NBA power rankings, After a week in which none of the top three teams emerged unscathed, Oklahoma City has nonetheless inched into the top spot in ESPN.com's weekly NBA Power Rankings for the first time this season, thanks largely to a dominant December that offsets Sunday's home loss to Toronto. More on how this week's order was calculated can be found at Stein Line Live. You are also invited, as always, to rank the teams yourself here.
Of course we expected them to handle Toronto. Yet the fact remains that the Thunder have only lost twice since Nov. 14 and won the weekend game that mattered most by conquering San Antonio on the road. OKC's opening third of the season really couldn't have gone much better.
Clippers at home Thursday night. Heat at home Saturday night. OKC away on New Year's Eve. If any Blazermaniacs out there are peeved about being excluded from Christmas Day festivities, what's left on the schedule for the rest of 2013 will take care of the national attention they crave.
The Pacers being the Pacers, always looking to use slights as fuel, they're presumably more focused on the fact they weren't invited to participate in the Christmas Day schedule than they're talking about Danny Granger's return or Lance Stephenson's league-leading three triple-doubles.
It's not just LeBron's ridiculous shooting that we can't stop talking about. The Heat, folks, are shooting .515 as a team. The only team since Michael Jordan's retirement to shoot 50 percent or better for an entire season is the Steve Nash Suns in 2007-08 and 2008-09. That's the list.
Just to reiterate what sort of onslaught the surging Clips survived Sunday night: Kevin Love is the first player since Hakeem Olajuwon in 1996 to rumble for at least 45 points, 19 boards and 6 assists in a single game. Before that? Bob McAdoo did it twice in the 1970s for my Buffalo Braves.
If the Raps find a way to claw out a win Monday night in San Antonio, hand 'em the Atlantic Division trophy right now. Toronto is on the second half of a back-to-back. The Spurs, beaten by Indy on Dec. 7, haven't lost consecutive home games to East opposition since January ... of 2002.
Can you really win in the NBA by riding two great guards and surrounding them with young, exuberant, athletic role players whose shooting won't seem to cool off? Can you believe we've been asking this question for almost 30 games? Hornacek & Co. keep winning with that exact mix.
James Harden remains hobbled and Omer Asik is still a Rocket, so all is not well. But it's not exactly dire, either, when Houston sports the league's seventh-best nightly point differential (+4.3) and when Dwight Howard is putting up 21 and 14 in December compared to 17 and 12 previously.
There's nothing nicer we can say, no better gift we can give Hawks fans, than merely shouting out this reminder to the world that Al Horford, Kyle Korver and friends are the East's unquestioned No. 3 team this Christmas. Nothing can change it (or explain it) between now and Wednesday.
Steph Curry is in a zone. Andrew Bogut/David Lee are the first teammates since David Robinson/Dennis Rodman in '93-94 to grab at least 10 boards each in eight straight games. Andre Iguodala's back, too. So it's worrisome, amid all that, to hear Mark Jackson questioning his team's desire.
You know the unwritten rules of MVP voting by now: Players from sub-.500 teams can't be candidates. You can also understand, if you've watched K-Love lately, that you hate yourself after writing such a sentence. Especially after rechecking his sick lines against the Blazers and Clips.
A home loss to Utah on Friday the 13th was the first hint that Denver's top-10 status was tenuous. Then came last week's spike in degree of schedule difficulty, Denver's big blown lead at home to Phoenix and Kenneth Faried's ankle injury to provide the decisive downward nudge.
The Raps are 5-2 since trading Rudy Gay and easily could have been 6-1 if they hadn't lost their eighth straight OT game at home, dating all the way back to March 2009, on Kemba Walker's buzzer-beater. The rest of the story behind Toronto's jump this week is here on Stein Line Live.
Not much has gone right since that signature win at Portland on Dec. 7. Samuel Dalembert is suddenly losing minutes to both DeJuan Blair and Brandan Wright, while the Mavs' porous D, after failing to hold nice leads at Atlanta and Golden State, just let a fat cushion slip at home to Toronto.
