Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less absurd task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I was skeptical of entering the season, but whose collapse I really didn't see coming -- the 2013 Sixers, of course.

Fun story -- I actually didn't like Philadelphia that much as we entered the 2013 season. A few reasons for that: Bynum's injury was worrisome given his prior injury history, they replaced their best offensive player (Lou Williams) with Nick Young, and I wasn't a big fan of any of their non-Bynum moves. Still, the general consensus that they were a high upside team with potential outclassing the names on the roster -- after all, Doug Collins had guided a roster of relative no-names and young castaways to a game short of the Eastern Conference Finals a year prior, right? No way they'd disappoint. Except for the "no way" part, since that's exactly what happened. Let's examine how.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: PHILADELPHIA AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: This one's pretty obvious -- from late January to early February, the Sixers went on a pretty nice run. One of the few good ones this season. It wasn't exactly a murderer's row of opponents, but it was a good stretch. They lost to Milwaukee and Memphis in close games, coupling that with their best win of the season (a blowout of the Knicks) and a few blowouts over the East's cellar (the Bobcats and the Magic, obviously). Add in some comfortable wins against the Wizards and the Kings and you have their best stretch. It's really not much, but that's the kind of year they're having.
  

• WORST STRETCH: They were pretty atrocious in December as a whole -- they went 4-11 over the month. But in these particular two-week splits, the worst stretch has to be their 1-6 schneid around the middle of the month. They went 1-6 against generally weak competition, including an embarrassing home blowout loss to the Lakers and a 0-4 road record against the Pacers, Mavericks, Rockets, and Nets. Their only saving grace? A single blowout win against the Hawks. Not their finest hour.
  

Let's not beat around the bush -- the Sixers have been poor. Awful. Atrocious. They're still in the weeds of a tepid Eastern playoff race, but that's only on the assumption that Rondo's absence eventually leads to a Boston collapse -- it's unlikely they leapfrog Milwaukee, so Boston's theoretical collapse is their only real in-roads. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the two teams directly around them in the standings -- Toronto and Detroit -- are both a touch better than they are. At the 51-game mark, the Sixers rate out as one of the worst offensive teams in the league and a marginally above average defense. They're a defensive team, theoretically, but they're mostly just a bad one -- all things considered, Washington's shown a much higher defensive ceiling than Philadelphia has and they're a better offense as well, now that Wall's returned.

• • •

PHILADELPHIA'S PERFECT PACE: Doesn't exist!

Last season, around the conference finals, I performed an analysis of each conference finalist's "perfect" pace -- essentially, I split pace into four buckets (slow, mid-slow, mid-fast, fast) and assessed records and efficiency for each conference finalist in each bucket. I've decided to bring that type of analysis back to give a bit more context on the way teams are best suited to play. A reminder of what's going on here: I've split every game played this season into four buckets based on the number of possessions played -- one for slow, one mid-slow, one mid-fast, one fast. Quartiles. I've set up my program to update the quartiles as more games get played, so the designations may change slightly as time goes on. As for the statistics provided, they're similar to those you'll see above. There's the team's efficiency differential in that pace bucket, the average opponent differential of their opponents in that bucket on all games played, wins and losses, home and away totals, offensive ratings, defensive ratings, and a nice collection of the team's four factors stats. Good talk.

Here's how the Sixers have done by each bucket:

Some interesting stuff. A few observations on the overall distribution here.

• By design, Doug Collins likes his teams to focus on grind-it-out basketball. The man's happiest when his teams play turtle-slow basketball and grind the opponent into submission. That's... just about exactly what they've been doing, too! Almost 40% of Philadelphia's games were played at a snail's pace, at less than 88 possessions per contest. The Sixers have punched slightly above their weight at that pace -- they actually defend a bit worse than they do at faster paces, but their halfcourt offense does actually work a bit better when it's used less.

• One thing that may surprise you is how Philadelphia did in the 10 games they've played at over 95 possessions per contest. They really haven't been that bad. Their offense falls apart when they play fast, but their defense has shown to be a bit more stingy at high speeds, primarily because their rebounding improves and they force a lot of turnovers. This matches the eye test, as well -- when you watch some of the games Philadelphia has played at breakneck speeds, like this solid win against the Rockets, one of the first things you notice is just how comfortable Jrue Holiday and Thaddeus Young are when they're sprinting the floor and given free reign to challenge all quick passing lanes. They played a harder slate in those 10 "fast" games but still posted performances above their average. Good stuff.

