Joakim Noah’s ankle sprain is expected to keep him out of Game 5 on Tuesday. (Landov)

We’ll never know if Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau did further damage to Joakim Noah’s ankle by reinserting him late in Game 3, when it was clear the center could barely jog, let alone box out Philadelphia’s Spencer Hawes for a 50-50 rebound. Noah missed Game 4, a third consecutive loss that left the Bulls trailing the first-round series 3-1, and now K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune reports that Noah is nearly certain to sit out the do-or-die Game 5 on Tuesday.

When Noah missed significant time because of a thumb injury last season, the Bulls felt his loss more on offense than on defense. That may be the case again now, though the Bulls’ defense may suffer a bit with the plodding Carlos Boozer forced into more minutes than usual. Still, the bigger issue for Chicago in this series is that it simply cannot score enough to win. Noah is not a great offensive player, and it’s tough to untangle his individual offensive impact because he and injured point guard Derrick Rose are so closely tethered in the Bulls’ rotation when both are healthy. Rose played about 80 percent of his minutes alongside Noah, and the Bulls outscored opponents by 250 points in their 1,079 minutes together, according to NBA.com. Those minutes composed only about one-third of Chicago’s season, and in the remaining two-thirds, the team outscored its opponents by about the same number of total points — 290, to be exact.

The 19 Chicago lineups that logged at least 10 minutes this season and included neither Rose nor Noah were a total of plus-165 over 702 minutes. But a deeper look is not so encouraging. A bunch of garbage-time lineups featuring the likes of Mike James and Brian Scalabrine blitzed opponents in short stretches that artificially inflate this plus/minus total. Seven of the 10 non-Noah/Rose units in question that logged more than 20 minutes scored at a rate that would have ranked 29th or 30th in the league, and the ones that were successful spent a huge chunk of their time going up against opposing bench units. They will face starter-quality opposition now. Read More…

There were just too many games in too few nights. It was bad for fans, but especially difficult for coaches and players, who had to play and travel too often, with too little time for rest or preparation. Cramming what amounted to two or three extra games per team into each month was a money-based decision — an inevitable grab that both sides in the labor dispute agreed to, minimizing the financial impact of the lockout on each.

A regular season in which it felt like there were 10 games every night ends Thursday, with 26 teams in action and a whopping 10 games tipping at 8 p.m. ET. Remarkably, only two of the 13 games – Miami-Washington and Portland-Utah — are irrelevant in terms of both playoff and lottery implications. The Jazz are locked into the No. 8 spot in the Western Conference and a first-round matchup with the Spurs. The Heat can tie the Thunder at 47-19 with a victory against the Wizards, but Oklahoma City already owns the tiebreaker for home-court advantage in a potential NBA Finals matchup because of a better record against teams from the opposite conference.

Here’s a rundown of what remains at stake:

• The No. 7 and No 8 spots in the Eastern Conference

The Knicks and Sixers are tied at 35-30. But New York has a giant edge in the “race” for No. 7 because it owns the tiebreaker and plays the hapless Bobcats in Charlotte. Choosing between potential series against top-seeded Chicago and No. 2 Miami is like picking between Kate Hudson movies, but given Philadelphia’s 1-11 record against Miami since the Heat added LeBron James, the Sixers are going to be more than happy to rest their key players again against the Pistons and slide into the No. 8 spot.

(Remember all the way back to a week or so ago, when Wednesday’s Philadelphia-Milwaukee game looked like it might decide the No. 8 seed between the two?)

That said, Carmelo Anthony indicated after Wednesday’s victory against the Clippers that he and Tyson Chandler may sit out Thursday, raising the possibility that the Sixers’ and Knicks’ bench units will decide the first-round pairings — just as Steve Novak’s last-minute deflection was key to the win over the Clippers and may rank as one of the biggest plays of the season for Memphis (see below). Yay, late-season NBA!

