Thoughts On the First Twenty Games of the NBA Season

1) At 17-2, the Boston Celtics are as good as advertised, and every one of those games has been fun to watch. Veteran stars Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce are leading by example, their roles players like James Posey and Rajon Rondo chip in their nickels every game, and their bench guys have been playing with an enormous amount of intensity. The NBA is at its most interesting when Boston has a good team, and having a dominant squad in the eastern conference gives the league a natural counter-weight to the dominant western conference teams like the Spurs and the Suns.

2) With a Player Efficiency Rating of 32.38, LeBron James is having arguably the best season any NBA player has ever had. Right now, he is more than half of a point better than Wilt Chamberlain's all-time leading 31.84 (from the '62-'63 season) and Michael Jordan's all-time highest 31.71, from '87-'88. The main advantage of PER as a statistic is that it accounts for both the pace of the team on which you play and for the pace of the league in general, which, like Bill James' "win shares" method in baseball, allows fans to compare contemporary players to those of earlier eras. PER doesn't take defense into account, and Jordan and Chamberlain were two of the greatest defensive players to ever step onto a basketball court, so of course there's room to argue. But LeBron isn't just having a good season - he is having a historically great one.

3) Has anybody seen the Toronto Raptors play this year? They're really fun to watch - good ball movement, old fashioned drive-and-kick point guard play, big men who can shoot and run the floor, and a couple of genuine underdog stories in Anthony Parker and Jamario Moon, both of whom were total unknowns plucked out of obscure European leagues by Toronto's savvy GM Bryan Colangelo. Jose Calderon, who I raved about all last year to little effect, has a chance to join the exclusive 50/40/90 club, and has an assist-to-turnover ratio of 6-to-1, the best in the NBA.

4) Every year, sportswriters predict that Manu Ginobili is over the hill, and that, while he may heat up in the playoffs, he is no longer going to be able to carry the Spurs for long stretches of the regular season. Well, this season his Player Efficiency Rating is 29.21, which means he is on pace for the twenty-second-best season of all-time. Ever. He's averaging 20.8 points, 4.8 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 1.8 steals per game, which is even more impressive when you consider a) the pace at which the Spurs play, and b) that Ginobili plays only 29 minutes per game. Manu averages 1.55 points per field goal attempt, compared to LeBron's 1.40, Carmello Anthony's 1.22, Baron Davis' 1.19 and Rasheed Wallace's 1.17. Say what you will about the guy, but there aren't more than three players in the league who could put together a collection of plays this good in just a single game.

5) I don't think there are more than three teams in the NBA capable of beating the Utah Jazz in a seven-game series. Carlos Boozer is averaging 25 and 12, and has positioned himself as the next great NBA power forward, as Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Dirk all get up there in years. Deron Williams looks like a perennial all-star, averaging almost 21 and 9 and shooting an absurd 48% from 3-point range. Since Brewer has developed as a scoring threat, Andrei Kirilenko has been free to do what he does best, crashing the boards, roaming the passing lanes, and blocking shots from the weak side. Their execution is near-perfect, like a well-drilled international team. Check them out the next time they're on tv.

6) John Hollinger's Rookie PER ratings interested me. "Big Baby" Glen Davis leads all rookies with 17.53. I'm a little surprised that Atlanta rookie Al Horford didn't rate more highly - he grabs an incredible 27.5% of all defensive rebounds while he's on the court, but rates behind Davis because he turns the ball over more and doesn't get to the foul line very much. Glen Davis, though so-so on the defensive boards, somehow manages to get 19.2% of the offensive rebounds while he's on the court and has a true shooting percentage of .614%, due in large part to his ability to draw fouls.

7) Penny Hardaway was just waived by the Miami heat, to make room for rookie Luke Jackson. I don't know what's more amazing - that Hardaway attempted a comeback nearly two years after one of the worst NBA seasons in memory, that the Heat actually started him at small forward for a number of games, or that Shaq was willing to take the court with a 36 year-old retread he once compared to Fredo Corleone.