No division in the NBA was more competitive last season than the Southwest. Every team made the playoffs, and the division champion was not decided until the final night of the season.
Now, with the summer signing season all but complete, the division appears as though it will be as competitive in the upcoming season as it was in 2014-15.
The San Antonio Spurs have added LaMarcus Aldridge and David West, the Houston Rockets have added Ty Lawson, the New Orleans Pelicans have maxed out Anthony Davis, the Memphis Grizzlies have added a couple of glue guys in Matt Barnes and Brandan Wright, and the Dallas Mavericks have added Samuel Dalembert.
OK, cheap shot right there. Guilty as charged. But if we can’t have a little fun at the expense of Mark Cuban and the Haitian Sensation, we’re all taking things a little too seriously.
Of course, Dalembert was not in the Mavs’ plans way back when the Fourth of July weekend was playing out and Cuban had received a verbal commitment from DeAndre Jordan to go with the one he got from Wes Matthews. But we all know what happened from there — Jordan changing his mind at the 11th hour and deciding to return to the Los Angeles Clippers, leaving Dallas scrambling and Cuban at Level 12 on the pissed off scale.
The Mavs will still be a good team with Matthews replacing Monta Ellis, Dirk Nowitzki returning as he begins the final decade of his career, and Deron Williams stepping in as the new starting point guard.
But being a good team is a relative term in the West, where Oklahoma City should be back in the playoffs if Kevin Durant returns healthy, and where the Sacramento Kings have upgraded both their talent base and their potential dysfunction dynamic by bringing in Rajon Rondo and deciding against trading DeMarcus Cousins, believing the coach sometimes known as Furious George can pull off the most stunning kumbaya moment in league history.
It just doesn’t seem fair that the West can be so ultracompetitive while the East can be so blah, but this has been the trend for so long that it really is no longer a trend. It is what it is, and you can be rest assured that at least two good teams are going to be sitting in the same draft lottery room where Sam Presti was forced to be locked away last May.
Will any of those outliers come from the Southwest?
Well, when looking at the odds on the top eight teams and their chances of winning the West, five of those eight teams are from the Southwest. (Vegas is not sold on the Kings, BTW. They have the longest odds of any Western Conference team at 175-1.) So that is a pretty good indicator that what we saw last season is what we will see this season, to a certain degree.
With that in mind, let’s hand out some grades for each of Southwest teams’ offseason moves. We’ll handle it alphabetically:
DALLAS MAVERICKS: While the Jordan histrionics stole all of the headlines, the Matthews signing and Ellis’ departure were not as closely scrutinized. Say what you want about Ellis’ shot selection, but the guy did lead the Mavs in scoring last season, and he’s being replaced by a player who is coming off a torn Achilles tendon. Those do not heal easily, as Kobe Bryant can attest. Team doctors told Cuban that Matthews will be ready for the season opener, but Cuban added, “my doctors change their minds.” Don’t they all? “You haven’t seen guys who have just fallen apart in the last few years [after Achilles surgeries],” Cuban said. “Fifteen years ago, yes, but that really hasn’t been the case, and all I can do is listen to our doctors, and our doctors seem to think he’ll be back to form.” The scrap heap yielded Zaza Pachulia and Dalembert, and JaVale McGee remains a possibility. All in all, what looked like an unmitigated disaster on July 9 has been somewhat mitigated. Grade: B.
(RELATED: MAVERICKS SALARY CAP SITUATION AND ANALYSIS)
HOUSTON ROCKETS: There is no doubt that Ty Lawson is going to have to sit out a sizeable portion of the season because of his two DWI arrests. If you drink and drive and get caught and come to some sort of closure in court, the NBA suspends you. So at some point in the upcoming season, Patrick Beverley is going to be doing quite a bit of heavy lifting. But having a guy like Lawson around for the playoffs is why GM Daryl Morey acquired the speedy point guard from the Denver Nuggets, and there is no discounting how much that could mean. James Harden could not outscore the Golden State Warriors by himself in last season’s Western Conference finals, and Lawson can help. So, too, can draft picks Sam Dekker and Montrezl Harrell, and Morey also made two more smart re-signings with Corey Brewer and K.J. McDaniels. This is a damn good team. Grade: A.