Read More…

With the MVP out of the way, here are the rest of The Point Forward’s official end-of-season awards. A note: Figuring in injuries is always tricky, especially in such a compressed season, but we disqualified players who missed about half of their team’s games — a decision that affected Ricky Rubio, Jeremy Lin, Manu Ginobili and a couple of others.

Defensive Player of the Year

Tyson Chandler turned the Knicks into one of the league's top defensive teams. (Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)

1. Tyson Chandler, New York Knicks

I’ll admit a bias for big men over wing players in deciding this award. Big men are more impactful on defense in the larger picture, protecting the rim, defending the post and blowing up pick-and-rolls. You can build a competent NBA defense around a single elite big man, and if you have two good ones who communicate well together, you’re on your way to a top-five defense.

That’s not to discount wing guys such as Andre Iguodala, Tony Allen, LeBron James, Luol Deng, Paul Pierce, Shawn Marion and others — especially when they are versatile enough to defend point guards, as Marion has done nearly tip-to-buzzer in several games this season. In particular head-to-head matchups, they can be a decisive factor and/or the thing that keeps an otherwise overmatched team afloat.

But over a full season, they can’t quite match the impact of a dominant big, and none have been more dominant this season than Chandler, who almost single-handedly transformed the Knicks from a defensive laughingstock into one of the league’s very best on that end. New York has jumped from 23rd in points allowed per possession last season to fifth this season, despite playing one mostly unmotivated defender (Carmelo Anthony) and another “star” who might be the single worst defender among all NBA starters (Amar’e Stoudemire).

The Knicks’ defense has been only marginally better with Chandler on the floor, allowing 98 points per 100 possessions compared to 99.3 when he sits, but that masks his value. Both Mike D’Antoni and Mike Woodson have been absolutely terrified to play the Anthony/Stoudemire combination without Chandler around to fill the leaks; no lineup with Melo and Stoudemire but no Chandler has logged more than 15 minutes per game this season, per NBA.com, and such lineups have been disastrous in their limited floor time.

In other words, we have no evidence this Knicks team could really exist as a playoff team without Chandler defending the post, avoiding fouls, switching onto guards when required and racing around the back line to help and challenge shots. A monumental, tireless effort — and one that has included very few mistakes on a night-to-night basis. Read More…

Steve Nash and the Suns could lock up the eighth seed in the West with a win tonight. (Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images)

During the regular season we tend to focus on the matchups between elite teams, hoping to perhaps learn something about how Player X performs on the big stage, or how the Spurs deal with the Lakers’ size advantage. But those games aren’t really “big” in the macro sense. Elite teams are going to make the playoffs, generally advance pretty far and eventually have to beat another elite team four times in seven tries.

But tonight’s Suns-Jazz game, in Utah? That’s a big a regular-season game, one that will likely decide the eighth seed in the Western Conference. Let’s review the stakes and preview this bad boy.

THE SITUATION

• Utah enters at 34-30, with a one-game edge on the 33-31 Suns. If the Jazz win, they are in the playoffs. They could in theory move from No. 8 to No. 7 if they sweep their final two games (Tonight and at home against Portland on Thursday) and Denver loses its last two, but that scenario is unlikely.

Phoenix has taken the first two head-to-head games over the Jazz, the last in dramatic fashion three weeks ago in Utah, and thus owns the tiebreaker. The Suns finish Wednesday at home against a San Antonio team that clinched the Western Conference’s top seed Monday night and will likely rest its three star players. If Phoenix wins both games, it is in, regardless of what Utah does on Thursday against the Trail Blazers. Utah could lose tonight against the Suns and still get in, but only if the Spurs beat Phoenix on Wednesday and Utah follows with a (very likely) win over Portland on Thursday.

• This game also has draft implications, beyond the obvious fact that one of these teams will be in the lottery. Utah still owes a first-round pick to Minnesota via the Al Jefferson trade, and it must send its first-round pick in this year’s draft to Wolves if that pick falls outside the lottery. In other words, if Utah wins tonight and makes the playoffs, it’ll lose its first-round pick.

