Chapter 1: What were the highlights of the NBA week?
Welcome to the Saturday Slammin' Jam here on the Athletic NBA Daily. On today's show, we're going to do the good, the bad, and the what? We're back. We're going to have Jared Weiss on to talk about the San Antonio Spurs, who are a very good team, and we're going to do some trivia. But before we get to all that, Al, tell me what happened in the NBA this week.
Well, Andrew, our top story this week was the first trade of the NBA season. After months of listening to NBA fans wonder whether the Hawks would be better off without face of the franchise Trey Young, Atlanta decided they were also kind of wondering the same thing.
In a move that involved zero draft assets on either side, the Hawks sent Trey Young to the Washington Wizards for CJ McCollum, who was on an expiring contract, and Corey Kispert, Now there were reports that the Hawks tried to get the Wizards to include beat writer Josh Robbins in the deal, but Washington refused, telling the Hawks, hands off America's sweetheart.
Now Robbins tweeted after the deal that he would be surprised if Trey plays much, if at all, the remainder of the season for the Wizards. The highlight of Trae Young's time in Atlanta was, of course, the Eastern Conference Finals run in 2021, which included the infamous second round series with Philadelphia and Ben Simmons.
The Hawks were never able to capitalize on that run, however, never winning more than 43 games in the subsequent seasons. The Hawks are currently 18 and 21, but Sham Sharana reports that the Hawks see this as the first domino intending to pursue a trade for a large salary player with Anthony Davis as the prime target.
As one high-level league source told The Athletic, quote, every team in the East believes they're an Anthony Davis away from making the finals. Of note, Anthony Davis left the Mavericks Thursday night game against the Jazz in the fourth quarter with a left-hand injury. While the East does seem quite wide open right now, the Detroit Pistons keep trying to tell us that they're very good.
After a stretch where they lost three of four, the Pistons got back on track this week, winning three in a row, including one of their biggest statement wins of the season, a 121 to 90 win over the New York Knicks. This was the first time these two teams had played each other since that first round series last season. and the Pistons were ready. Cade had 29 and 13 assists.
Jaden Ivey put up his highest scoring game of the season, scoring 16 off the bench. The Pistons are 28 and nine, first in the East and four games up on the Knicks. Now for the Knicks, those 90 points they scored against the Pistons, fewest they've had in a regular season game since March, 2024, when they lost a game to the Sixers by the score of 79 to 73. That was in March 2024.
That is the lowest scoring NBA game in the last decade. Now the loss to the Pistons was also the Knicks' fourth straight loss, though they did finally get back on track by beating the Clippers on Wednesday night. And while beating the Clippers would not have been that impressive the last time we did an episode of Slamma Jam,
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of Trae Young's trade?
He's shooting 50-38-94. He's taking over nine threes per game and getting to the line almost nine times per game. 2.6 steals, 1.3 blocks, generally one of the best runs by any player this season, and it included the first 50-point game of his career, a 55-point masterpiece, against those same Detroit Pistons that held the entire Knicks team to 90 points.
Now, despite this run, the Clips still face an uphill battle due to their early season woes and another injury to Jarek Jones Jr. that's going to keep him out at least six weeks. They are closing in on that final playing spot only two and a half games back of the Grizzlies in 10th. The Clippers' recent success isn't just great news for the Clippers.
It's also great news for 28 other teams who are hoping the Clippers don't stumble into giving the Thundering top pick in next year's draft. But honestly, Andrew... Maybe the Thunder need that top pick. Do they need that? What happened to this team?
The last time we did an episode of Slam & Jam, the Thunder had just lost their second game of the season, a two-point loss to the Spurs in the NBA Cup semifinals. Starting with that first loss to the Spurs, the Thunder have gone 7-6 over their next 13 games. After starting 24-1, they narrowly avoided a three-game losing streak this week.
After going all the way to overtime with the Utah Jazz, the two losses this week included a pretty fun game with the Suns that was won on a Devin Booker three-pointer with 0.7 seconds left, but also a 27-point loss to the Charlotte Hornets at home. Even with some blowout wins during the stretch, the Thunder's offense has plummeted to 18th overall per clean of the glass.
Their overall record remains a very impressive 31-7 as of Friday morning, but things are clearly off, and there's two marquee matchups coming up against the Spurs and Rockets next week. Now, if you look across the standings, there's only one team who was eight and two or better in their last ten, and that is the Boston Celtics.
Now, admittedly, hasn't been the toughest schedule as of late, but if you push it back a little further, this team has been on a tear, winning 13 of their last 17. Jalen Brown, who had a 50-point game against the Clippers this week, he's been playing so well, we're starting to debate whether he's in the MVP conversation or whether he's just been invited to the table.
