The Six Biggest Questions of the NBA’s Stretch Run

After a weekend in which the NBA not-so-subtly tried to engineer the worst dunk contest result in history and had even commissioner (and chief offensive inflation officer) Adam Silver sounding unamused by the absolute dearth of competition in the highest-scoring All-Star Game ever … we’re back!

The last leg of the 2023-24 NBA regular season is officially upon us—can you believe it? No more than 30 games remain for any team. No more than 30 games to find out where you truly stand in the conference hierarchy, to pinpoint what exactly the team needs entering the draft and how to get it, to find that spark at the end of a season that can carry you deep into the playoffs and turn you into a momentum evangelist. There are questions we’re all still seeking answers to. Let’s run through some of the biggest.

Has the Rookie of the Year race already been set in stone?

It’s fitting that Victor Wembanyama entered the league in a season when we’ve been forced to recalibrate what numbers mean in the NBA. It’s one thing to be inured to the compromised defenses amid the league’s latest and greatest scoring boom, to the cheapening value of a 50-point game. But then, just when you think the league’s juiced ball era has left your heart calloused, Wemby nearly drops a 5x5 triple-double in Toronto. That’s not a stat line, that’s an In-N-Out order from a hungry stoner.

Those types of performances from Wemby, still less than 50 games into his NBA career, are truly awing. With his talent, his skill level, his reach, and his preternatural demeanor, he is history waiting to be made. At Wembanyama’s current rate, he’ll need just 17 more games to surpass Josh Smith for the second-most blocks ever in a season from a player 20 years old or younger. Assuming Wemby plays in all 27 remaining games, he’d have to average 4.9 blocks per game the rest of the way to surpass Shaquille O’Neal at the top of that list. It says a lot about Wemby that these frankly ridiculous rates of production seem feasible.

Where does that leave the ROY race? On December 12, The Ringer published a roundtable giving out awards for the first quarter of the season. Four of five writers (myself included) named Chet Holmgren as our top rookie of the first 20-or-so games. At that point, Holmgren’s shooting efficiency (and the fact that he had a dramatic impact on wins for the Thunder) trumped what were fairly similar numbers between the two elongated titans. Since that date, Wemby’s production has been irrepressible. The list of players who have averaged 20 points, 10 rebounds, three assists, and three blocks per game in a season: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Bob Lanier, and Shaq—the youngest to ever do it was Lanier at 25. Wembanyama is on track. He’s 20.

Holmgren is having an incredible rookie campaign on one of the NBA’s best teams, but his raw numbers now trail Wemby’s in just about every category. Since the turn of the century, the award has typically gone to the best stat line. In seasons wherein multiple players have compelling statistical cases—i.e., Mike Miller vs. Kenyon Martin in 2001, Amar’e Stoudemire vs. Yao Ming in 2003, Malcolm Brogdon vs. Dario Saric vs. Joel Embiid in 2017, and Scottie Barnes vs. Evan Mobley in 2022—the edge went to the player on a playoff team. But it’s getting harder to see their numbers as equal.

Which MVP favorite will have the most compelling MVP moment?

I suppose the idea is silly, that any MVP-worthy campaign might be distilled to a specific play or performance. But anchors are powerful. I think about the 2017 season’s MVP race a lot, if only because I’m reminded every time I watch the Clippers: Russell Westbrook, James Harden, and Kawhi Leonard each had a compelling claim to the most prestigious regular-season award in the sport that season.

I still think about how, in a late March game against the Magic, Westbrook had the crowd in Orlando chanting “MVP” as they witnessed their own team buckle under the weight of the Thunder star’s sheer force of will in overtime. He notched a 57-point triple-double (then the highest-scoring one on record, since eclipsed by Harden and Luka Doncic), in a season when he did what hadn’t been done in 55 years: average a triple-double. Westbrook’s decline in the intervening years has only seemed to strengthen the moment in my mind. When I think about 2017, I think about Russell Westbrook doing everything he could, full stop. Time has taken so much away from him, but it can’t take that. In that sense, the player most likely to put their all into a season-defining regular-season performance is unquestionably Giannis Antetokounmpo—as long as the Bucks are indeed turning the corner with Doc Rivers at the helm.

The NBA, Ranked

Click here to read the The Ringer’s 2023-24 NBA rankings.

