LeBron attacks his own team, and the grim fascination of the 76ers

It’s week four in the NBA! While it’s too early to stop saying “it’s too early,” there’s been enough time that we can start actually identifying trends. It helps that this season has been less topsy-turvy at this stage than it normally is. The good teams have been consistently good and the losing teams have been consistently losing. But we’ll get to the 76ers later, we begin in Cleveland.

Are the Cleveland Cavaliers really ‘fragile’?

Having spent most of his career in the media crucible, LeBron James has a better sense than most NBA players about which offhand comments will spark headlines. That’s why it feels like James was intentionally starting a firestorm when he said his team was “very fragile right now” after the Cleveland Cavaliers dropped their fourth straight game on Saturday night with a loss to the Eastern Conference leading Toronto Raptors.

If James was publicly calling out his team – which has struggled to even reach .500 after a much-hyped offseason – with a purpose in mind then it’s a page right out of the Phil Jackson playbook. There are plenty of coaches who have used the media to issue necessary wake-up calls to their players during disappointing stretches.

The timing certainly would suggest this is the case. The ideal moment to make these kind of public proclamations is right before a game against a beatable opponent. In this case, James’s comments came before a Monday night game against a very young Orlando Magic team.

As it so happens, the Cavaliers improved their record to 6-7 on Monday, ending the losing skid with a 106-74 victory over the Magic. If they build upon this and go on one of the long winning streaks a team this talented is capable of , the media will remember James’s comments as a turning point of Cleveland’s season.This is probably an incredibly ridiculous way of explaining how seasons work in sports, but it’s what we do regardless.

Whatever the motivation was behind James’s comments, they still didn’t help the perception that there’s something off about the Cavs in comparison with his previous Miami Heat teams. When James called the Cavaliers “fragile” it sounded as if he wasn’t including himself in that description. While James alone can’t be be blamed for Cleveland’s losing record, the fact that he has had a rough start to the season certainly hasn’t helped.

That’s the problem with attempting to pull a managerial strategy when you’re not technically the manager: you can’t call out your team when you’re the most important part of it. Perhaps James should let David Blatt, theoretically the actual head coach of Cleveland, handle these types of motivational gambits in the future.

The Houston Rockets: the new villains?

Here’s one of the underrated results of the breakup of the Heat’s Big Three, LeBron’s struggles in Cleveland, the irrelevance of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics and the inability for the New York area to field a basketball team functional enough to truly hate: there are no villains this season in the NBA.

Enter the Houston Rockets, currently 11-3 in the Western Conference. They are one of the best teams in the league, to the chagrin of a growing number of basketball fans who have no use for them.

A big reason for the Houston hate is that they have Dwight Howard at center. Howard is disliked for his endless off-the-court drama, disrespected by his peers and, reportedly, goes to the Adrian Peterson School of Child Discipline. His partner is James Harden, a ball-hogging offensive-minded player who often doesn’t even pretend to make an effort on defense. They are one of the more unlikable pairings in the NBA.

The problem with the Rockets-as-villains narrative is that villains should be more fun to watch. See, the Rockets play a form of basketball that is designed to be brutally efficient rather than actually enjoyable. Dubbed by some as “Moreyball,” in honor of analytically-minded GM Daryl Morey, the system is designed to eliminate the least efficient ways to score.

This means the Rockets take a lot of three-pointers and, in what amounts to a massive aesthetic crime, rack up an endless barrage of free throw attempts. As Grantland’s Jason Concepcion notes in an article comparing the Houston Rockets to the win-ugly “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons teams: the strategy works but it’s as “if card counting were a spectator sport.”

As obnoxious as Howard and Harden can be, the way the Rockets play they don’t play like villains. They don’t inspire anger as much as annoyance.

Anthony Davis is ridiculous

National TV audiences rejoice, the higher-ups have granted you the chance to witness the ‘Brow at least one more time this season. Originally, the New Orleans Pelicans were only scheduled to make one appearance on ESPN and another on TNT.

That changed last week when ESPN made a decision to switch out a game between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs for a game between the Dallas Mavericks and the Pelicans. No, the reason behind that was not a growing national demand for more Austin Rivers.