As good as Boston has been, the real reason I brought them up was actually to talk about the Denver Nuggets, who beat those Boston Celtics on Thursday night behind a 30-point game from Peyton Watson, who went 6 of 7 from 3 and is suddenly shooting 40% from 3 on 3.2 attempts this season.
Now, it was assumed that the Nuggets would take a huge fall once Nikola Jokic went down, but so far, they're keeping their heads above water, going 3-2 since Jokic went down, including an overtime win against Philly this week, where the Nuggets started Peyton Watson, Spencer Jones, Bruce Brown, Deron Holmes, and Jalen Pickett.
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Chapter 3: How are the San Antonio Spurs performing this season?
There's nothing entertaining about it.
The craziest thing about that tweet, because obviously I've been seeing a lot of tweets about Trey Young, and they all lead off with four-time All-Star Trey Young. And then I see the tweet about John Morant, and it's two-time All-Star John Morant. It just sounds wrong. He only made the All-Star game twice? How's that possible?
It is so weird. It is so weird. It is weird. Let's not talk about our what's yet, Al.
Let's not do that. We're talking what's. We got to talk about our good and bad first on a segment we call Good Bad What, where we share something we like this week, something we didn't like this week, and then something that just left us confused.
Good Bad What
Andrew, what is your good this week?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Victor Wembanyama in the Spurs' success?
I wanted to talk more about the Celtics. Jalen Brown has obviously been the talk of the town, but what about Derek White? Derek White has been awesome this year. He's 10th in total blocks so far this season. More than guys like Triple J, Klingon, Ware, more than those guys. He's 26 in steals.
Over the last 15 games, he's been 21 points, five boards, five assists, a steal in nearly two blocks per game. and has just kind of glued this entire team together. I wondered, like, there are a lot of changes that happened. It wasn't just Jason Tatum going down. There are a lot of changes that happened to this Boston team. And some of it's been, like, Derek White is as good as advertised.
He hasn't shot the ball as well as you would hope, but he's still, like, the volume is, like, insane. I think during that stretch, he's taken over 10 threes per game, which is awesome, just to get the attempts up. It's been his emergence as a legitimate, probably all-star candidate.
Chapter 5: What challenges are the Oklahoma City Thunder facing?
Plus, Nemeus Keita has been so good. With Keita and Derek White on the court and Jalen Brown off the court, according to Cleaning the Glass, and it's in limited possessions, but they're a plus 23.4. Having a perimeter guy who is super good, having Keita, who's been awesome for them, Manning the middle. They've really kind of figured some stuff out. I was so dubious.
I did not think they were going to be a good team before the season started. And a lot of it was like, they don't have a big man. Like they don't have any big man, but he's Kata has been really good. And Derek White has stepped up. Cause like losing drew holiday and like his leadership, like, I don't know, hadn't really mattered all that much.
to them like they've been really really good and a lot of it is like you have the scoring and the guy at the top and none of that happens without Jalen Brown but sincerely none of this like success happens without Derek White and what Kata has been in the middle so those guys deserve just as much credit in my book yeah Derek White one of my favorite stat lines of the season that game where you had seven blocks just yeah insane and then it was like it tied a record for like the most blocks by a guard
Wasn't it him, though? Didn't he tie his own record? Yes. Yeah, yeah. And the Keita thing is huge because one of the things I was so suspicious of was everyone was referring to this as a gap year. And it's like, okay, yeah, sure, you're going to get Tatum back, but you're still not going to have a center. You still have to fill this major role on the team.
And I'm assuming they'll still try to add another big man to this roster going into next season. Yeah. but at least knowing that you have Keita. That's a real rotation piece now. Whether he ends up being their starting center of the future or just ends up being a big off the bench, they at least have something there, which is more than I thought going into this season.
Yeah, and he's only 26 too. He's a guy that can continue to get better. It's been pretty impressive.
My good this week is R.J. Barrett. And it starts with me watching the Raptors Hornets game.
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Chapter 6: What are the latest updates on Ja Morant's trade rumors?
Now, admittedly, I was watching this game because it was the Hornets' first game since beating my favorite team by 27. And I was kind of hoping it would turn out, oh, the Hornets are just good now. It's not a big deal that OKC lost by 27 to them. The Hornets have now lost two in a row to the Raptors and league worst pacers. Anywho, the way they lost to Toronto was pretty memorable.
Manuel quickly had that game-winning three-pointer. His time expired. But it was R.J. Barrett that stuck out in this game, specifically in the fourth quarter. He scored 16 of his 28 points in that fourth quarter. And it's usual R.J. stuff, getting downhill, using his strength to beat up whatever Hornet was guarding him. He hit a three.
He also hit a couple floaters, which I'm going to come back to. Now, I've been hearing about how important RJ Barrett has been for this Raptors team. If you haven't heard the stat, the Raptors are 16-6 when RJ Barrett plays, basically a 60-win pace. And they're 7-9 when he doesn't play. And it's because of his effect on the offense.