The cynic would argue a first-round pick, even a mid-rounder, is more valuable than a playoff appearance and a likely white-washing against the Spurs. The cynic would have something of a point. The counter would be that Utah already has four lottery picks combined from the last two drafts, and thus could use playoff experience more than another young player. But you never know when that end-of-lottery pick will exceed expectations, and there are few more valuable commodities in the NBA than a productive player on a rookie deal.

Still, all things considered, including some extra playoff home game revenue, both franchises probably benefit more from some time in the postseason hothouse. Read More…

SI.com’s Ian Thomsen and Chris Mannix, official voters for the NBA’s year-end awards, released their ballots on Monday, so over the next few days, I’ll be rolling out my picks. We’ll start with the big one: Most Valuable Player. Here’s my five-man ballot:

(Statistical support for this post from NBA.com. All stats and records are through April 22.)

1. LeBron James, Miami Heat

LeBron James has been, hands down, the best player this season. (Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images)

When LeBron missed a crucial free throw with 11 seconds left in Chicago on April 12 and proceeded to take just two shots in overtime, Royce Young of CBSSports.com and the blog Daily Thunder mentioned James’ gun-shy approach on Twitter, asking, “Just confirming: That’s your MVP?”

The tweet crystallized the LeBron vs. Kevin Durant MVP debate, with one side suggesting that Durant’s edge in “clutch” performance could make up for James’ obvious superiority as an overall player — a superiority reflected in a mammoth 4.5-point advantage in Player Efficiency Rating, historically rare all-around numbers and defensive skills that Durant, though much-improved on that end, still can’t touch.

There have been two problems with this murky argument all along:

1. It tends to involve the cherry-picking of favorable evidence, generally taken from national TV games or highlight moments that for whatever reason become flashpoints on national talking-head shows.

The Bulls game qualified as such a flashpoint. Ditto for LeBron’s “controversial” decision to pass to a (wide-open) Udonis Haslem with the game on the line in Utah in early March — a pass that immediately erased all memory of LeBron’s hitting two jumpers in the last 1:07 of the game and going 4-of-4 in the final five minutes of regulation.

This kind of selective memory has no place in a debate over a trophy intended to award individual performance over a full season. It ignores run-of-the-mill crunch-time performances on League Pass, such as James’ demolition of the Nets last week; the big shots he hit against Indiana on March 10 to set up Dwyane Wade’s buzzer-beater; James’ 14 straight points in the fourth quarter of an early-April win over the Sixers; and others. It also ignores big-time fourth-quarter performances that don’t technically qualify as clutch because the scoring margin never got small enough; few remember LeBron’s 11 points in the last five minutes of regulation to keep the Knicks at bay in late January, or his halting a furious Philadelphia comeback on a weeknight in mid-March.

This is not to say James has been a giant in the clutch. He has been unsteady at the line, hitting just 15-of-22 free throws (68 percent) in the last three minutes of games with a scoring margin of three or fewer points, and he has looked passive in close losses to the Warriors, Magic and Bulls. In other games, including a memorable early-season loss to the Clippers, he simply missed a bunch of crunch-time shots.

But that brings us to problem No. 2 with this clutch argument:

2. We’re running out of evidence now that Durant has been better in crunch time.

The clutch-based argument for the Thunder forward now comes down to one thing: Durant shoots all the time at the end of games, while James passes a lot. In the last three minutes of close games (margin of three points or fewer), Durant has taken 66 shots, the second-highest number in the league. He is 28-of-66 (42 percent), a rate that is nice but unremarkable.

James, in 21 fewer qualifying minutes, is 12-of-26 (46 percent). James also has 12 assists to Durant’s zero, and he has attempted the same number of free throws (22) despite playing 45 qualifying minutes to Durant’s 66. James has outrebounded Durant easily, and his defensive-rebounding rate in crunch time rivals those of Dwight Howard and Kevin Love.