The Wiz are the only team in the East not named Indy or Miami with a positive +/- in the standings. So what if it's only a +1 when you subtract Washington's home losses from its total of road wins? Sporting a 6-8 road record has to feel pretty fantastic after living through last season's 7-34.
The Pistons just became the first team since Orlando more than a decade ago (2001) to climb out of a 20-point hole in one game (at Boston) and then blow a 20-point lead in the next (home to Charlotte). Yet this continues to look like a playoff team, given the current state of the Least.
The good news: Anthony Davis missed only seven games with a fractured hand after the Pels feared he'd miss up to six weeks. The bad news: New Orleans has dropped to 0-11 against teams at .500 or better and will have to start beating some of those teams if it wants to sniff the playoffs.
You know the Lakers would never go for it -- not with Kobe back in six weeks and not with what they charge for tickets -- but fading into the lottery really is the wisest thing they could do for the future. Their only two previous lottery trips begat two All-Stars: Eddie Jones and Andrew Bynum.
It's the warmest winter in Charlotte in ages. Nothing but raves for the new coach, ditto for the new logo ... and Kemba Walker has heated up noticeably to hike his shooting percentage into the 40s at last. The Bobcats were 2-17 over the last two Decembers; this month they're a pesky 5-6.
Double-whammy Sunday for Brad Stevens. Going back to Indy to absorb a 27-point pounding from the Pacers ... that was the easy part. Hearing Rajon Rondo announce he might not be able to come back in January is the bigger blow with the Celts so eager to see those two work together.
As with Jason Kidd in Brooklyn, Memphis' injury woes come with a very modest silver lining: Dave Joerger no longer faces the same intense scrutiny that greeted him as a rookie coach. Of course, at 4-9 without him, you figure he'd learn to live with it all again to have Marc Gasol back.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that pretty much all of the Cavs' success this season has been in Cleveland: Kyrie Irving's 24.5 points per game at The Q ties him for fourth in the league among scorers at home ... but that figure dips to a mere 18.9 points per game on the road.
It's such a small triumph that it barely registers after everything Chicago has been through, but the reality is there's not much else to latch onto post-Derrick Rose these days beyond the reasonably bright start his stand-in D.J. Augustin made: 14.4 PPG and 8.0 APG over the past four games.
The knee pain plaguing Rudy Gay hasn't knocked him out of his new team's lineup. Not yet, anyway. He's still shooting 50 percent from the floor through six games with the Kings (compared to 38.8 percent in Toronto) but they've only won two of them: Houston at home and Orlando away.
One monster game, even in Orlando against Victor Oladipo, isn't going to make us reconfigure our rookie assessments just yet. Yet it must be said that Trey Burke has had a very MCW-like impact on Jazz fortunes; they're a decent 7-11 since his Nov. 20 activation. Maybe Trimester 2 will be his.
I suspect you'll find it pretty unsurprising to hear that the last player to hoist 17 3s in a game before J.R. Smith did so against Milwaukee was ... J.R. Smith in December 2009. As for Brandon Knight, who came in at 11.1 PPG, shredding the Knicks for 36? Sadly not much of a shocker, either.
Comparisons to Bill Walton and Yao Ming are unavoidable now for Brook Lopez after re-breaking his right foot in December yet again. The Nets can (and should) make the playoffs without him, but that wasn't quite the goal when Mikhail Prokhorov committed $190 million on this group.
Michael Carter-Williams returns; Philly finally wins. It was 0-7 during his latest absence until Evan Turner shook free for an OT bucket against Brooklyn for the Sixers' first buzzer-beating success since (whoa) November 2004, when a guy named Allen Iverson beat Washington at the horn.
The Magic actually won four of their first five home games. No apologies needed if you've forgotten that 4-1 start completely, because road-weary Orlando just opened a six-game homestand with demoralizing losses to Utah and Sacramento. Worst yet: Victor Oladipo is back on the bench.