Nikola Jokic is still the favorite to win the award, which is one of the perks of being the best player in the world: benefit of the doubt in a hazy field. But the Nuggets are largely where they want to be in the standings, in position to earn home-court advantage in the first round. Without much to compensate for, Jokic could be in perfunctory clock-in-clock-out mode. Respect to the man. Kawhi has been a popular candidate of late, and he remains on pace to play more games this season than he has since that 2017 campaign. But like Jokic, he understands deeply the importance of self-preservation.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander having the second-best odds in the MVP race is interesting. As I explored earlier this month, SGA on a micro level is one of the most fascinating athletes in basketball; from a macro level, his consistency almost registers as an ambient hum of greatness in a manner reminiscent of Kawhi. Perhaps one thing missing from Gilgeous-Alexander’s library of moments is a 50-point performance. The Thunder offense is one of the best in the league, and SGA can drop 30 in his sleep, but players like Keegan Murray (47) and Saddiq Bey (51) have scored more points in a game than Shai has. With the way a 50-piece has been devalued, maybe it wouldn’t make a difference in how we remember Shai’s season. It could also make all the difference. If the MVP award truly does serve as the epitaph of a season, it’s better to be loudly symbolic of the dominant league trend than not.

What the hell is going to happen in the West?

The playoff ladder out West has become a two-tiered platform. Four teams (Timberwolves, Thunder, Nuggets, Clippers) on the higher rung, six teams (Suns, Pelicans, Mavericks, Kings, Lakers, Warriors) in the lower. There are almost as many games (6) separating the first-place Wolves and the fifth-place Suns as there are between the Suns and the 10th-place Warriors clinging to the fringes of a play-in spot.

It’s a perfect setup for chaos. Unproven teams nestled at the top and aged lions in slumber resting at the bottom, as has been the case lately in the play-in era of playoff basketball. Last year’s Kings-Warriors series was among the most compelling of the entire postseason—a validation of Sacramento’s promising trajectory in spite of a crushing Game 7 loss, capped off by one of the greatest Game 7 performances in NBA history from Steph Curry. These matchups color our perception of teams. Disparities in experience lay the groundwork for succession at best, and a knowing derisiveness at worst.

A Timberwolves-Warriors first-round series would be a narrative gold mine, though there can be no moral victories for the Wolves. Anthony Edwards has staked his claim as this generation’s Air Apparent, but both Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns each bear a heavy weight heading into the postseason. Reputations eventually calcify into identity if they aren’t adequately addressed and dealt with.

It’s been almost seven years since Curry had Gobert drilling his own pit of captivity in the playoffs. Gobert, one of the defining defensive players of a generation, has yet to shake the prevailing notion that his walling defense, so impenetrable in the regular season, can be exploited in a best-of-seven series. He has consistently been a target for players who can repeatedly force him to move his feet on the perimeter. But these Wolves present the most talented roster that Gobert, the favorite to win Defensive Player of the Year again this season, has ever played on; he is among other impressive stalwarts in Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker on the perimeter. No matter who their opponent is, this is it. This is Gobert’s best shot at shedding a damning perception, and maybe the biggest opportunity Minnesota has had to break out past the first round for the first time in 20 years. But there’s plenty of ball left to determine just how history repeats itself or breaks trend. The West is still unwritten.

Is anyone in the East a real threat to the Celtics?

The East, on the other hand, seems securely in the hands of Boston. The Celtics are outscoring teams by 10.3 points per 100 possessions, the highest regular-season net rating the league has seen since the 2016-17 Warriors, the greatest team of all time. Boston’s the only team so far this season to have multiple 50-point wins. They’ve overtaken the Pacers as the most efficient offense in NBA history. The biggest question left for them is whether Kristaps Porzingis can hold up over the course of a Finals run. He hasn’t played more than 65 games in seven years and he tweaked his ankle in the 50-point win against Brooklyn, among other small bumps and bruises he’s accrued all season.

With Joel Embiid’s season still up in the air, and the status of Julius Randle’s dislocated shoulder to be determined, the Sixers and Knicks are looming wild cards. One team with the clear statistical makeup to pose a threat is the Cleveland Cavaliers, who boast a top-two defense and a top-five net rating, both important signifiers of a contender. The Cavs have lost to the Celtics in back-to-back games, but weren’t at full strength in either. They’re 18-2 in the 20 games leading into the All-Star break, with intriguing lineup versatility, boasting a breakout defensive stopper in Isaac Okoro and a designated sharpshooter in Sam Merrill, two players that have added new dimensions to the team since mid-December. The team is aware of its reputation, after being absolutely worked by the Knicks in the playoffs last season. That stink will linger until the team does something about it in the postseason. The March 5 clash between the Cavaliers and Celtics will be a must-watch.