We could go on. The point is, if you’re basing an MVP argument for Durant on the idea of clutch, the numbers just aren’t there for you. For Durant to handle the ball late as often as he does and record zero assists is an astounding failure of creativity that touches everyone on the Thunder team and the coaching staff.

DURANT SAYS LEBRON DESERVES MVP AWARD

Again, James will occasionally get the yips under pressure. He and Wade go long, frustrating stretches in which they appear uncommitted to screening and cutting off the ball. James folded in the Finals last season, and if he does so again this season, the damage to his NBA legacy will be severe. But getting the yips in the Finals is an entirely different thing from passing to Haslem on a pick-and-pop in a (basically meaningless) regular-season game, and the difference between the 2011-12 clutch résumés of Durant and James is not nearly enough to overcome LeBron’s monstrous overall season.

LeBron’s 2011-12 season will mark the 16th time any player has posted a PER over 30. He’s shooting a ridiculous 53 percent from the floor and a career-best 36 percent from three-point range. He has been a more willing post player for much of the season. He has carried Miami while Wade missed 13 games, Chris Bosh struggled with inconsistency and the supporting players mostly fell apart after a hot start. His ability to defend multiple positions allows the Heat to go small without yielding much on defense or on the glass, and that versatility is crucial for a team with only two steady big-man contributors.

This is really an open-and-shut case. The difficult decisions come in spots two through five. Read More…

Last Wednesday had the potential to be the craziest night of the NBA season, a loaded schedule with huge playoff implications. The night largely delivered, with a half-dozen games coming down to crunch time. Tonight’s schedule of 11 games — one fewer than last Wednesday’s cascade — is nearly as crazy, and as the season gets closer to its end point, the playoff impact of key games only gets larger.

Can you put off doing your taxes one more day? If you can, here’s a game-by-game look at the madness:

7 p.m. ET: Pacers vs. Cavaliers and Sixers vs. Raptors

The Pacers' shooting has improved to 46 percent over the last 20 games, with Danny Granger finally settling into a groove. (AP)

Philadelphia’s slippage has made the middle of the Eastern Conference less interesting, since it leaves four teams — Boston, Indiana, Orlando and Atlanta — battling for the Nos. 3-6 spots. Each of those four spots guarantees avoidance of Miami and Chicago in the first round, so the punishment for falling all the way to the bottom of this barrel isn’t so severe.

Still, home-court advantage in the first round is nice if you can get it. Indiana, quietly developing a good offense to go with a solid defense, has the inside track at 35-22, with a two-game edge in the loss column over the presumptive Atlantic Division champs in Boston. The Pacers have the same two-game edge over the Magic but just a one-game lead over the Hawks, and they have already lost tiebreakers to both Atlanta and Orlando. Given that the Atlantic Division champion (i.e., Boston) is guaranteed a top-four seed, the Pacers need to bank every winnable game left on the schedule. Read More…

According to a study by STATS LLC, Derrick Rose is the 'hockey assists' leader. (Dale Zanine/US PRESSWIRE)

Commentators often mention the elusive “hockey assist” as an important potential statistic that could prove that Player X is a better passer than his regular assist numbers might indicate. But tracking hockey assists isn’t easy. Basketball moves very fast in real time, and defining what should count as a hockey assist is tricky. Imagine a possession in which one player hands the ball to a point guard at the top of the key, clears to the corner and watches as the point guard records an assist several seconds later on a pick-and-roll. Has that initial player contributed anything meaningful?