The Bucks are winless against .500-or-better teams. Now for the surprise: They've only played seven. Which means "tough schedule" is not among the reasons they can cite to explain the league's worst record. O.J. Mayo, meanwhile, is also the lowest-scoring team leader: 13.9 PPG.
Of course we expected them to handle Toronto. Yet the fact remains that the Thunder have only lost twice since Nov. 14 and won the weekend game that mattered most by conquering San Antonio on the road. OKC's opening third of the season really couldn't have gone much better.
Clippers at home Thursday night. Heat at home Saturday night. OKC away on New Year's Eve. If any Blazermaniacs out there are peeved about being excluded from Christmas Day festivities, what's left on the schedule for the rest of 2013 will take care of the national attention they crave.
The Pacers being the Pacers, always looking to use slights as fuel, they're presumably more focused on the fact they weren't invited to participate in the Christmas Day schedule than they're talking about Danny Granger's return or Lance Stephenson's league-leading three triple-doubles.
It's not just LeBron's ridiculous shooting that we can't stop talking about. The Heat, folks, are shooting .515 as a team. The only team since Michael Jordan's retirement to shoot 50 percent or better for an entire season is the Steve Nash Suns in 2007-08 and 2008-09. That's the list.
Just to reiterate what sort of onslaught the surging Clips survived Sunday night: Kevin Love is the first player since Hakeem Olajuwon in 1996 to rumble for at least 45 points, 19 boards and 6 assists in a single game. Before that? Bob McAdoo did it twice in the 1970s for my Buffalo Braves.
If the Raps find a way to claw out a win Monday night in San Antonio, hand 'em the Atlantic Division trophy right now. Toronto is on the second half of a back-to-back. The Spurs, beaten by Indy on Dec. 7, haven't lost consecutive home games to East opposition since January ... of 2002.
Can you really win in the NBA by riding two great guards and surrounding them with young, exuberant, athletic role players whose shooting won't seem to cool off? Can you believe we've been asking this question for almost 30 games? Hornacek & Co. keep winning with that exact mix.
James Harden remains hobbled and Omer Asik is still a Rocket, so all is not well. But it's not exactly dire, either, when Houston sports the league's seventh-best nightly point differential (+4.3) and when Dwight Howard is putting up 21 and 14 in December compared to 17 and 12 previously.
There's nothing nicer we can say, no better gift we can give Hawks fans, than merely shouting out this reminder to the world that Al Horford, Kyle Korver and friends are the East's unquestioned No. 3 team this Christmas. Nothing can change it (or explain it) between now and Wednesday.
Steph Curry is in a zone. Andrew Bogut/David Lee are the first teammates since David Robinson/Dennis Rodman in '93-94 to grab at least 10 boards each in eight straight games. Andre Iguodala's back, too. So it's worrisome, amid all that, to hear Mark Jackson questioning his team's desire.
You know the unwritten rules of MVP voting by now: Players from sub-.500 teams can't be candidates. You can also understand, if you've watched K-Love lately, that you hate yourself after writing such a sentence. Especially after rechecking his sick lines against the Blazers and Clips.
A home loss to Utah on Friday the 13th was the first hint that Denver's top-10 status was tenuous. Then came last week's spike in degree of schedule difficulty, Denver's big blown lead at home to Phoenix and Kenneth Faried's ankle injury to provide the decisive downward nudge.
The Raps are 5-2 since trading Rudy Gay and easily could have been 6-1 if they hadn't lost their eighth straight OT game at home, dating all the way back to March 2009, on Kemba Walker's buzzer-beater. The rest of the story behind Toronto's jump this week is here on Stein Line Live.
Not much has gone right since that signature win at Portland on Dec. 7. Samuel Dalembert is suddenly losing minutes to both DeJuan Blair and Brandan Wright, while the Mavs' porous D, after failing to hold nice leads at Atlanta and Golden State, just let a fat cushion slip at home to Toronto.
The Wiz are the only team in the East not named Indy or Miami with a positive +/- in the standings. So what if it's only a +1 when you subtract Washington's home losses from its total of road wins? Sporting a 6-8 road record has to feel pretty fantastic after living through last season's 7-34.