(RELATED: ROCKETS SALARY CAP SITUATION AND ANALYSIS)
MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES: You can grit and grind and grit and grind all you want, but at a certain point you have to make a 3-point shot — despite what Phil Jackson might think. Only the Minnesota Timberwolves (5.0 per game) made fewer 3-pointers per night than the Grizzlies (5.2), and Matt Barnes is not going to change that equation very much. That being said, Barnes is a nice option to have when opposing defenses are sagging off Tony Allen to such a degree that Allen needs to come out. Wright is a nice pickup who has been let go by too many stupid teams, and let’s not forget that they did re-sign the guy who was ranked No. 1 on our original Top 50 Free Agents list — Marc Gasol. Definitely a playoff team, but definitely a playoff team that can be outscored by just about anyone on any given night. GRADE: B-minus.
(RELATED: GRIZZLIES SALARY CAP SITUATION AND ANALYSIS)
NEW ORLEANS PELICANS: Not a lot happened here, aside from Anthony Davis getting a $145 million extension and Monty Williams being replaced as coach by Alvin Gentry. Omer Asik was re-signed, Norris Cole remains unsigned, Kendrick Perkins and Alonzo Gee were added on vet minimums, and that’s about it. Given that they were the No. 8 seed and are returning basically the same roster, they are very much a bubble team when it comes to making the eight-team postseason field in a conference with nine or 10 good teams. Eric Gordon and Ryan Anderson are in contract years, and that is always a motivating factor — even more so this year with the amount of dollars that will be available in free agency next July. My only complaint was that Williams, a good guy, did not deserve to be fired. But the NBA coaching business is cutthroat. GRADE: B.
(RELATED: PELICANS SALARY CAP SITUATION AND ANALYSIS)
SAN ANTONIO SPURS: The undisputed winners among Western Conference teams, not only for their signings of LaMarcus Aldridge and David West (and retaining Kawhi Leonard) but also for their ability to find a replacement for departed centers Tiago Splitter and Aron Baynes. Does this mean we are predicting All-Rookie status for Bobjan Marjanovic? No. But these guys can use Tim Duncan, Aldridge and even Boris Diaw as paint defenders against certain opposing centers. They also always find a way to figure things out. The summer is not over, and neither, we surmise, is San Antonio’s efforts to come up with an extra big body — somebody better than Dalembert. But the bottom line with the Spurs is that they added a 20-point scorer to a team that was already loaded and cohesive. I don’t expect them to go out in the first round two years in a row. GRADE: A.
(RELATED: SPURS SALARY CAP SITUATION AND ANALYSIS)
TOMORROW: PACIFIC DIVISION
PREVIOUSLY: ATLANTIC | SOUTHEAST | CENTRAL| NORTHWEST
Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. Follow him on Twitter.
I don’t want to be nitpicky and anal, especially when reading a post by a guy that still won’t admit that he was wrong and despite the badgering, still refuses to be a standup guy and keeps pretending he never tweeted it or wrote it on his site. Come clean, man. Otherwise you’re just a white Stephen A. Smith with a blog. https://twitter.com/sheridanhoops/status/603717690591547395
With that said, for Pete’s Vecsey sakes, the guy has been playing in the NBA for six full seasons, he’s not some obscure dude on a 10-day contract, and his father with the exact same name played in the NBA for a decade. So you’d think a guy that writes about the NBA as a profession would, at the very least, know how to spell it. Wes Matthews. Not Wes Mathews. A “who cares” thing if your reading glasses were merely on the fritz and it was only a careless typo, but seeing you did it twice, it obviously wasn’t.