I can't tell you definitively who will be winning the championship this year, but I can tell you one team that won't be.
Yes, I'm the one who usually cautions you about sample size, and yes, I'm writing off the defending champions after two games.
Before I pile on further, let's backtrack for a second. In general, early-season results are tricky because everybody wants to make grand proclamations from one-game samples, even though that's usually a terrible idea.
Take the Los Angeles Lakers, for instance. They lost two close games, both coming without star center Andrew Bynum, and are 0-2. In the big picture, all this means is that they're 0-2. Losing by one at home to the Chicago Bulls and by nine on the road to the Sacramento Kings isn't a big enough departure from our expectations to meaningfully adjust them. (Although it would be nice if they could rebound a missed free throw.)
But there's an exception to the rule. At this time of year, people sometimes ask me whether there's anything I look for to draw conclusions from early-season games. Actually, there is because it can help us draw conclusions very quickly, from a much smaller sample than normally required:
Home-court blowouts
In particular, home teams that are at full strength (or reasonably close to it) yet are still run off the floor.
There's a reason for this: Good teams are virtually never blown out at home, and, conversely, bad teams virtually never win blowouts on the road. So we have fairly strong information, already, that the Miami Heat and Denver Nuggets are teams with which to be reckoned.
As for the Dallas Mavericks, we can make an even stronger statement: Championship-caliber teams virtually never lose at home like this even once. They sure as heck never do it twice in a row.
Want to find an eventual champion who lost a home game by 22 points? You'll have to go back awhile.
Last year, for instance, Dallas' worst home loss was by 11 even though the Mavs played several games without Dirk Nowitzki. Before them, the Lakers won two championships without ever losing by more than 19 even though they played long stretches of both seasons without Bynum. In a two-year period, in fact, the Lakers had only two losses at home by 12 or more points. Dallas needed just 36 hours to match that total.
Even the 2010 Boston Celtics, who staggered and limped through the regular season before finding their mojo in April and nearly storming to the title, didn't lose a regular-season home game by 22 points. The 2007 Cavs were one of the worst teams ever to make a Finals; yet their worst home loss was by 16.
The last conference champion to lose so badly at home was the 2007 San Antonio Spurs & who rested their starters on the final day of the regular season and lost by 23 to Denver. Miami did a similar thing in 2006. But the last time an eventual conference champ lost a game by this much with its starters playing came in January 2005, when the Memphis Grizzlies won at the Detroit Pistons by 22. The last time it happened to an eventual champion was in December 2002, when the Kings crushed the Spurs by 24.
Big picture, we're talking about an extremely low-frequency event -- it hasn't happened in more than 500 home games. Dallas is 1-for-2, and would be 2-for-2 were it not for a heroic burst of cosmetic scoring to end the Miami game.
The Mavs' two defeats were by a combined 33 points, and they required strong garbage-time surges just to make things look that good. The composite first-half score of the two games was 121-83. Yuck.
Here's the scary part: The Mavs are completely healthy right now. They just aren't a championship-caliber team.
The reasons are obvious, and Tyson Chandler is only part of it. I go back to the similarities between the 2011 Mavs team and the 2006 Heat. Miami had several veterans on their last legs in 2006, players who fell off sharply the next season; it appears a few Mavs have suffered similar declines in mobility.
Sure, the 30-something perimeter players on Dallas don't have a rim protector to bail them out, but, even if they did, I'm not sure what Chandler could do against this sustained assault of blow-bys on the perimeter. Shawn Marion is getting beat on straight-line drives as if he's not even there. Ty Lawson was sizing up Jason Kidd not for whether to drive or shoot but for whether to blow by him to the right or to the left. Vince Carter, Jason Terry and Lamar Odom put up similarly futile resistance when asked to guard the perimeter. Many teams struggle to stop Lawson's penetration, but when Al Harrington and Danilo Gallinari get to the cup at will? You've got problems.
Combined with horrifying transition defense and an inability to drive or create at the offensive end, it's been ugly. Dallas rather suddenly has become one of the league's least athletic teams, and again the similarities to the '07 Heat team are jarring.
That Miami team in 2007 lost its opener by 42 points and lost three of its first six home games by 20 or more; eventually, the Heat bailed enough water from their sinking ship to limp into the playoffs before the Bulls put them out of their misery in four games in the first round.
I expect similar things from the Mavs, which at this point might make me an optimist: a limp into the playoffs, some brave "you can't count out the champs" talk and a meek first-round exit. Although Dallas has a shorter season remaining, the Mavs also won't be facing the Heat and Nuggets every night (side note: still plenty of room on the Denver bandwagon, folks. Any time you want to hop on, just let me know.)
So, yes, it's only two games and we still have plenty of unanswered questions about the Mavs: Will they recover enough to make the playoffs? Will they start dealing their vets? How strong are Denver and Miami? Has a team ever dropped from first to 30th in Marc Stein's Power Rankings in one week?
But a repeat championship? That's one thing we can already safely rule out. Healthy, championship-caliber teams don't get annihilated at home in consecutive games like this. Ever.
Über einen so verdienten Spieler in der NBA, über den Teamkameraden und Fans der Lakers (siehe Lakers-Thread) fast nur gutes sagen solch eine Aussage zu treffen halte ich nach 5!!!!!! Spielen schon für sehr frech. Wenn er Mitte Februar immer noch so spielt bin ich bei Dir, aber doch nicht nach 1 Woche.