• Overall, the Sixers have posted a winning record from exactly zero of these possession buckets -- there's no particularly notable pace of the game that strengthens them considerably. They play slow because Doug Collins likes to play slow. While it isn't exactly working out gangbusters for them, there aren't a whole lot of other options -- they play a bit better at breakneck speeds but transitioning to such a style falls squarely outside Collins' expertise. When nothing really helps, you do what you know.

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

I really can't restate it enough -- the Philadelphia 76ers are one of the biggest disappointments of the season. The higher profile struggles of the Lakers and the Celtics have obfuscated it, but this is an astonishingly poor season for a franchise that thought it was putting its hens in order. In the preseason, I thought they'd go 40-42. That's good for a 3 game drop from last season's standard, but hardly anything close to the currently projected 35-47 record that Basketball Reference forecasts them for. There were two main causes, so far as I see it, for their currently awful season.

• ANDREW BYNUM. I don't want to beat it into the ground, because it isn't really reasonable. But Bynum hasn't played a single game for them. He's the best player on a not-particularly-deep team -- that was going to hurt no matter what happened. All that said, I stop short of attributing all of their struggles to Bynum's absence. As good as Andrew Bynum is, we still have yet to see him acting as a team's first option on offense and we have yet to see how he recovers from his latest injury. Bynum's notorious for long recovery time and occasional flagging effort -- while it's possible he would've fixed everything for Philadelphia, it's hard to simply assume he would.

• A TERRIBLE SUMMER. Let's be straight, here -- the Sixers had an atrocious summer. The Bynum trade was decent in theory, if you consider just how tepid the trade market was for Andre Iguodala in the first place. But almost every single other move they made this summer went sour. Replacing Lou Williams with Nick Young has proven to be an unreasonably massive downgrade, and replacing Elton Brand with Kwame Brown has been arguably worse. Spencer Hawes has played so poorly he's had trouble living up to his contract, even though it's a massive bargain-bin deal. Dorrell Wright has been mediocre at best, Royal Ivey has been worse than Jodie Meeks (really? REALLY?!), and Jason Richardson is messing up their future cap situation (more on that in a second). Even if Bynum WAS playing, it's impossible to argue that Philadelphia made lateral moves this summer. Their wheeling and dealing dramatically harmed their team.

The second bullet is the more important one. They may yet sign Bynum to a max contract, and he may yet suit up and prove he deserves it. But Philadelphia got worse at virtually every position they touched this summer. That's phenomenally hard to do. It's also difficult to have a year as bad as the one Philadelphia's having in concert with your young stars having breakout years, but Philadelphia's aggressively poor offseason made sure of that. Seriously -- Jrue Holiday has taken a quantum leap forward and Thaddeus Young has looked phenomenal this season. If during the offseason you'd told me that either of those would happen, I would've predicted 48-54 wins. Even if Bynum was out! But alas. Sometimes your moves simply don't work out.

This season's an obvious casualty of a few moves that didn't work out, but it's worth mentioning that next season may be out too. Philadelphia currently has $44 million in the books for next season, and that's without resigning Bynum, Nick Young, or Dorrell Wright -- once they resign Bynum, they'll be over the salary cap and reduced to scrounging for the lower-priced scraps on the market. It's certainly possible that a three man core of Bynum/Holiday/Thaddeus can contend for a middling-tier playoff spot in a barren Eastern conference, but it's hard to see a championship endgame for a team like that without some excellent depth and some better wings. If Evan Turner didn't look atrocious, that might change matters -- but he's looked bad.

The Sixers are perilously close to losing all financial flexibility, partly because of their taking on Jason Richardson in the Andrew Bynum deal. Richardson's looked over the hill with a foot out the door for two seasons now, and he's still got $12 million left on his contract after this season. Richardson probably takes Philadelphia out of the picture in the incoming free agency bonanza during the 2014 offseason. Which all translates to a murky, hazy future. Philadelphia doesn't look like a title contender, or anything close -- if they resign Bynum, their upside appears to be a second round Hawks-type faux contender. What's the endgame? I really don't know. We'll see soon enough.

Here's hoping it goes a bit better than last year's endgame.

