Office Hours with the Professor: the Kings stumble, the Mavs crash and burn & the Coach of the Year frontrunner
A few stories from around the Association that are just too juicy to pass up
The bright side of Jalen Brunson’s injury: it could be worse
Imagine the Knicks got off to a slow start this season. Their big offseason addition put up numbers but that didn’t translate to winning, with the team below .500 as late as February, two months after they fired Tom Thibodeau – despite Jalen Brunson having made clear he supported Thibs and wanted to be coached by him, despite the team having given Thibs a three-year extension only five months prior. Soon thereafter, the Knicks traded an unhappy Brunson to a team with oodles of young talent, yet didn’t acquire any.
Imagine it was obvious Leon Rose hadn’t wanted Thibs fired and was pissed after it happened, but James Dolan wanted it, so that was that. Stories circulate about one of Dolan’s kids becoming a more influential voice in their father’s ear; they’re even named general manager of the Westchester Knicks, where they date one of their players and eventually resign after another player is arrested for murdering a woman. Can you even imagine? Literal nightmare – but also the dark and twisted reality of the team the Knicks take on tonight, one that’s also a top-three seed – for the Play-In.
The Kings seem to have righted the ship after 10 weeks of Doug Christie, so far successfully navigating the De’Aaron Fox trade and its aftershocks, though it remains to be seen how much ground they end up making up. The sixth seed and the playoff spot it ensures is still tantalizingly close, with Golden State just two up in the loss column and Sacramento facing them after the Knicks. But other than the Cavaliers (winners of 14 straight), no one’s has been hotter than the Warriors since acquiring Jimmy Butler.
Nor are they the Kings’ only competition. Last night the Clippers beat them in overtime at the buzzer, creating a little more space between eighth and ninth. Also victorious anoche: the Timberwolves, now winners of five straight, all five coming after the return of a certain ex-Knick lefty power forward who last night put up 10 assists and no turnovers. Minnesota is 10-0 in the last 10 games Julius Randle’s played.
But stability is not exactly a watchword in Sacramento, one reason Fox refused to sign an extension for many months before finally giving up on the franchise. Word is Damontas Sabonis wants to meet with Ranadivé after the season ends seeking “clarity” over the team’s direction. Zach LaVine, terrific since acquired in the Fox trade, is under contract next season but holds a $49 million player option for 2026-27. He’ll be 31 that summer, possibly in line to opt out for less annual salary but a larger total package; if the Kings stagnate or slip-up next season, LaVine’s status will become a talking point, and not in the fun way.
Behind it all, the madness to the method, is Ranadivé. For nine years the Kings floundered under him, until Brown’s arrival marked a turnaround. They were a win away from knocking off the defending champion Warriors and advancing to the second round; a year later they gained a measure of revenge on Golden State in the Play-In, then fell to New Orleans with the eighth seed on the line. Two years ago Brown was the first unanimous Coach of the Year winner in league history, and Fox an All-NBA and All-Star selection. Now both are gone, while Ranadivé and his sense of sense remains. Cold comfort for Kings fans.
For Knick fans, a reminder there are bigger problems in life than ankle sprains, giving up too many threes or struggling with the Celtics – or giving up too many threes to the Celtics.
“I’m not like a regular billionaire; I’m a cool billionaire”
Last summer, not long before Kamala Harris decided the best way to win over voters opposed to their government arming and funding the genocide of Palestinians was to promise them the world’s “most lethal fighting force,” the Dallas Mavericks were, if not on top of the world, high enough up to look down on much of it. And if there’s one thing that organization loves, it’s looking down on people. Put a pin on that thought. We’ll come back to it.
Behind Luka Dončić, Kyrie Irving and a reimagined and really good frontcourt, the Mavs reached the Finals for the first time in a long time. The last time they were there, they won and then immediately set about destroying their team before it even had a chance to repeat. Mark Cuban was too rich and too smart not to re-invent the wheel, even with his team rolling along just fine. Result: the team sunk into stinking for years, until Luka came along. No way they make that mistake twice – not with Cuban having sold the team to a Trump-loving Zionist who put it in the hands of her son-in-law, the literal face of nepotism.
You know what happened next. Dončić was not only traded to the Lakers, but at a discount, too: because he ceased to be eligible for the supermax extension once the Mavs moved him, the Lakers will be able to re-sign him for a lot less than if Luka had been a sign-and-trade move. Patrick Dumont, Dallas’ public-facing owner, said the trade was made because of concerns Dončić’s body wouldn’t hold up. Dončić played in 94 of the team’s 104 total games a year ago, regular-season and playoffs. He averaged 29/10/8 over a postseason where he led the league in minutes. Dumont said he had to go because he didn’t have the obvious commitment to conditioning that Shaquille O’Neal had. He wasn’t joking.
The Mavs traded Fat Undependable Luka for Anthony Davis, a man who’s missed double-digit games in nine of his 13 seasons and is literally nicknamed “Street Clothes.” Davis played 30 minutes in his Mavs debut, hurt himself and hasn’t returned since. After losing AD, Dallas decided the best recourse was to play Kyrie Irving about 40 minutes a night, the same Irving who’s in his 14th season and has missed 10+ games 13 times. He’s since torn his ACL and is lost for the rest of the season and a good chunk of next year. The Mavericks are so very smart indeed!