What will Jordan Poole’s disasterpiece look like in the end?

Back in December, my colleague Danny Heifetz considered the true value of 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy, whose expected points added per dropback figures in the 2023 season were in elite company historically—especially given that Purdy makes less than $1 million per year. (Heifetz termed the value-to-value disparity “EPA per pay”; I would’ve gone with EPA per guap back.)

There is a legitimate case to be made for Wizards guard-slash-performance-artist Jordan Poole as the complete inverse of that.

Among players who have played at least 1,300 minutes in a season over the past 30 years, there have been 11 players with a worse box plus/minus than Poole. Those 11 players made a combined $23.8 million from their respective ignominious seasons. Poole will make $27.5 million this year alone. (In this arbitrary exercise, let us proceed as though the concept of inflation does not exist.)

Washington is in one of the most fascinating binds I can remember. The franchise acquired a player whom the Warriors paid to be the future through line to Steph Curry, but whose on-court volatility had become a sort of intransigence: The only constant was explosive offensive inconsistency and defensive apathy. You get what you get and you will be upset. Taken away from the dynastic structure of Golden State and placed on a mantle in D.C., Poole’s chaotic genius has mostly just been rendered as chaotic. Players of Poole’s ilk—talented but deeply flawed boundary pushers gradually humbled by the NBA’s grind—aren’t typically given max extensions. And given what Poole has provided for the Wizards in year one, this is truly uncharted territory. What is there to do but ride it out and hope the Jackson Pollock he’s thrown at the walls will one day make sense?

Are there any tank jobs worth paying attention to?

It’s an off year for the sick and twisted Tankathoners among us. (Hello!) After one of the most ballyhooed draft classes in recent memory last season, there has been a bit of a comedown effect chilling the 2024 crop. It’s clear that Wemby and Chet have set a new standard, but not yet a trend. So I recognize the desire to view possible no. 1 prospect Alex Sarr as a sort of step toward an NBA-wide universal basic income, but for long, hypermobile 7-footers with game-wrecking defensive talent. I love Alex Sarr’s potential. I also recognize that it hasn’t always been prudent to chase the league’s Best New Archetypes as soon as they reveal themselves.

There will be less jockeying for position down the homestretch, at least at the very bottom. The Pistons, Wizards, and Spurs are clearly the worst teams in the league, and each will be granted a 14 percent chance at the no. 1 selection for their efforts, thanks to the flattened lottery odds. And while none of those teams seem to be in danger of being declared the worst ever, they also won’t have trouble staying on their respective sordid courses.

What fun we can manufacture out of the loser’s bracket as the season winds down will have come through tracking teams dancing around pick protections. The Jazz, currently the 11th-worst team in the league, owe a top-10 protected pick to the Thunder in the upcoming draft. After trading away Kelly Olynyk, Ochai Agbaji, and Simone Fontecchio before the deadline, it’s clear which way Danny Ainge wants the arrow to tilt in Utah.

The Raptors, at 19-36, have the sixth-worst record in the league. This is important because the Raptors traded a top-six-protected 2024 first-round pick to the Spurs last year essentially for an inside track to lock up quiz whiz Jakob Poeltl. Of course, therein lies the drama: the sixth-worst record is far more likely to pick seventh or eighth overall than sixth. And the Raptors can’t exactly plummet much further down. The Grizzlies are being held together by dental floss, but have the easiest remaining schedule among teams out of playoff contention and have been a top-10 defense in spite of everything. The Blazers are bad, but in a charming way. Are we buying into the Hornets—inexplicably one of the hottest teams in the league leading into the All-Star break—led by rookie Brandon Miller and new trade acquisitions Tre Mann and Grant Williams? Both Portland and Charlotte have among the toughest schedules in the league the rest of the way. Raptors president Masai Ujiri all but admitted the Poeltl trade was a mistake based on an outsized belief in the team’s prospects last season—one year later, with a significant rebuild set into action, it could very well bite the team in the ass.