• For more Sixers scouting, check out the 2012 Philadelphia 76ers player capsules. •

• • •

Since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #5 plays relatively fast -- they don't always play at the fastest pace, but they almost never play slow. They've only played 8 games this season at under 88 possessions a contest, which is one of the lowest totals in the NBA. They've been consistently awful all year regardless of their pace, and their rotation is an absolute mess. Their coach infuriates me and they're having one of the worst 5-year stretches any franchise has ever gone through. At least they're 11-12 against the East. Wait, what.

Best of luck. See you next week.

Continue reading

Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less absurd task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I was a bit higher on than a lot of people -- the 2013 Hawks.

Throughout the capsules, I expressed a general thought that the 2013 Hawks weren't going to be as bad as most people expected. Many saw them as a fringe playoff team -- I thought it was reasonable to go a step further and call them a team with a puncher's chance at first round home court. After all. Though most people vastly underrated what Joe Johnson brought that Atlanta team, so too did most people vastly underrate what Lou Williams had the potential to bring them. Combine that with a bit of help off the bench through Devin Harris and a full season of their best player, Al Horford? The Hawks always had a good shot at being the same exact 4-5 seed type team they've been since 2009, despite Ferry's apt blow-it-up style asset trading. Checking in today, the Hawks have banked 45 of their 82 games. They sit at 6th in the East and 2nd in their division, 4.5 games behind Miami and 12 games ahead of Orlando. They've gotten a lot of benefit out of an easy schedule, but they are once again neither atrocious nor excellent. As they say: they are who we thought they were. Let's talk Hawks.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: ATLANTA AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: There's often some degree of uncertainty when sifting out a team's best stretch. No such uncertainty here -- the Hawks were at their best in period #2, in late November. For a nice 6 game stretch, the Hawks went 5-1. The opposition was stronger than it looks in SRS -- although they played a few teams close, they also had their best win of the season, an 11 point home upset of the Los Angeles Clippers, who'd start a 17 game win streak less than a week later.

• WORST STRETCH: Once again, no uncertainty necessary. They've finally gotten back above water over the last week or so, but my lord, they started the year poorly. From January 8th to the 21st, the Hawks played absolutely abysmal basketball. Slow-pace grindfests, ones where neither team shot or defended particularly well but games where the opposing team got to shoot free throws in scads. This included, obviously, the absolute worst game of Atlanta's season -- their embarrassing 39-point defeat to the Chicago Bulls. It also included blowout losses to the Cavaliers and the Wizards. Rough times.

On an overall level, after 45 games, the Hawks have finally entered the fringes of the top 10 (9th overall) in Defensive Rating. They're marginally below average on offense, rating out as the 16th best team. If you adjust for strength of schedule, their defense remains 9th-ranked, although cardinally less impressive. In a related story, their adjusted offense rating drops them to 19th overall. (They aren't a particularly fun team to watch, that's all I'm saying.) Additionally, they've played 17 of their 30 cross-conference contests -- they're one of just four eastern teams to post a winning record against the West, at a strong 9-8. Not bad for a team with no shot at the playoffs.

• • •

ATLANTA'S PERFECT PACE: Keep it steady, and FAR AWAY from grinds

Last season, around the conference finals, I performed an analysis of each conference finalist's "perfect" pace -- essentially, I split pace into four buckets (slow, mid-slow, mid-fast, fast) and assessed records and efficiency for each conference finalist in each bucket. Given the Hawks are a good teaching example, I decided to bring that general type of analysis back in an effort to give you a bit more context on the way Atlanta's best suited to play. So, a reminder of what's going on here. I've split every game played this season into four buckets based on the number of possessions played -- one for slow, one mid-slow, one mid-fast, one fast. Quartiles. I've set up my program to update the quartiles as more games get played, so the designations may change slightly as time goes on.

As for the statistics provided, they're quite similar to that you'll see above. There's the team's efficiency differential in that pace bucket, the average opponent differential of their opponents in that bucket on all games played, wins and losses, home and away totals, offensive ratings, defensive ratings, and a nice collection of the team's four factors stats. Good talk. Here's how the Hawks have done by each bucket:

Some interesting stuff. A few observations on the overall distribution here.

• The Hawks haven't skewed particularly hard towards either the fast or slow end of the NBA spectrum, but they've had an ever-so-slight tendency to play slow -- 57% of their games are played at a below-average tempo. This isn't really a good thing. The Hawks have been utterly dismal in slow-it-down grinding games, with their generally substandard half-court defense failing them when the game slows to a screeching halt.

