Hope is a wonderful thing. How much of it should each of the 30 NBA fan bases have that their team might actually win a ring in the foreseeable future?
“Blow it up.”
Pick a fairly knowledgeable NBA fan. Any fan. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. Then ask that fan to pick the most logical path for their team to take if they actually want to contend for a championship – not a playoff birth or a Conference Finals appearance, but a ring – anytime soon.
Odds are you’re going to get the above response.
Blowing it up, of course, is not actually a plan. It is a reactionary response to the monolith currently towering over not only the Bay Area but the entire NBA landscape.
Such is life in the L in 2017. Teams are left to wonder which one of two unpalatable paths is the easiest to stomach: try to win now, and fail admirably – falling with style, if you will – or operate with a finish line in the more distant future, after the juggernaut in Golden State has finally run its course.
Some teams don’t have a decision at all because you don’t just blow up 55-ish win teams in the NBA, regardless of whether the GM secretly thinks it doesn’t have a prayer. As Zach Lowe noted in his excellent post-Finals look at the league, teams like the Rockets, Spurs, Celtics and Heat have no intention of packing it in.
But does such an approach make it more likely that those teams will contend sooner?
Other teams, like the Knicks – who have fully admitted they don’t plan to do much winning next year – will happily ride out the next season or two while their young talent develops.
Most teams are somewhere in between, unable to throw in the towel on competitive basketball for one reason or another. Perhaps their market – Memphis and Indiana, for example – won’t allow it. Maybe they have a superstar on the roster already – Washington falls into this category – who would be unthinkable to trade. Or maybe they’ve dealt away future draft assets – the Clippers and Memphis again – which makes tanking untenable.
This brings us to the first annual NBA Hope index, a ranking of every team’s chances to realistically compete for a championship.
These AREN’T Power Rankings, as there are some damn good teams at the bottom of this list, and some crappy ones near the top. This is purely an ordering of every franchise based on how close they are to actually winning it all. The ones at the bottom face the toughest road off of what the Ringer’s Chris Ryan calls the treadmill of mediocrity.
There was no exact formula used to compose the rankings, because some things can’t be quantified. For example, what is the value of having Danny Ainge or RC Buford running your team versus the negative value of having James Dolan or Vivek Ranadive owning it? Many teams have great assets, but some teams have a history of maximizing the value of the cards they’re dealt while others can lose a hand after they’re given a pair of aces.
The rankings are subjective, but generally I looked at five categories: Present Roster, Future Assets, Coaching, Management, and Other (Jimmy and Vivek, this is where you live). The rankings are in reverse order, so the 30th team has the hardest conceivable path in front of them, with each team after them facing a slightly more realistic path to the ultimate prize.
Group 1: If Only It Were As Simple As Tanking
These teams that wish they could simply hit the reset button, but things aren’t quite that simple for one reason or another.