The Pistons just became the first team since Orlando more than a decade ago (2001) to climb out of a 20-point hole in one game (at Boston) and then blow a 20-point lead in the next (home to Charlotte). Yet this continues to look like a playoff team, given the current state of the Least.
The good news: Anthony Davis missed only seven games with a fractured hand after the Pels feared he'd miss up to six weeks. The bad news: New Orleans has dropped to 0-11 against teams at .500 or better and will have to start beating some of those teams if it wants to sniff the playoffs.
You know the Lakers would never go for it -- not with Kobe back in six weeks and not with what they charge for tickets -- but fading into the lottery really is the wisest thing they could do for the future. Their only two previous lottery trips begat two All-Stars: Eddie Jones and Andrew Bynum.
It's the warmest winter in Charlotte in ages. Nothing but raves for the new coach, ditto for the new logo ... and Kemba Walker has heated up noticeably to hike his shooting percentage into the 40s at last. The Bobcats were 2-17 over the last two Decembers; this month they're a pesky 5-6.
Double-whammy Sunday for Brad Stevens. Going back to Indy to absorb a 27-point pounding from the Pacers ... that was the easy part. Hearing Rajon Rondo announce he might not be able to come back in January is the bigger blow with the Celts so eager to see those two work together.
As with Jason Kidd in Brooklyn, Memphis' injury woes come with a very modest silver lining: Dave Joerger no longer faces the same intense scrutiny that greeted him as a rookie coach. Of course, at 4-9 without him, you figure he'd learn to live with it all again to have Marc Gasol back.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that pretty much all of the Cavs' success this season has been in Cleveland: Kyrie Irving's 24.5 points per game at The Q ties him for fourth in the league among scorers at home ... but that figure dips to a mere 18.9 points per game on the road.
It's such a small triumph that it barely registers after everything Chicago has been through, but the reality is there's not much else to latch onto post-Derrick Rose these days beyond the reasonably bright start his stand-in D.J. Augustin made: 14.4 PPG and 8.0 APG over the past four games.
The knee pain plaguing Rudy Gay hasn't knocked him out of his new team's lineup. Not yet, anyway. He's still shooting 50 percent from the floor through six games with the Kings (compared to 38.8 percent in Toronto) but they've only won two of them: Houston at home and Orlando away.
One monster game, even in Orlando against Victor Oladipo, isn't going to make us reconfigure our rookie assessments just yet. Yet it must be said that Trey Burke has had a very MCW-like impact on Jazz fortunes; they're a decent 7-11 since his Nov. 20 activation. Maybe Trimester 2 will be his.
I suspect you'll find it pretty unsurprising to hear that the last player to hoist 17 3s in a game before J.R. Smith did so against Milwaukee was ... J.R. Smith in December 2009. As for Brandon Knight, who came in at 11.1 PPG, shredding the Knicks for 36? Sadly not much of a shocker, either.
Comparisons to Bill Walton and Yao Ming are unavoidable now for Brook Lopez after re-breaking his right foot in December yet again. The Nets can (and should) make the playoffs without him, but that wasn't quite the goal when Mikhail Prokhorov committed $190 million on this group.
Michael Carter-Williams returns; Philly finally wins. It was 0-7 during his latest absence until Evan Turner shook free for an OT bucket against Brooklyn for the Sixers' first buzzer-beating success since (whoa) November 2004, when a guy named Allen Iverson beat Washington at the horn.
The Magic actually won four of their first five home games. No apologies needed if you've forgotten that 4-1 start completely, because road-weary Orlando just opened a six-game homestand with demoralizing losses to Utah and Sacramento. Worst yet: Victor Oladipo is back on the bench.
The Bucks are winless against .500-or-better teams. Now for the surprise: They've only played seven. Which means "tough schedule" is not among the reasons they can cite to explain the league's worst record. O.J. Mayo, meanwhile, is also the lowest-scoring team leader: 13.9 PPG.
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