• On the other hand... the Hawks are hardly phenomenal at playing with breakneck speeds, either. They've posted a 7-4 record in "fast" games, but that's fools gold -- they posted that record against awful teams with a combined efficiency differential of -2.05, and did it while posting a markedly negative differential themselves. While the Hawks are a good transition team, they aren't great shakes at defending other good transition squads. Combine that with a general inability to lock down the boards or keep opponents off the line in a rubber match and you've got a flat-out disastrous mix.

• In general, the Hawks play above their heads when they keep the game to a league average pace and wilt when faced with a fast pace or a grindout game. The idea that they're better when they play to the average pace generally backs the eye test -- the Hawks don't have a phenomenally strong identity at this point of the season, other than being a team that barely ever shoots free throws. That's how things have trended, so far. If they play a team in the playoffs that forces them into either extreme, the Hawks may struggle mightily.

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

The Hawks aren't a great team this year. They really aren't. While Horford's been back and in relatively decent form, he's been a slight bit removed the all-star caliber play that made him such a steal for the Hawks from 2010 to 2012, especially on the defensive end. In that duration, Horford played like a legitimate star -- never one of the 10 best players in the league, but always a top tier big man and one of the better players in the Eastern conference. He was the steady hand to Josh Smith's unpredictable bursts of energy and supreme competence. This year, he's been good -- his per-minute averages are about where they always are, but he's been markedly better in wins than losses -- 55% shooting in wins, 50% in losses. His free throw rate plummets and his defensive intensity does the same. It's not really Horford's fault at all that the Hawks are relying on him to punch a bit too far above his weight, but he can't be excused for being relatively nonessential in their losses either.

The thing is? This season simply doesn't matter that much. This offseason, the Hawks are -- theoretically -- set to clean house. Their books are going to be clean as a whistle for the first time since the mid-aughts, and their assets are going to be stronger than just about any other team in free agency. If Dwight Howard chooses to leave Los Angeles, Atlanta's his best choice for him. Same goes for any major free agent, really. Their books are clean, their management is sound, and their supporting cast is going to be far and away better than any other big free agent draw on the market in the 2013 offseason. Think about their supporting cast for a moment:

• As previously noted, the Hawks have Al Horford. Tad disappointing this year or not, the man's a two-time all-star at the age of 26 who's been one of the best bigs in his conference for the last 3 years. And he's locked up on an impressively cheap deal until 2016.

• Additionally, the Hawks have Lou Williams locked up for peanuts until the 2015 season. Williams is a frustrating player at times, but he's a legitimate starting two or a bench zeitgeist on a great team going forward. The man can drain threes, draw freebies, and control the ball with the best of them. For $5 million a year? Steals galore.

• Standout rookie John Jenkins is locked up on team-friendly options until 2016, and possible NBA-caliber talent Mike Scott has a comfortable sub-million dollar deal the Hawks can extend to give him a bit of burn. DeShawn Stevenson has a small contract, but it's small enough that Ferry can probably waive it and swallow the hit, if he really needed to.

Who else? Nobody. Absolutely nobody! But of those five players, three of them are obvious assets (strong players on cap-friendly deals), one is a question mark but a possible asset (Mike Scott), and one has Lincoln tattooed to his adam's apple. No other team can sport out a roster with an all-star, a volume scoring wing, and a nice high-upside rookie to surround their new acquisitions. The Hawks are set to have twenty to thirty million dollars of free space to fill with an affordable Ferry-stamped supporting cast around a max level star in a hilariously weak conference. If Ferry plays his cards right, the Hawks could end up as one of the best teams in the East for years to come. A new-age Howard-era Orlando Magic without Otis Smith to muck things up.

Sure, Atlanta isn't anyone's most ostentatious free agent play. They won't win on flash, pizzazz, or glitz. But just on the court, in the team that Ferry has the opportunity to build? The Hawks have made a formidable case for themselves, and one that Danny Ferry is preparing to give to whatever big stars don't go on a good postseason run. The Hawks may bow out peacefully in the first round this year. I'd expect that. But puttering around the 4 or 5 seed in a rebuilding year -- a year where they'll actually have a legitimate shot at taking a huge leap -- is a fantastic position for a franchise whose city is tepid enough that they can't tank in a horrifying manner. He probably won't win it, but he deserves it -- Ferry's work as Hawks GM has been great regardless of how this all turns out, and the man deserves more recognition for his successes. Don't trust this year's Hawks, no. But trust Ferry's management. The man knows what he's doing, for better or for worse.

