Top 5 Playoff-Ready Lottery Teams
This is a great time of year to be an NBA fan. The playoffs are in full swing, teams are surprising us with unbelievable postseason play, and fans in arenas have kicked up the energy about a thousand notches. The playoffs are so fantastic because there’s so much at stake, and sixteen teams are fighting their rear ends off for a shot at the NBA title.
So yeah, it’s a great time of year… for those 16 teams.
That leaves 14 teams (and by association, 14 fan bases) with little to look forward to until the draft in late June, but let’s remind ourselves which of those 14 lottery teams are still worth talking about. Some of these organizations aren’t far from the playoffs; they’ve either got the players to make a real run at it right now, or they’ve got a young core right on the cusp of blowing up. Today’s Top 5 looks at the non-playoff teams who are most likely to get into the playoffs next spring. In descending order, here they are:
#5 – L.A. Clippers – Blake Griffin is on the cusp of superstardom and Eric Gordon isn’t too far from getting All-Star consideration himself. Those two players plus a host of other young and talented kids on the L.A. roster put them in a position to be a really annoying team for opponents next season. They’ve got a lot of growing up to do, and they still need a small forward, and they aren’t that deep, and Vinny Del Negro is their coach, but there’s some firepower there. It’s harder to win in the West, but these guys are going to be good eventually. There’s no reason "eventually" can’t be next season.
#4 – Utah Jazz – Few teams had a more disappointing last six weeks of the 2010-2011 season than the Utah Jazz, but in looking at the personnel they’ve got in place, it’s impossible to count them too far out of the equation. Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap make a great frontcourt, and Devin Harris is a more than serviceable point guard. It’d be easier to have faith in this group were Jerry Sloan still coaching, but even without him they look good on paper. Throw in two lottery picks and they could have something interesting next year. Even if they don’t make the playoffs next year (and that’s a strong possibility), at least the future looks bright with a good mix of young talent and relatively youthful veterans comprising the majority of the roster.
#3 – Golden State Warriors – Steph Curry and Monta Ellis make this team fun to watch, but with David Lee, Dorrell Wright, and a score of talented role players, Golden State actually isn’t too far away from being a perennial playoff participant. They finished this past season 10 games under .500, but they’ve got the potential to be much, much better than that. Their draft pick probably won’t make too big a difference, but the further development of Curry, Wright, and guys like Reggie Williams and Ekpe Udoh certainly could, and that’s what the Warriors need in order to get back to the postseason.
#2 – New Jersey Nets – It will be interesting to see what a full season with Deron Williams will look like in Newark, and considering the shaky nature of the Eastern Conference outside of the top five or six teams, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see one of the league’s top point guards lead the Nets back to the postseason. They don’t have a lottery pick this year (it’s going to Utah), but even a great pick in this particular draft wouldn’t have necessarily led to a game-changing rookie. What they do have, though, is a reasonable amount of cap space, and were they able to land someone like David West (if he enters free agency), they’d suddenly look quite formidable. They’ve got a solid foundation with money to spend and the desire to spend it. That’s a formula for a return to the postseason only two seasons after one of the most embarrassing seasons in league history.
{AUTHOR_BOX}#1 – Milwaukee Bucks – Injuries really derailed Milwaukee’s season this year, but let’s not forget that a lot of people picked them to actually win the Central Division. Granted, this was long before we knew how dominant the Chicago Bulls would be, but had the team not suffered injuries to Brandon Jennings and Andrew Bogut that either led to huge amounts of lost games or just nagged enough to affect play, they may have ended up in the playoffs this year. Despite everything, they only missed the postseason by two games. If they can thin out their roster just a little bit, they’ve got the talent and the coaching to get themselves back into the playoff picture pretty quickly.
Honorable Mention:
Houston Rockets – Despite planning undermanned all season long, the Rockets only just missed the playoffs in a tough Western Conference and still finished the year four games above .500. There probably will not be a Yao next year, and the closest thing they’ve got to a consistent star is Kevin Martin, but regardless they manage to overachieve year after year. A lot of their success (or lack thereof) next season will depend on who they get to replace Rick Adelman as head coach, but if they came that close to the postseason built they way they are, they can certainly compete with a few tweaks.
Charlotte Bobcats – The ‘Cats were close to being a playoff team this past season, but that was when they still had Gerald Wallace. Now that they’ve traded him away for virtually nothing, their chances of getting in are a heck of a lot slimmer. Despite the fact that most of us still subconsciously consider them a team on the brink of the postseason, they don’t have the horses to get there anymore. They won’t be the worst team in the conference by far, but it’s easy to see them falling short of other East teams higher on the list.
With all the intention falling squarely on the shoulders of our current playoff teams, it felt only right to give the rest of the league’s fans a bit of optimism between now and the draft. Not everybody gets to make the postseason—that’s sort of the whole point of professional sports—but that doesn’t mean we can’t look forward to next year. That’s the other thing about pro sports; if you don’t win now, there’s always later…
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