A new contender rises in the West

Who’s on the championship bus?

BY DAVID THORPE

Forget the loss to Luka, LeBron, and the Lakers—Joker will have the last laugh. AARON ONTIVEROZ/THE DENVER POST

I can’t believe how much has changed since we debuted this season’s TrueHoop Championship Bus back in December:

• The Mavericks had a first-class seat … then they traded Luka Dončić and got kicked off the bus, probably for a long while.

• The Nuggets were hanging on by a Nikola Jokić … now their knees are pressing into the back of the front seat.

• The Knicks have tumbled off the trailer … and out of sight.

• The Lakers had no business on the bus … then they acquired Luka.

• The Celtics, still my heavy favorite to win this year’s chip, are the only constant.

Now, to my eyes, there are two top contenders—neither of which is atop the standings. The Cavs and the Thunder, the top seeds in their respective conferences, worry me a little for reasons we’ll discuss. Will a Jimmy Butler injection be the boost the Warriors needed? The Luka-LeBron combo makes the Lakers intriguing, but are they convincing? Do the Grizzlies have enough to upend the West? Can the red-hot Nugs make a run?

If a team can make it to the Finals, anything’s possible. That said, I find myself at odds with ESPN’s current Basketball Power Index, which evaluates each team’s chances of reaching and/or winning this year’s title and has the Thunder as clear favorites with the Cavs a close second. Our revised TrueHoop Championship Bus manifest features teams the present index either overrates or overlooks.

The team to beat

Boston Celtics

ESPN BPI: 27.4 percent chance to reach Finals / 12 percent chance to win Finals

After a 16-3 start to the season, the Celtics took a step back in December, winning just eight of their next 14 games. As their dribble-ISO, 3-point-heavy offense started to look stagnant, I broke down head coach Joe Mazzulla’s approach: To me, it was pure guile, a rope-a-dope. Mazzulla was deliberately masking the Celtics’ best offensive actions—likely to give them time to fine-tune their offense which has been excellent, but could be much better.

Weaponizing Jrue Holiday on that end will be key, as Jaylen Brown told The Athletic: “If we want to go where we want to go, we need Jrue to be a dog. We need Jrue to be more aggressive. I need Jrue to be more aggressive because when he’s in that mode — that attack mode — I think we’re better than when he’s kind of sitting back, taking a back seat.” It looks to me like they’ve been playing with that concept like a killer whale plays with a seal. Seventeen times this season, Holiday has taken 10-or-more shots, and, despite some funky lineups and missing Celtics, Boston has won 13 of those—a slightly better winning rate than their season as a whole. Holiday has also had 10 games attempting seven-or-more 3s; the Celtics have won nine of them. It’s a smart experiment at the perfect time. Over his career as one of the NBA’s best defenders, Holiday has often forgotten he can/should be scoring, so getting him ramped up now will have him weaponized for the postseason.

My people on the ground in Boston feel like everything’s humming. Everyone’s really well connected, and the Celtics are an adult group. Mazzulla has done an excellent job of quashing early panic and staying the course.

I understand why popular sports media is favoring the Thunder and Cavaliers—those teams are running away with the regular season. But the Celtics know who they are, and they have the scars. They all remember blowing a 2-1 series against the Warriors in the 2021-2022 Finals. The Celtics swept a scorching Pacers team after being down in three of the four games. They executed a gentleman's sweep over Luka’s Mavericks to claim the chip last year. They know the path because they’ve walked the path.

That makes the Celtics the team to beat.