• For more Hawks scouting, check out the 2012 Atlanta Hawks player capsules. •

• • •

I told you all I'd try to come up with a riddle. But since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #4's record could be a lot worse -- their Pythagorean record and their true-to-life record are a bit disparate, and they've won about two more games than they "should" have. Still, they look like they'll probably be better in the second half of the season. If they succeed, it'll be the complete and opposite inverse of how they played last season. The problem? Their strength of schedule is going to get A LOT tougher, and if they don't get better quickly, things are going to snowball well out of hand. They play better slow and better fast, but when the game trends toward the average pace, the team collapses.

Best of luck. See you next week.

Continue reading

Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less incredible task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I recently deemed one of the league's biggest surprises, although certainly not in a good way -- we're covering the sordid, unhappy tales of the 2013 Chicago Bulls.

In the preseason, I notched Chicago for a record of 41-41. There were two main reasons. First, the obvious -- I'd gotten some information indicating that Rose was going to be out for all but 10-15 games of the season, and in Rose's absence, I had absolutely no idea how the Chicago offense was going to hold up. The defense would remain decent, but I was worried it too would experience a drop-off after the Bulls let bench mainstay Omer Asik go, let Ronnie Brewer go, and watched helplessly as Luol Deng suffered more injuries over the summer in London. Needless to say, I wasn't entirely apt -- the Bulls are hardly a great team, but a stay-puft early schedule combined with one of Joakim Noah's best years as a pro have kept the Bulls well above water. They're comfortably in the Eastern playoff picture, and if Rose is back into shape by the playoffs, they'll be as firmly ensconced in the eastern picture as any non-Miami team. How have they been so far, though?

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: CHICAGO AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: Although it wasn't their best stretch in terms of raw wins and losses, you'd be hard pressed to pick against their most recent two weeks if you're simply looking for their best general performance against decent competition. Home shellackings of the Hawks and the Lakers and a close overtime loss to a good Memphis team highlight the surprisingly-fast-paced stretch for the Bulls, although that blowout loss to the Suns (at home!) might end the season as one of Chicago's worst losses. Still, it's been a good stretch for Thibodeau's guys.
  

• WORST STRETCH: They were playing against moderately decent teams, but that doesn't really excuse the general play -- the Bulls were at their worst back in a memorable mid-November schneid, a five-game road trip they went 2-3 on only to bookend it with a confusing home loss to the not-really-good but not-really-bad Milwaukee Bucks. During that stretch, they very nearly dropped a game to Phoenix (barely pulled it out in OT), got obliterated at Staples center against the Clippers, and scored 93 points two games in a row against the Bucks (once to win, once to lose). Pretty bad stretch. On the plus side? Since that stretch, the Bulls have gone 9-2 on the road, which is pretty phenomenal.

One interesting trend, coming from that home/road note -- the Bulls are currently 12-5 on the road and only 13-12 at home. There aren't many teams in the league that can say they've played better on the road then they have at home. In fact, of the current 16 playoff-bound teams, only the Milwaukee Bucks can say that, and they're only better by a half-game (11-9 road, 10-9 home). If they can keep the road warrior act going in the playoffs with some Rose-fueled home improvement, they'll be an extremely tough out whether they've got home court or not.

• • •

CHICAGO'S BIGGEST MYSTERY: Who's their best player, sans Rose?

Unlike most teams, there aren't a lot of huge mysteries about Chicago's play. We know how they defend, in a general sense -- after all, just about every team in the league has adopted Coach Thibodeau's flood-the-ball-side defensive strategy that tends to spread the scoring around and give bigger games to secondary scorers to the minimization of the primary scorer's raw numbers. Thibodeau teams seem to be better at it than anyone else, but that's more a function of effort, personnel, and the tickling intricacies of the strategy than a function of Thibodeau doing something nobody else is aware of. The offense isn't much of a mystery either -- it's pretty awful, for sure, but you could make a reasonable argument that his teams are offensively deficient on purpose. That is to say, Thibodeau sacrifices offensive creativity for defensive creativity, getting his players to put their best work in on the defensive end because it's simply more consistent and more his personal style. Such as they strive and all. All that said, there's still one curiosity I've always had about the Bulls.