Good news: 10 NBA teams have purchased a super-sophisticated camera system from STATS LLC that tracks every movement on an NBA court to a precise degree. These are the same cameras, you’ll recall, that told us Tony Parker is the fastest point guard in the NBA. These cameras can track and sort everything, and the STATS folks decided to track hockey assists using a specific definition: A hockey assist, for STATS, occurs when Player X passes to Player Y, and Player Y then records an assist after holding the ball for two or fewer seconds and taking zero dribbles. The goal of the two seconds/no dribbles criteria is to isolate situations in which the initial pass — the hockey assist — has compromised the defense to the degree that the player who then records the “real” assist has little work left to do other than make a relatively simple pass.

So, who has the most hockey assists? Who records more hockey assists than we might expect? Who records fewer than we might expect? Before we answer, it’s important to note the caveats here: The STATS cameras are in only 10 of 30 arenas, and in order to filter out random noise, the STATS study supplied to SI.com tracked only players who have appeared in front of the cameras in at least eight games this season. That rules out some pretty darn good passers, including Chris Paul and Deron Williams.

Without further ado, here’s the hockey assist leaderboard, with total games tracked in parentheses: Read More…

Blake Griffin posterized Pau Gasol (twice) in the Lakers' win over the Clippers. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

A night that had the potential to be the craziest of the regular season certainly lived up to the hype, with games in Minnesota, New Orleans, Utah, Los Angeles, Boston and Miami — all but one with major playoff implications — coming down to crunch time. The Jazz-Suns showdown was probably the most exciting of the night, with Paul Millsap and Steve Nash trading ridiculous clutch plays around a Channing Frye banked-in prayer that gave the Suns three crucial points during a dry spell.

But Lakers-Clippers might have been the most spell-binding game. The Staples Center tenants have been barking at each other and trading shoves since the preseason, Blake Griffin mauled Pau Gasol twice Thursday night and Chris Paul worked his brand of magic again in the fourth quarter. The win 113-108 Lakers win gave them the inside track to both the Pacific Division title and the No. 3 seed. They are now two games up in the loss column over the No. 4 Clippers, with the season series tie-breaker in hand. If the standings hold, the two teams could not meet in what would be a hugely entertaining playoff series unless they both advanced to the conference finals. That would seem unlikely.

Some bullet point thoughts on the game:

• About those Griffin dunks over Gasol: The second one was clearly an offensive foul, and as I watched it, I once again thought that if I were a coach, I’d create some sort of cash bonus system for players who give good, honest challenges against big-time dunkers. The system would also carry small cash fines for players who duck out of the way.

Alas, I checked with the league, and such a system would violate league rules that ban teams from changing a player’s compensation in any way.

Such a system is inherently silly, since it’s meant to heal wounds players may not even feel so deeply; players understand that being the victim of a highlight now and then is the price of doing business, and they keep the big picture in mind better than fans do. And Pau, of course, continued to play hard, highlighted by his crunch-time rejection of Griffin in the post. Still, when you catch Andrew Bynum desecrating the very idea of “transition defense” with his “elderly man jogging” routine several times per game, it’s discouraging to know lots of fans and highlight shows will miss that and focus on Gasol actually trying to play sound defense. Read More…

Wednesdays in the NBA are always crazy, stacked with at least 10 games and overlapping crunch-time sequences that test even the most vigilant League Pass channel-flipper. But seldom do the league’s Wednesday slates feature as many games between elite teams and games with playoff implications as tonight’s ridiculous schedule. Save your taxes for another night and don’t waste time cooking dinner.

Here’s a game-by-game look at what’s in store:

7 p.m. ET: Raptors vs. Sixers and Pacers vs. Wizards

The Sixers need to avoid the No. 7 seed, as they'd likely face Miami in the first round. (Howard Smith/US PRESSWIRE)

Two seemingly “blah” games between the lottery-bound and the playoff locks, but both games are interesting when you look at the larger picture. Indiana and Philadelphia are at the top and bottom, respectively, of the Eastern Conference’s muddled Nos. 3-7 seeding picture, and both have the potential to move up or down into any of those spots.