ESPN’s Doug White says the decision was entirely motivated by the ascendency of power forward Anthony Davis, who is developing into one of of the game’s premiere players at an almost scary speed:

We’ve been keeping an eye on him. His performance for USA basketball over the summer in the Fiba World Cup solidified and crystallized in our minds; he really emerged as a leader this summer. We had some inkling that his star was on the rise. You could obviously see the maturity in him in terms of his game and also his leadership skills. That’s translated on the court and into the performance of his team.

Okay, so Davis is good enough that he’s able to get ESPN programmers to admit that they were wrong, that’s something right? What do the numbers say though? Well, let’s have Yahoo! Sport’s Ben Rohrbach break it down:

The Pelicans star’s 26.3 points, 11.4 rebounds, 3.5 blocks and 2.2 steals per game — numbers that have not been replicated over a full season in Basketball Reference’s database — are wreaking havoc on opposing game plans. A quick look at the league leaders reveals Davis tops the NBA in player efficiency rating and blocks in addition to ranking second in scoring, third in steals and fifth in rebounds.

Okay, so, if the Kentucky product keeps this up he’ll be literally unlike any player the league has ever seen. Also impressive. Still, lots of players put up numbers that don’t really translate to real world dominance and...

Wait, what did he do against the Utah Jazz on Saturday?

Oh. Well then. We here officially believe.

The Philadelphia 76ers are still dead

The Philadelphia 76ers will be big enough NBA news to be mentioned in this column as long as they keep losing or, conversely, when (if?) they eventually win a game. Whether they continue this level of ineptness or they somehow defeat another team, they’re one of the most fascinating stories in sports.

That means, they are a shoe-in to appear next week as Monday night’s 114-104 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers dropped them to 0-14 on the season. Maybe next week they will break the seal and snatch that first victory and then they will just be a basketball team again (albeit a potentially historically bad one). Right now the 76ers aren’t anything resembling a professional sports team.

The last week for the 76ers has basically been a Johnny Carson routine. How bad has it gotten? It’s gotten so bad that Papa John’s has had to change a promotion where they offered 50% off pizzas whenever the 76ers won a game, because it’s hard to lure customers via a promotion that is never valid.

It’s gotten so bad that players’ mothers are getting upset at the Philadelphia front office.

— Michael Levin (@Michael_Levin) November 20, 2014

Also, KJ McDaniels' mom has a hot take for me and you: https://t.co/You4OMKtwB pic.twitter.com/BH1h8e6JyZ

It’s gotten so bad that the 76ers are not the favorites in any game they have scheduled for the remainder of the season and it would be more surprising if they somehow were.

It’s gotten so bad that the Nate Silver-run website FiveThirtyEight was compelled to run the numbers to see whether or not college basketball’s Kentucky Wildcats could defeat the 76ers in a seven game series. The silver lining to all of this is that they determined that Philadelphia would defeat Kentucky 78% of the time. Unfortunately, the 76ers only face NBA teams for the foreseeable future.

Other things we’ve learned

• Xavier Henry has a ruptured Achilles and will be out for the entire Los Angeles Lakers season, lucky man.

• New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony is out with back spasms but he isn’t as fortunate as Henry: he will probably have to return to the Knicks sooner rather than later.

• This is what I’m talking about with the lack of villains. It’s really hard to hate the Heat when it’s former figure of fun Chris Bosh playing hero and making the game winners, like this shot against the Charlotte Hornets on Monday night.
  

• This week’s must read: The Guardian’s own Jeb Lund has a feature for Rolling Stone on the 15 Worst Owners In Sports, and yes there are some “winners” from the NBA world. Here’s a sample from his entry on the DeVos Family, owners of the Orlando Magic:

Fun fact: despite “struggling” to run a profitable franchise, DeVos’ advertising efforts outside of greater Orlando are practically nonexistent. Drive around greater Tampa Bay and ask any one of the nearly 3 million citizens currently living within two hours’ drive from the arena if they want to see a basketball game and watch them either look at you in total bafflement, explain that the USF Bulls sucked last year, or demur because they don’t have time to drive to Miami right now.