Who's their best player? Obviously, if you look at the Bulls with Rose back, it's going to be their MVP. But we aren't. It's a funny question, because the obvious answer isn't quite as fitting as most people think. The easiest answer is to say Joakim Noah and call it a day. And I'll admit, it's tempting. Noah's pivot passing is a stone's throw from best-in-class, he has a rangy dominance of the defensive end that's easy to underrate, and he's a vocal leader on the floor. And all of that's great, but I tend to go back to the facts I outlined in Noah's player capsule -- he's regularly been an oddly preeminent drag on Chicago's statistical performance when he's on the court, and it's been a pronounced effect for long enough that I have trouble simply looking past it without any reasonable explanation. The trend has held up this year, by the way -- the Bulls have been about a point worse per 100 possessions with Noah on the court, despite no incredible backups a la Omer Asik.

So I'm not positive that Noah's their best player. But if not Noah, then who? Carlos Boozer would be a possible answer if we were watching the Magic School Bus, but we aren't, so he's not. Luol Deng is a great player, but I've got difficulty naming him Chicago's best. He's a great defensive player whose offensive statistics are a bit inflated due to his completely insane minutes haul. And his defense has suffered a bit over the past few years as he's racked up a heavy weight of untreated maladies and injuries. I maintain that Taj Gibson is their best defensive player, but Thibodeau gives the man 20 minutes per game and never seems to consider increasing his role on the team, so he certainly can't be called their best without calling Thibodeau incompetent. Kirk Hinrich is the cryptkeeper. Rip Hamilton is torn. Which leads one back to the obvious answer -- mystifying off-court numbers aside, Noah's their best player.

I just wish I could figure out those splits, you know?

• For more Bulls scouting, check out the 2012 Chicago Bulls player capsules. •

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Trying to figure out how the Bulls are going to finish the season is essentially impossible. It's not that they've been an impossible team to figure out -- as I said, they're a classic Thibodeau unit. Great on defense, lacking creativity or vigor on offense. But without Rose around to carry them offensively, "lacking creativity" becomes "lacking quality", and "lacking quality" becomes a morass that nobody in the world wants to watch. One of the sad subplots of the 2013 season has been watching Bulls fans experience profound frustration on those games where the Bulls can't seem to get anything going. They come more often than they used to, now, and it's immensely irritating to anyone paying close attention. More irritating than that, though, is the sense that the Bulls -- as an organization -- don't care all that much.

This isn't the on-court product, mind you. The Bulls are a whirling dervish of effort and energy on the court, at least on the defensive end -- they hound teams to the breaking point. Chief among Thibodeau's assets as a coach is the way his teams come to play and throttle lesser teams. If a Bulls adversary takes them lightly, it doesn't take more than a quarter or two for the Bulls to go up by 20-30 and end the game early. But that on-court product masks a general disregard for the franchise fortune from their owner. Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf (his titles notwithstanding) is one of the NBA's least engaged owners. He doesn't seem to care much about his team, and he has more regard for blasting past the luxury tax than he has for building a product that can seriously contend for a title going forward. How else do you explain the franchise's lateral moves, letting promising pieces like Omer Asik go for a pittance and losing more and more depth as Thibodeau puts more and more heat on Chicago's best pieces? How do you justify wasting a year or two of Derrick Rose's prime with an aging supporting cast and few avenues for improvement?

That's the real thing, for me. What are the Bulls going to do when Rose gets back? They'll compete. They'll contend, perhaps -- I think they've got a good chance of pushing an immensely lazy Miami team to 6 or 7 games. And then, in that last game, they'll get blown out of the water. Exposed. Every team in the East will, and it won't really be Chicago's fault. But it'll happen. Reinsdorf will shrug his shoulders and give his old "what, me worry?" grin. "We'll be better next year," he'll say. "We'll keep building on what we've done," he'll say. "We'll get over the hump when Derrick gets better," he'll say. But if his track record's any indication, he won't really care all that much. He'll grin and bear it as he takes the abuse of a fanbase desperately aching for an owner that cares as much as they do, and he'll watch as the Bulls continue their old habits. Maximum effort, maximum energy, maximum grind. And when the chips are down? A wheezy crew of worn-down veterans who played too many minutes with depth that was sold to save a buck.

All that said? Prove me wrong, Jerry. Please. I like Rose. I don't want him to retire with nothing but "what ifs."

