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Hollinger: The Solution to the Historically Bad, Bottom-Heavy State of NBA Standings – Blazer's Edge
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The Athletic’s John Hollinger presents a fascinating idea to solve the NBA’s plague of late-season awful teams.
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The bottom teams in the NBA have been bad this season, like historically bad, and it’s only gotten worse since the NBA All-Star Break.
How bad is “historically bad” you may ask? In a recent piece (subscription required), The Athletic’s John Hollinger, who’s been hot on this beat of terrible teams all year, provided a comprehensive breakdown of the situation, with your Portland Trail Blazers serving as a poster child for this phenomenon of the putrid.
Hollinger noted that the bottom eight teams in the league — the Blazers, Jazz, Raptors, Hornets, Pistons, Wizards, Spurs and Grizzlies — were a combined 41-130 as of April 4, with a whopping 84 losses by double digits and 33 by at least 20 points.
The Blazers during that span went 5-17, but it gets worse for everybody when they aren’t playing each other, Hollinger said. The bottom eight teams were a combined 24-114 against the top 22 teams in the NBA through April 4. The Blazers, playing their part, were 1-16 against the Top 22.
While Hollinger said the NBA largely solved the tanking problem for most of the season with the play-in, he said the league hasn’t solved the problem of the worst teams in the league completely dropping off come March and April. He highlighted the quality of lineups these bottom teams roll out in spring creates a tremendous talent disparity and sullies the NBA product, creating a perception problem.
For example, Portland and Charlotte played on Wednesday with exactly four of the 10 starters anything close to NBA rotation players the first half of the season. The second quarter featured an extended stretch where one of the 10 players on the court, Grant Williams, was what you’d generally consider a real top-eight guy on an NBA roster.
… Anyway, lineups like those the Blazers and Hornets put out have been a feature of the league’s bottom-feeders in this stretch run … and really, in nearly every season’s. It’s worse this year, but that may be a harbinger of what’s to come. The ongoing trend of run-of-the-mill bad teams veering off into cringey awfulness after the trade deadline could seemingly worsen given the current environment of shorter contracts and the more all-in approach of the league’s top contenders.
So, Hollinger presented two possible solutions to help remedy this issue, one he labeled “minor” and one that is “bolder.”
For the minor solution, he suggested eliminating the buyout market, so that contenders would actually be motivated to give up something of value to acquire more talent for the stretch run, rather than just waiting for players to be bought out.
For the bolder solution, he presented a fascinating idea called “Delete Eight,” similar to when the worst NBA teams weren’t invited to the Bubble during the 2019-20 season.
I’m not suggesting these eight teams be shut down, but I do wonder if there’s a way to relegate them to their own little playpen where they only face each other the final month of the season and don’t have to infect the nightly schedule with their awfulness.
It’s an out-there idea from Hollinger, one that I don’t think could work logistically (and most importantly, monetarily), but it’s certainly food for thought about an NBA issue that appears to be only gaining momentum. I don’t think the NBA would ever go the full relegation route that international soccer leagues deploy, in which bottom teams are demoted to a lower division. However, this late-season relegation, or something similar to it, would be the closest I could see the NBA getting to that strategy.
What do you think about the “Delete Eight” method and the state of the bottom eight teams of the league in general? Let us know, let us know!
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