangerous on-ball scorer and can take some of the offensive responsibility Tatum leaves behind, albeit out of different actions and from different areas of the floor. Remember, over the past three years with a pretty woeful supporting cast, Simon has averaged 20.7 points and 4.7 assists per game, shooting 37.4 percent from beyond the arc.
Maybe the Celtics make him a bit player, just taking Holiday's offensive responsibilities and nothing else. Maybe they try to flip him for another piece at the deadline. But maybe his offensive skillset is a catalyst, helping this team continue to evolve and become something new while they wait for Tatum to return.
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Brooklyn Nets — Egor Demin
The Nets left the first-round of the NBA Draft with three new point guards. Honestly, you could have put any of them here. They're all similarly unformed, with intriguing tools, fuzzy ceilings and a lot of development and evolution needed between their present and future stardom. But the whole Nets roster pretty much suffers from the same condition, and these three point guards seem like the most likely candidates to pop, becoming the kind of foundational building block that helps bring order to the chaos in the rest of the rotation.
Of the three, I've put Demin here mostly because he's 6-foot-9, and he was the highest pick, seeming to indicate he'll get the most opportunities to learn and fail and grow this year. There is a lot of Josh Giddey in his game. Size and potentially elite passing ability, but questions about whether his shaky shooting touch, benign scoring ability and ho-hum burst will ever put enough pressure on the defense to create open shots for his teammates.
The Nets are going to lose a lot of games this year, and it's not hard to imagine him putting up something like 12 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists per game, numbers bolstered by a healthy dose of garbage time. What the Nets need to see from him is open jumpers going down and defenses responding to the threat of his drives. If that doesn't happen, there's always Nolan Traore and Ben Saraf?
New York Knicks — Miles McBride
The Knicks entered last season with one of the best starting lineups in the league, on paper, but huge questions about their depth. It turned out to be a season-long issue, but fourth-year guard Miles McBride was one of the few consistently reliable contributors. His shooting percentages dropped from the previous year, but in just under 25 minutes per game, he averaged 9.5 points, 2.9 assists and 2.5 rebounds, hitting 36.9 percent from beyond the arc.
However, he was completely stymied in the playoffs — big drops in his scoring and assist numbers and a field goal percentage that plummeted to 37.8.
The Knicks once again have one of the strongest cores in the Eastern Conference. But the biggest challenge for Mike Brown will be figuring out how to take this from a six-man rotation to one that can compete with the best teams in the league while still going eight- or nine-deep.
The problem with a short bench isn't just wear-and-tear on the starters, it also limits a team's versatility, their ability to adapt to mismatches and change their approach to exploit an opponent's weaknesses. In that, McBride is the fulcrum for the Knicks. He's a ferocious backcourt defender, can contribute on or off the ball on offense, and offers a lot more versatility than new bench pieces Jordan Clarkson or Guerschon Yabusele. If he takes another step forward, the Knicks might actually have the kind of deep bench they need to chase a title.
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Philadelphia 76ers — Joel Embiid
Tom Ziller made the argument for Joel Embiid, and pretty compellingly, I might add:
"People act like Joel Embiid lost a leg, or died. Less than two years ago, Joel Embiid was on pace to repeat as the NBA MVP. Before a knee injury cost him a 2-month chunk of the season, Embiid was riding a 22-game streak scoring 30+ points. He had 40+ eight times in that stretch, 50+ three times and a 70-point game. Seventy."
When healthy, Embiid is one of the four or five best players in the league. They might get nothing from Paul George, VJ Edgecombe is an insanely talented question mark, Tyrese Maxey is also looking to bounce back from an injury-riddled season and Jared McCain could be playing next season with a hook for a hand.
But if Embiid played 65 games at an MVP-ish level, all those other questions will resolve themselves and the 76ers have a good shot at a top-four seed.
Toronto Raptors — Scottie Barnes
Can Scottie Barnes make jumpers?
It was his most dramatic weaknesses as a rookie — he averaged 15.3 points, 7.5 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.1 steals per game. But he also posted an effective field goal percentage of just 42.4 percent on all-jumpers, a catastrophically terrible number for someone who took over 500 of them. His second season was even worse — 40.2 percent on 522 attempts. His third season? A much improved 47.2 percent! Yay! Last year? Back to 42.4 percent! Whoops!
Entering his fifth season, we have a dynamic, big-bodied playmaker who makes 30 percent of his 3s and under 40 percent of his long 2s. Defenders can comfortably cede him space when he has the ball in his hands, collapsing cutting lanes and limiting the effectiveness of his creation away from the basket.
Barnes is the best player on this roster, the only one with real star potential worth building a competitive team around. But that only works if he makes jumpers. If he does that this season, the Raptors might mess around and make the playoffs. If he can't, they're heading toward another summer of re-evaluating the plan.