• • •

I told you all I'd try to come up with a riddle. But since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #3 has been one of the worst teams in the NBA over the past two weeks. Seriously atrocious play. This is despite going 3-6 in their last 9, too. They've sported the 25th worst offense in the period, shooting the ball relatively well but never getting second chance points and virtually never getting to the line. That's all a bit astonishing in the aftermath of their 9-3 stretch from mid-November to mid-December, but let's be honest -- we all knew they weren't that good, right? Right?

Best of luck. See you next week. (Or later this week. I'm not sure.)

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Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less incredible task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I recently deemed one of the league's biggest surprises, although certainly not in a good way -- we're covering the sordid, unhappy tales of the 2013 Washington Wizards.

Not exactly the most grandiose of a start I could've hoped for, but you can't win them all. Today, to start this new series outlining the stories and evolutions of each team in the NBA, I'm starting with a team most people can't bear to watch: your 2013 Washington Wizards. A bit of backstory. In the preseason, I notched the Wizards for 35 wins -- short of the playoffs, but only 5 or 6 games back. I was a bit surprised to find the Wizards I had in my head -- a scrappy (though well below average) defensive unit with a roughly average offense -- apparently didn't exist anywhere outside my head. As they stand, the Wizards are among the slowest teams in the league, and currently hold the dubious distinction of sporting the 10th worst offense in the history of the NBA. Some of that's bound to improve when John Wall comes back. How much of it? Let's find out.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: WASHINGTON AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: From 11/27 to 12/10, the Wizards faced their toughest opposition of the season to date. They went 2-3 (almost 0.500!) against that moderately tough schedule, didn't completely embarrass themselves by the margins, and looked semi-competent. For a short time, of course.

• WORST STRETCH: From 12/11 to 12/24, the Wizards were -- on average -- blown out by over 12 points a night over 8 games, even though they won one of them. They scored 90 points per 100 possessions in the stretch. I watched 5 of those 8 games, and let me tell you -- it looked just as bad as it sounds. "Your search for entertainment returned an error: 404, not found."

Despite the fact that the Wizards are the 11th best defense in the league, in not one of these stretches have the Wizards shot better than the team they're defending. Little has changed, even with Nene back -- this is a team that loses big to bad teams and has a nasty habit of losing just about every close game they could possibly lose to the good ones. Last night's brilliant performance excepted.

• • •

WASHINGTON'S BIGGEST MYSTERY: "How do you defend?"

As a team profile, I'm trying to answer most of the questions I can about the Wizards. Give some insight into what they're doing, why they're doing it, what's the point of it all, et cetera. That's the goal, anyway. But I also want to be honest about the things that mystify me. And for the Wizards, there's one thing I really can't even pretend to understand.

How in God's name do they defend so well?

Really. Despite the fact that the Wizards enter today at 5-28 on the season, they're hardly a poor defensive unit. Just the opposite -- they're on the fringes of the league's top 10, allowing just 104 points per 100 possessions. That's good for the 11th best defense in the league, and my lord, it doesn't make sense. I watched a lot of tape on the Wizards to try and figure out what exactly they do well on defense, and I've come up with a single answer. One specific thing they do well that fuels their defense and keeps them above water, defensively. That thing? They're really good at missing shots.

Let me explain. There are two or three types of missed shots in the NBA. The first are the chippies -- the ones you miss directly under the rim under little duress, that give you an excellent chance for the offensive rebound. The second are the long, semi-random chucks. Those bounce to god-knows-where, often starting a fastbreak by bouncing to the three point line into the hands of the other team's fastest player. The third are the completely hopeless missed shots, the ones that bounce behind the rim and force the other team to inbound the ball behind the baseline. The thing with the Wizards is that despite having a shot distribution that's inordinately skewed towards long two-pointers and errant threes, they're simply really good at missing shots. They're more likely to have a shot miss spectacularly (over the rim, above the backboard, bouncing off to the corner) than they are a simple long bounce that feeds a transition break. That dramatically cuts down on the number of transition opportunities the Wizards allow their opponents -- they're a top-5 team in tamping down on their foe's fastbreak points, and that certainly isn't because they're full of defensive savants.

