Young NBA season tough to explain
Under the former NBA schedule, the first month of the season would just be coming to a close this week.
The earlier start that the league went to last year, with the regular season beginning two weeks sooner, means some teams are now already more than a quarter of the way through their 82-game schedules. The extra time doesn’t make it any easier to explain things so far. The Clippers and Nuggets are up. Houston and Boston are down. Golden State has already been both, flying out to a fast start that quickly came to a halt after Stephen Curry was hurt.
The restructured schedule, done to build in more opportunities for rest and fewer back-to-back games, trimmed the preseason and reduced the number of exhibition games, in some cases forcing coaches to continue tinkering around Thanksgiving when they’d prefer to be done with it by Halloween.
“Just like every team in the league, in November you’re not going to be the same team as you are in April or May,” Portland coach Terry Stotts said. “So you kind of expand your play list a little bit.”
Eleven teams in the Western Conference are .500 or better, and that list doesn’t include the usually automatic San Antonio Spurs. The Clippers, Denver and Memphis are all in the top five spots after missing the playoffs last season.
The experimenting figures to continue for the Celtics, who had to readjust to having Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward, and the Rockets, who had to replace Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute. Both teams start the final week of November at .500 after falling a game short of the NBA Finals last season.
Then there’s the Clippers, perhaps the surprise of the league and percentage points ahead of the Warriors for the best record in the West. The team that once boasted a starting lineup that included Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan now fields a much-more anonymous
starting lineup but with excellent results.
Can that continue? Like plenty else around the NBA thus far, it appears too early to tell.
“I think we can beat anyone,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said, “but I think we can lose to anyone.”
The Warriors are recovering. The Raptors are rolling.
When they meet this week, possibly with Stephen Curry back on the floor, it sets up as one of the games of the NBA season.
Golden State heads to Toronto on Thursday for the nationally televised game with the Raptors, who have the NBA’s best record at 17-4. Led by Kawhi Leonard, they have won five in a row overall and are 8-2 at home.
The Warriors have won two in a row after a four-game skid that was their longest under coach Steve Kerr. The game in Toronto opens a five-game road trip to the Eastern Conference during which they believe Curry will return from a strained left groin that will sideline him for a 10th straight game Monday against Orlando.