True to form, East attracting a crowd
With ‘inconsistent teams,’ standings logjam no surprise
This is a bizarre season for the NBA in a bizarre time for the world.
Most of those who must attend the All-Star Game in Atlanta don’t seem particularly excited by those plans. Arenas across the country are somewhere between almost empty and totally empty because of coronavirus protocols. Game schedules are typically known months in advance; nobody knows what the second week of March looks like yet.
All of this is most unusual.
There is, however, one constant: The Eastern Conference standings are a mess.
Spending any time trying to figure how the East is going to shake out would be a futile undertaking, because it’s clear that the teams themselves have no idea. The Heat won the East last season and have spent zero days over .500 this season. The Bucks — the NBA’s best regular-season team in each of the last two seasons, a team with two-time reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo — just had a streak of five consecutive losses. Every team in the East has had at least one three-game losing streak; 11 of those 15 teams have had multiple three-game slides and the season isn’t even half over.
If all that wasn’t enough, the Western Conference is dominating its friends from the other half of the league. The West is winning 57% of its games against the East. That’s on pace to be the biggest margin since the West won 58.4% in 2014-15 — and virtually assures that the West will win the regular-season series versus the East for the 21st time in the last 22 seasons. The East won four consecutive years against the West from 1995-96 through 1998-99; the only season in which the East beat the West since was 2008-09.
By now, that’s to be expected.
Having only three teams better than one game above .500 entering Tuesday’s games, two months into the season, that’s the big surprise out of the East. The 76ers (20-11) and Nets (20-12) sit atop the East, and the Bucks (18-13) are right in their shadow.
That’s where the ridiculously tight traffic jam starts, with the next 10 teams — the Pacers, Raptors, Celtics, Knicks, Bulls, Hornets, Heat, Hawks, Magic and Wizards — all within 3 ½ games of each other.
Some offer a very simple explanation.
“I see a lot of inconsistent teams in the East,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “And we’re one of them.”
That being said, there are signs that some teams are figuring it out.
The Nets just went 5-0 on a West road trip, playing most of those games without Kevin Durant. The Raptors started 7-12; they’re 9-3 since. The Bulls and the Heat have already won more games in February than they did in January. The Wizards beat the reigning champion Lakers on Monday night for a fifth consecutive victory, meaning they’re 5-0 since starting 6-17. And the Knicks — this is true and amazing — have a chance at their first winning calendar month since going 8-7 in November 2017.
“We’re striving to become a 48-minute team,” said Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau, who has already made a sizable impact in his first couple of months in New York. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
The good news is that there’s a lot of time left.
Teams will get their second-half schedules finalized by the NBA this week. Everyone, even those going to Atlanta for the one-day All-Star events on March 7, will get a little bit of a much-needed break after a very hectic first couple of months to the season.
The trade deadline on March 25 will be interesting, because with the play-in tournament happening this year — and 20 teams essentially going to the postseason, even if four will be eliminated in very short order — more teams than usual will technically be in the playoff race.
Put simply, there’s a long way to go. And that means there’s plenty of time for this East logjam to break up a little.
“Anybody that can find some consistency and reliability quicker can find some separation in the standings, but right now that there is not separation,” Spoelstra said. “So what I see is opportunity.”
It was a case that drew headlines all over the world when it was revealed that a father had imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children.
That abomination really happened in Austria and was exposed in 2008. But it’s only a template for Lifetime’s new “Ripped From the Headlines” movie premiering Feb. 27.
It proved a challenge for actress Elisabeth Rohm (“Jane the Virgin”) to move behind the camera in her directorial debut for tale, “Girl in the Basement.”
“It’s a mixture of different stories of abduction, sexual assault, imprisonment and incest,” she says. “So, that was intimidating because it was starting my first film in a complex way.
“There are some stories you may remember — like the Elisabeth Fritzl case and so forth — but ‘Girl in the Basement’ is inspired by many different stories much like this.”
Lifetime will follow the feature with a special documentary, says Rohm.
“Where people who are either victims of this type of assault or they know somebody, they will be able to see this documentary about surviving abduction and imprisonment.
“But also, we are offering information about RAINN, which is the largest organization against sexual assault in this country.”
Rohm says she sees “Girl in the Basement” as a call to action.
“And though that was a big responsibility, I was inspired by Lifetime’s commitment to make it a movement,” she says.
Judd Nelson portrays the abusing father, Don, who convinces his wife their 18-year-old daughter has run away and joined a cult — when she’s imprisoned in his basement.
Twenty-four-year-old Stefanie Scott plays the daughter imprisoned.
“It’s a very challenging movie in itself, ranging from about 20 years, and all of the different life stages that the character goes through while living underground — becoming a mother, what that’s like raising kids with no outside sources?
“How do you even keep your mind together if that is your reality?” she asks.
But Scott was able to maintain her equilibrium
in spite of the horrific subject matter she had to portray every day, she says.
“At the end of the day, it was a movie, and I was pretending. And I had breaks all day long. And it wasn’t real for me.
“So at the end of the day, it’s not like I can identify with those feelings as if it’s something I really went through.
“Even though it’s a ‘Ripped From the Headlines’ story and it really is
. . . kind of making aware, I guess, of some of these stories that people have been through and are probably happening right now that we’re completely unaware of, which is horrifying.
“I feel like I can’t really do justice to what these girls have actually been through because I’m just an actor pretending.”