The odd rebounds their opponents get serve two purposes. First, it cuts down on fast breaks. Second, it slows the game down and forces their opponent into their halfcourt sets. That's essential for the Wizards. Without Wall (and sustaining the sort of insane injury maladies they've suffered this season), the Wizards can reasonably claim to be the least talented team in the NBA -- when you're worse than the opponent, mucking the game up and forcing a slow, high-effort contest is just about the only way to grind out a win. With the exception of their road win over the New Orleans Hornets (where they won 77-70 in a game where both teams got an above average number of possessions, somehow), each win the Wizards have put up this year have involved holding the opposing team below their ideal pace. By pushing teams out of their comfort zone, the Wizards can throw up a few threes and get lucky. When they can't do that, they get stomped. Simple as that.

(Also, it helps that Chris Singleton is getting minutes. He's a good defender.)

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

At writing, the Wizards are shooting an effective field goal percentage of 44% on the season. That's phenomenally bad. It's the 20th worst mark of the shot clock era, in fact. Some excruciating stuff. The problem I have with projecting anything dramatically better to close the season is that I'm simply not sure where the improvement is supposed to come from. John Wall is a solid player, but unless he comes back from injury exactly as good as he was before, with absolutely no warm-up period? I don't see him changing the equation in a whole-scale way. He'll add a better passing wrinkle, and he's fast enough that his speed disorients the defense into giving up a slightly more open shot. But it's not like the Wizards shoot that much better on open shots -- Wall's shooters can't shoot. This team may be built around his talents, but it's hard for any one man's talents to make up for a parade of errant shooting talents and an offense that simply can't move correctly. Especially when Wall is a poor shooter himself!

Still, you have to think the Wizards are going to stumble into a better offense eventually. Maybe. Just look at last year, when the Wizards ended the year on a solid 6-game win streak after an absolutely abhorrent season, with Jordan Crawford, Kevin Seraphin, and Nene leading them to semi-respectability. Crawford actually started the 2013 season out well -- his shot selection has been poor, as is his wont, but he's made a few more threes than usual and shown a particular proficiency for the pure above-the-break dead center three point shot. With Wall back healthy to end the season, I doubt they sniff 25 wins or end the season on the same sort of a 6-game winning streak, but I could see them putting up a decent fight for 15-20 victories if they experience a marginal offensive improvement and continue their mystifyingly solid defense. Their overall outlook is grim, but as long as they continue to put in effort on the defensive end and keep missing shots with the sort of sickening aplomb that fuels their defense, they'll never quite reach the levels reached by historically awful pushovers -- you know, like the 2012 Bobcats, the 2011 Cavaliers, or the 2010 Nets. A fringe top-10 defense is more than any of those teams ever had going for them, that's for sure.

As for next year? We clearly shouldn't have been entertaining the notion of a playoff team this year, and next year seems like a comparable stretch. As good as Nene may be, one good piece doesn't make a team a playoff squad. And the offensive problems run deep. Nobody on this team can shoot, nobody can consistently draw free throws, and Randy Wittman may be the least qualified offensive coach in the NBA. Really! He's the Jay Triano of offense. In Wittman's entire coaching history, his best offensive team was 23rd in the league, and it was Andre Miller's accomplishment to get them that far. His sets aren't creative. We can pooh-pooh the Wizards players all we want -- at the end of the day, when a team spends a coach's entire tenure looking like an uninspired offensive mess with no system or strategy of movement, it's hard to really blame the players. The Wizards have an irritating tendency to take their foot off the gas and play tight every time they shoot out to even an inconsequential lead, and Wittman has an irritating tendency to either not notice or not care. They don't play to win, they play to avoid the loss -- when your team is as offensively dismal as this group, reducing your offense to 10 second no-movement half-court sets is almost like guaranteeing the other team a gift-wrapped stop. If Wittman can dramatically improve his ability to coach offense and the Wizards don't blow another draft pick, they could be decent. If Wittman can't? He should be fired, no matter how little the franchise cares about winning. Do no harm, as they say.

• • •

Hope everyone enjoyed the reprieve from my 15,000 words a week. Let's hope this series can go half as well as the last. Current rough schedule is one team a week until the all-star break, when I kick this into a higher gear and go to 3 or 4 to have scouting and stories for each team by the playoffs. I'll be writing a column about an undisclosed subject in an undisclosed location with an undisclosed family on Thursday. Look out for that. Also, I told you I'd try to come up with a riddle. But since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #2 has as many losses against their own division in the 2013 season as they had in 2012 and 2011 combined. Their pace has slowed to a tortoise crawl, and they've averaged just 88 possessions a night since December 10th. Their All-Star probably won't repeat, but they should safely have a new representative at the game.

Best of luck. See you next week.

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