Around the Arc: Playoffs Without LeBron, Playoff Race, Giannis & Paul

4 min readJan 25, 2023

Hi, and welcome to your weekly dose of basketball, Around the Arc. Each week, I’ll be going through some of the things that I’ve found interesting — this simply is me rambling my thoughts in a free, random way.

These topics will vary from thoughts during games, tweets I’ve seen, articles I’ve read, videos I’ve watched — literally anything. This will be split into the main topics, film breakdown section, and the Around the League section.

The Playoffs Without LeBron

Writing this heading felt weird. It doesn’t happen often where James isn’t one of the better teams in the league.

Injuries played a big part — James played only 56 games and Anthony Davis played 38! But this team has been pretty bad even when both were on the court.

Per Cleaning the Glass(CTG), with both on, the Lakers are minus 2.5 (39th) percentile. We should have known that this team probably wasn’t going to be anything special.

The signs were all there — they traded for Westbrook, let go of multiple key guys, plus defenders, and replaced them with old, big all-negatives on defense.

I actually thought they’d be significantly better than this, especially in the regular season. My thought process was we saw what Westbrook did in Washington and now you pair him with Davis.

The issue with the Lakers — and to be honest, with most of James’ teams — last year was the team sucking when James went to the bench.

Well, now you add one of the best floor raisers to take care of that problem.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and this is where we’re at. There is a high chance that the Lakers will miss the playoffs. They’re currently the 11th seed and one game behind the San Antonio Spurs.

And this sucks a lot. Not having LeBron James in the playoffs feels strange, especially with the season he’s having.

But this also raises a lot of questions regarding the Lakers. What happens if they don’t make the playoffs or manage to get in only to get swept in the first round? What can you even do with the way this roster is constructed?

Will James even want to stay or could he demand a trade?

Regardless of the outcome, the off-season for the Lakers will be fun and interesting.

Playoff Talk

How have we ever been around five games away from finishing the regular season and still have nothing certain?

Eastern Conference

1st and 4th seed are separated by 2.5 games
2nd and 3rd are still all for grabs
5th and 6th can go either way
The play-in can absolutely go any possible way

Western Conference

1st and 2nd seed are the only locks
3rd and 4th are 1 game behind
4th and 5th are tied
10th and 11th seed battle for the last play-in spot

There are still so many different scenarios that can happen and it’s making what matchups we’ll get in the playoffs difficult to predict.

I don’t even know where to start when making my playoff predictions, as every series is match-up dependent and no match-up is certain yet.

With all that said, this just makes the next couple of games more fun and it will make these playoffs a lot more fun too.

Can you imagine each round being a must-watch series?

Film Breakdown

In this section, I go through some of the plays from the breakdown threads I did that week. This could be a detailed breakdown of an individual play or a trend I saw during a game.

Giannis is Unstoppable

When watching the Milwaukee Bucks game, seeing Giannis Antetokounmpo take these mid-range shots with no hesitation is great to see. I had no clue he’s been having that good of a season from the mid-range. If he continues to be that confident and will be able to make the defenses pay, then he only makes himself even more dangerous.

But it’s not just his shooting that makes him unstoppable.

I’ve been impressed with all kinds of passes he’s been able to make, especially in transition. You know he’s going to attack the rim, so what do you have to do? Collapse the defense and make a wall. But you do that and he just whips a pass faster than you can realise. And if the Bucks continue to shoot the way they are, you’ll have to pick your poison.

Chris Paul is a Wizard

You play drop against him and he will just kill you from the mid-range. He’s patient enough to see what the defense will give him and either punish you with his passing or will get to his spots. Oh, and if he does, he shoots 52% on 4.6 mid-range attempts.

If he doesn’t take the shot, you can bet your ass he will make the right pass. I was amazed by some of the reads he’s been able to make

Originally published at https://www.simplyballin.com.