And amidst all this, America’s most desperate-to-be-liked billionaire keeps wanting to have his cake and eat it too. When Cuban owned the Mavericks he loved to play the everyman-who-just-happens-to-be-literally-insanely-wealthy schtick. He wasn’t just another rich butthole in a suit; he was a rich butthole in business casual who was more a fan than an owner, someone who understood that sports teams aren’t a private portfolio asset but a community trust. He profited off them like crazy, sure, but at least you could trust that this wasn’t Howard Schultz in Seattle or the Maloof doofuses in Sacramento. If Mavs fans couldn’t trust Cuban to always build a winner, they could trust him to honor the bond between club and community.
Until the man who already had too much realized he could have even more too much by selling the team. Since the Luka trade, Cuban seems stuck in a kind of purgatory: without the power he had as an owner but unable to fake the fact that he’s not a regular joe. He cursed out fans after they started a “Fire Nico!” chant (directed at Mavs’ general manager Nico Harrison, who’s Miriam Adelson and Dumont’s human shield), a very billionaire move – can’t have the paying customers expressing themselves beyond cheering and spending money. Once it emerged one fan who’d been dragged out of the arena by security re-injured a leg he’d recently had surgery on, Cuban popped up with free tickets for the man to attend a game. Awww! What a sweetie!
Now Cuban is getting it on the record that he didn’t like the trade, that the Mavs should’ve gotten back more. You’ll note he waited until after Davis and Irving were lost before saying this; if those two were healthy and the Mavs weren’t collapsing like they are now, Cuban wouldn’t have an opinion to sell. Even now, when asked if he would have traded Luka, he answered, “I’m not going there. It doesn’t matter.” Yes, Mark. You’re no longer the owner. You gave up that authority so you could go from some billions to more billions. What you think doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t be selective about it. Just shut up and go watch your interest compound.
Deee-troit basketball
The Cleveland Cavaliers are on pace to win 69 games a year after winning 48. They rank first in offensive rating, sixth in defensive rating and second in net rating. In addition to their current 14-game winning streak, they’ve also had 12- and 15-game winning stretches. If you remove those three streaks, they’d still have a winning record. This year’s Coach of the Year has to be the Cavs’ head coach – by which I mean their coach last year.
Kenny Atkinson inherited a sleeping giant and woke it up, and many years that’s enough to win one of the most pointless awards in the game today. Trust me when I say I know from pointless rewards: when I wrote for SB Nation they’d designate certain articles “Best of SB Nation,” presumably as some kind of honor, so instead of a Knicks piece running only on our Knicks site they’d publish it on their main NBA page, opening it up to a wider audience. What did I care? They didn’t pay me any extra for writing a “Best of” and I didn’t see any revenue sharing from however many extra views they got running it for that wider audience.
Coach of the Year maybe used to mean something, but not in a late-capitalist hellscape where everything and everyone is grist for the mill. Of the last eight COY winners, half are currently out of the league completely, while only two – last year’s recipient, Mark Daigneault, plus our own beloved Thibs – are still with the teams they won with. Kenny Atkinson could very easily win it this year, and just as easily be out of work by 2027.
Having dinged the award, I want to be clear that former Cavs coach J.B. Bickerstaff’s work in Detroit has been sterling. The Pistons, the league’s laughingstock for half a decade, are on pace to more than triple their win total from last year. And yes, that’s a testament to just how putrid they were a year ago, but that testament gets packaged and shipped to Monty Williams. Under Bickerstaff, Detroit entered last night’s game in Portland 14th in net rating; a year ago they were 28th.
And it’s not like they added the prohibitive Rookie of the Year or some can’t-miss free agent. The Pistons’ first-round pick last summer, Ron Holland, is a non-starter, literally (just one start in 65 games), and ranks seventh on the team in minutes. Ausar Thompson and Jaden Ivey, two of their key young players, are ninth and 10th in playing time, having already missed a combined 57 games due to a blood clot for Thompson and broken fibula for Ivey. Thompson is now back, and there’s hope the team’s initially unlikely but increasingly cemented return to the playoffs has raised hopes Ivey may be able to return by then.
Detroit’s big offseason signings were Malik Beasley and Tobias Harris; they added Tim Hardaway Jr. in a deal with Dallas that saw the Pistons also net three second-round picks, all so the Mavs could add Quentin Grimes and soon thereafter trade him for Caleb Martin. That trio of imports is giving them 40 points a game while providing Cade Cunningham and Jalen Duren their first exposure to professional, NBA-quality teammates, structure and flow. Fun fact: Grimes is 24 and making $4 million. Martin is 29 and making $9-10 million this year, the year after that, the year after that and the year after that, if he picks up his player option for 2027-28. The Mavs are so very, very smart.
I almost never think coaches deserve to be fired. I didn’t think Bickerstaff deserved it last year, though Atkinson’s success this year would suggest the Cavs weren’t wrong in hiring him. Sometimes when two people break-up, nobody’s wrong. Cleveland is undoubtedly elated with where they stand today. Detroit is, too. And given how far the Pistons have been from elation or standing for so long, I think Bickerstaff deserves to win Coach of the Year. Or, given how little that seems to matter these days, maybe it’s better to hope he doesn’t win it. What a world, what a world.