The Sixers especially need to find a way to out of the No. 7 slot, which could mean a first-round matchup against a Miami team that Philadelphia simply cannot beat. Philly’s remaining schedule is relatively easy, but only four of its final 13 games are at home, making a home date against a frisky Toronto team a near must-win. And the Raptors are frisky; they were an improbable Luol Deng buzzer-beater away from beating Chicago on the road on March 24, and they subsequently romped over both New York and Denver in Toronto. They play hard, and they easily have the best point differential of the East’s certain lottery teams. Andrea Bargnani is finally finding his groove after missing the middle part of the season with a calf injury.

As for the Pacers, the current No. 3 seed, they’ve got a home-heavy schedule the rest of the way, but they’ve already lost tie-breakers to both Atlanta and Orlando, and their season series against both Philly and Boston are up in the air. The Wizards have been much more competitive since dumping JaVale McGee and Nick Young, and the Pacers had to rally from a 20-point halftime deficit to win in Washington two weeks ago. Indiana is also coming off a draining win over New York last night. Nene and Trevor Booker will miss the game due to injury, so the Pacers really have no excuse. Read More…

The Heat's usually stingy defense failed to contain Rajon Rondo and the Celtics on Sunday. (Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images)

As ridiculous as it sounds, the regular season is over in only three weeks. Time for playbook tweaks and chemistry development is running short. With that in mind, here are some burning questions for the stretch run, with a focus outside the obvious (Derrick Rose’s health) and the races for the eighth seed in each conference.

• What’s wrong with the Heat?

Miami is just 10-7 since the All-Star break, and its regression started on the offensive end. The Heat are averaging just 101 points per 100 possessions in their last 15 games, down from a the monstrous 107.9 points per 100 possessions they put up before the break, according to NBA.com’s stats tool. That is about the same as the difference between the league’s best offense and an average one.

Miami’s defense remained as stifling as ever until collapsing in its last five games. The two trends collided during the first three quarters of its ugly loss in Boston on Sunday. The major question mark for the Heat will always be whether they can score enough in the half court to beat an elite team under playoff pressure four times in seven games. To do that, Miami has to run its sets with precision and vigorous commitment to pursuing second and third options.

That commitment was absent against both Oklahoma City last week and Boston on Sunday. Miami’s offense too often stalled out after one action, with either LeBron James or Dwyane Wade standing passively while the other ran the show or Chris Bosh backed down for yet another fruitless post-up try. James might have cut hard off the ball three times all game in Boston. Wade stood in the left corner several times, remaining still even as Joel Anthony approached for a screen.

The only exceptions came after Miami timeouts, when coach Erik Spoelstra could call plays and remind the Heat what it takes to score against an engaged Boston defense. The Heat have run their half-court offense with the right kind of energy for stretches of this season, including the entire month of February, when they destroyed just about every team they faced. Some slippage was inevitable during the compressed schedule, and three of Miami’s primary floor-spacing shooters are either slumping badly (Norris Cole, Mario Chalmers) or injured (Mike Miller, whose versatility and shooting are key).

Shooting slumps are inevitable, but Miami will have to run its half-court game with peak intensity, unselfishness and movement in the playoffs in order to win the title.

The defensive issues over the last five games or so have been more worrisome. James and Wade repeatedly lost Paul Pierce and especially Avery Bradley off the ball, and James and Bosh failed to communicate when Pierce freed Kevin Garnett on a simple back screen for a layup in the third quarter.

And Miami failed to keep Rajon Rondo from the center of the floor. This wasn’t just on Cole and Chalmers, though Cole’s inability to push Rondo toward the sideline resulted in at least one on-court Udonis Haslem lecture. James looked helpless in pick-and-roll defense when his man (Pierce) set screens for Rondo at the top of the key, repeatedly yielding easy driving lanes for Rondo.

Rondo is, of course, incredibly fast. But Miami’s play overall has been listless and unfocused, and it will not be good enough to win the championship. We know the Heat can be better. Is it as simple as flipping a switch?

Read More…