According to pbpstats.com, when RJ's on the court, the Raptors have a 119.5 offensive rating. And for context, that'd be around a top five offense if they always played like that. When he's off the court, it drops to a 112.3, which would be around the sixth worst offense of the league. On cleaning the glass, you can break it down by half-court offense and transition offense.
When RJ's on the court, the Raptors' half-court offense is 11 points per 100 possessions better than when he's off, and that differential is in the 96th percentile across the entire NBA. So I was looking through his individual stats. I was trying to get a better idea of, like, what has changed so much about his offensive game?
Because a lot of it looks the same, but the thing that jumps out is how efficient he has been in that floater range, that area 3 to 10 feet away from the basket. It's always been part of his game. He's pretty consistently taken around 25% of his shots in that area. But this season...
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Chapter 7: What is the current status of the Boston Celtics?
He is wildly more efficient. Here are his shooting percentages in floater range by year over his entire career. 27%, 32%, 31%, 40%, 42%, 39% last season, and then 50% so far this year.
And as if by divine intervention, while I was looking all this up last night, I briefly got on Instagram and saw a clip from a postgame presser where our guy S asked RJ about his floater game and specifically this move where he drives like he's going to the hoop. He stops, does a half spin, and then shoots a floater.
And RJ talked about how this was something he developed in New York when he was working with Knicks assistant coach Johnny Bryant. It was just very wild that all of a sudden he was S talking to me about the one thing I was looking up. You know, RJ's been a really good rim attacker since being in Toronto. It's a big strength of his game.
But now with this floater game, it's made his offensive game within the arc so much stronger because he has a real counter, making him that much harder to guard. And when thinking about this team in the preseason, I was so focused on Brandon Ingram, Scotty Barnes, as far as figuring out who would decide the Raptors' ceiling. But so far this season, it's clear that R.J.
Barrett is going to have a massive influence on this team's success. And for that, Andrew, he's my good this week.
he's he's been great he's i i it's interesting the raptors approach to team building and that they are looking for players that are kind of distressed assets to like some point or maybe they're like not performing as well as you would have hoped and they're just trying to kind of rehabilitate their value to either trade or to build the team i don't know what they're doing but
uh rj and bi have both been like pretty big success stories that i was uh questioning when they traded for both of them yeah yeah all right andrew flip it on its head what's your bad this week uh okay so this is a good that turns into just a bad or maybe i'm just more annoyed than i am this is like bad feeling annoyed uh denny avdia Leads the league in drives this season.
So far this season, he has 782 drives in 38 games. For context, for like, what does that mean? Last year, in 72 games, he had 764 drives. He's already surpassed the number of drives that he had last year in 38 games. Um, and last year, like scoot Henderson had more drives than him per game, like, which is just kind of wild.
And with that, Denny shoots a lot of free throws and the discourse around free throws online, um, has just gotten insane. Um, this is not bad for Denny. I think it's actually really good for Denny. I just think all the discourse is the bad thing.
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Chapter 8: What fun trivia games did the hosts play at the end?
This has always been a part of the game. And in fact, it's like elite players that want to get downhill, get to the hoop, get fouled. And it's because teams can't do anything with them. And that has just been the case. I went back all the way to 98-99 and just looked to see how many players are shooting nine or more free throws per game since 98-99. And
Since since 98, 99, one player, at least one player has shot nine or more free throws and as many as seven in a season have shot nine or more free throws per game. There was only four of those seasons where it was just one guy. And then back in 0405, there were seven players that shot nine or more free throws per game.
It was Allen Iverson, Shaq, Kobe, Corey Maggette, Amari Stoudemire, Wade and Dirk. And I just don't remember. I mean, we were big fans of the NBA back then. Was the free throw stuff a big conversation back then?
It only became a conversation the 06 Finals. That was definitely a big topic of conversation.
And that's a moment where, yes, that should be part of the discourse, not a part of the daily discourse online.
Right. No, but it's because back then you couldn't watch every game and you certainly couldn't watch highlights of every game. And there wasn't anyone out there who had enough time to clip just free throws, like to just clip the fouls that lead to free throws. It's because people are watching it more. They're watching more highlights of fouls than they've ever watched in the history of the game.
That's just a true fact. NBA fans are watching more fouls than at any other time in the history of this game. So they're being constantly reminded of it every single day. And of course, that's the thing they're talking about because it's the thing they're being shown nonstop on every social media platform.
And maybe it's the fault of the people that are complaining about it that have big platforms more than anything. I mean, I cannot tweet anything about Shea without people... Talking about the free throws that he takes. Getting on your ass. I mean, it is just insane. But I don't think anybody would like... Was anybody wanting to call Allen Iverson a free throw merchant?
No.
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