So You Wanna be The Blazers

Looking at the saddest teams in the NBA, they can pretty neatly be divided into two categories. Rebuilding teams and trainwrecks. The "Thunder", Memphis, and Minnesota all have reasonably talented young cores that are struggling to find traction. Kevin Durant, Russel Westbrook, and that crew is a talented big man away from looking like a team that could go somewhere (lets just hope Blake Griffin goes somewhere else). Marc Gasol, OJ Mayo and Rudy Gay need a strong bench and some some cohesion on the offensive end but maybe they'll go somewhere. Turning to Minnesota, a team still reeling from the loss of Kevin Garnett, I think there's even less evidence of some sort of sure path back to .500 basketball. Al Jefferson shines and rookie Kevin Love has been steadily improving but they need to find a backcourt star.

This is seperation by degrees but the three of these teams are looking for two main components: defense and more options on offense. Durant, Mayo, and Jefferson will be prolific scorers on their own but you need a second, third, and ussually a fourth option as well: Kobe, Pau, Bynam, Odom; Pierce, Garnett, Allen, Rondo; James, Williams, The Big Z; Roy, Aldridge, Rudy, Outlaw. With a weak draft, it may mean another season of waiting for these teams. The "Thunder" may make a run at the playoffs next year (according to some) but I don't see it. The western conference is absolutely stacked, who are they going to bump off? The only teams who have a serious possibility of deteriorating are.... Utah? New Orleans? Dallas? Maybe if NO has a fire sale but aside from that it just doesn't add up.

Moving on to the trainwrecks: Clips and the Kings. The Wizards are excused (injuries) as is Golden State (they have Anthony Randolph and they don't play defense). The Kings have Kevin Martin and the Clips have Zach Randolph, Baron Davis, Al Thornton and Eric Gordon. The Kings have such a lack of talent and, on paper, the Clips have so much its so strange that they manage to blow a season like this one. The dichotomy between these two teams says something because they have such different inputs and end up with the same result. Where they'll go in the future, nobody knows. I'm sure all 4 Clippers fans are looking forward to anything other than this season though.

The way the league shifts, slowly, from year to year is something worth noting. The free agent and draft pick system results in teams with more money generally winning more and teams with less money winning less. Looking at successes (Jazz, Blazers) and works in progress ("Thunder", Memphis) tells us something about what works and how to build a winning team in this league. I'm not sure what that is yet though.