When the Cleveland Cavaliers drafted current Rookie of the Year favorite Evan Mobley third overall last July, it marked the franchise’s highest selection since the 2014 NBA Draft. That year, the Cavs traded top overall pick Andrew Wiggins to the Minnesota Timberwolves in exchange for Kevin Love as Cleveland built a Finals mainstay around the […]
The worst type of basketball team to be, other than an abjectly horrible, last-in-the-league-type club, is probably an aimless one. And for the first couple months of this season — indeed, for the last few years — that is exactly what the Boston Celtics were. Built around the one-two punch of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen […]
For much of NBA history, building an elite defensive team came down to simply employing one of the league’s handful of generational defensive bigs. Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics regularly lapped the field defensively. David Robinson instantly made San Antonio a top-three defense during his rookie season in 1989-90; the Spurs wouldn’t dip below the top […]
When the Chicago Bulls acquired two-time All-Star Nikola Vučević midway through the 2020-21 season, they saw him as a cornerstone of yet another franchise remodeling during yet another playoff drought. They swapped Wendell Carter Jr., Otto Porter Jr. and two first-round picks for the steady production of Vučević, who joined Chicago amid the highest-scoring season […]
From the outside looking in, many of the Chicago Bulls’ recent personnel decisions have seemed to prioritize the offensive side of the ball at the cost of the defense. At the start of last season, the team’s star was unquestionably Zach LaVine, who had already established himself as a top-15 scorer. Throughout 2020-21, the Bulls […]