10 Predictions for the Rest of the 2023-24 NBA Regular Season

With less than a month until the conclusion of the 2023-24 NBA regular season, it’s stretch-run prediction time.

We’ll hit on prognostications about the final standings, individual statistical achievements and even an award or two. The goal is to be bold enough to make the prediction something short of a lock while still backing it with actual evidence that suggests it’s possible.

So while it would have been satisfying to predict Victor Wembanyama will swat the moon out of orbit at some point between now and the middle of April, we’re not going quite that far. Don’t worry, though: Wemby will appear in a slightly less outlandish forecast, as will Luka Dončic, Jayson Tatum, Joel Embiid and plenty of other big names around the league.

Unsatisfied with what’ll probably go down as the block of the year, Minnesota Timberwolves superstar Anthony Edwards is going to complete a dunk at some point over the next few weeks that’ll top anything we’ve seen this season.

How can we be so sure?

Because effort is the key to success, and Edwards puts more toward highlight dunks than most. Though Karl-Anthony Towns’ prolonged absence following surgery to repair his meniscus might seem like the obvious switch-flipping point of the season, the kind of thing that motivates stars like Edwards to pick up the slack, the reality is that Ant was dialing up the intensity before KAT went down.

Towns’ last appearance was March 4, but Edwards did this and also this way back in January. And let’s not forget this one from his rookie year. Edwards has been trying to tear down the rim since he came into the league.

Had he finished this attempt over Anthony Davis earlier this month, we probably could have declared a winner in the unofficial Dunk of the Year race early.

Consider this a bet that Edwards will give us a slam at least as good as this one would have been.

For this prediction to come true, the Philadelphia 76ers first have to slip out of the East’s top six. Considering the fall they’ve endured from the No. 3 spot they occupied at the end of January, that’s hardly a stretch.

From there, Philly would have to go down against one of the other East squads likely to rank between seven and 10, with theoretical pushovers like the Atlanta Hawks and Chicago Bulls (both of whom may be missing stars) seeming like easy prey.

Unfortunately for the Sixers, nothing has been easy since Joel Embiid got hurt. The Sixers have the No. 27 net rating in the league since the All-Star break and have even been outscored by 11.2 points per 100 possessions with Tyrese Maxey on the floor.

Elephant in the room: This prediction depends largely on Embiid not returning this season. The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported Embiid would be out for six to eight weeks following surgery on Feb. 6, and Embiid has said he hopes to return before the end of the regular season. But if we assume the Sixers’ slide will continue between now and then, the risk of sending Embiid back into the fray won’t be worth the reward.

Philadelphia would have to survive the play-in for the privilege of playing either the Milwaukee Bucks or Boston Celtics in the first round without home-court advantage. Embiid hasn’t held up physically through a postseason in his entire career, and the odds of him pulling that off after undergoing surgery and missing so much time are impossibly long.

Nick Nurse will keep coaching to win, and the rest of the roster won’t just pack up and quit. But the knowledge that 2023-24 is now essentially a lost season in Philly will quietly pervade the entire franchise and dull its competitive edge. That makes a one-and-done play-in appearance more likely than it otherwise might be.

The Dallas Mavericks went 3-3 during Luka Dončić’s record-setting stretch of six straight 30-point triple-doubles. Clearly, the stat-hoarding star needs to ratchet up his production even more for the Mavs to do better than break even.

Dallas is currently outside the West’s top six, and it’s hard to imagine a significant push up the standings originating with anyone other than Dončic. Kyrie Irving is one of the league’s most dangerous second options, but he’s quietly settling into a role where team-lifting takeovers are more the exception than the rule. Irving is posting his lowest scoring average since 2018-19 and his lowest usage rate in a decade.

No Mavs role player other than Irving is capable of reliably creating offense, a symptom of a roster built to support Dončić’s heliocentric game. The other issue: Dallas’ defense has fallen off since the All-Star break to an alarming degree, ranking 29th in the league for nearly the last month.

One can imagine Dončić’s perspective going forward. How could he not try to take on an even larger role? No one is chipping in on offense, and things have completely fallen apart on the other end. To an even more extreme degree than ever, it all comes down to him.

Fifty-point triple-doubles are ridiculously rare. We’ve only seen 15 of them in NBA history.

Fortunately for the Mavs (and this prediction), one of those belongs to Dončic, a 60-point, 21-rebound, 10-assist masterclass in a double-overtime win against the New York Knicks back on Dec. 27, 2022.

Given the circumstances he faces now and the historic precedent he established in the not-so-distant past, maybe predicting Dončić will turn in a 50-point triple-double is actually too conservative.

We’re either underrating the New Orleans Pelicans’ defensive scheme and every individual defender on the roster (other than Herb Jones, who’s objectively awesome), or something fishy is going on with the team’s performance this season.

The Pels sit at No. 7 in defensive efficiency, despite allowing opponents to attempt 40.7 percent of their shots from long range, the second-highest rate in the league. So far, all those long bombs haven’t hurt New Orleans. Pelicans opponents are hitting 34.2 percent from deep, including 36.0 percent on wide-open triples. Both numbers are the lowest in the league.

As a result, the Pelicans have the ninth-best opponent effective field-goal percentage. But based on the locations and quantities of the shots they permit, that ranking should be far worse. New Orleans is just 22nd in location-based effective field-goal percentage.

Two possibilities arise. The first is that the Pelicans have cracked a complex and heavily encrypted defensive code. They’ve figured out how to leave the correct shooters open and/or somehow force misses without actually being near the shooter. Willie Green is a quality NBA head coach, but it seems unlikely that he’s managed to school his players in defensive telepathy.

The second is that the Pels have been lucky and shouldn’t expect their good fortune to continue as opponents regress to the mean—particularly on those wide-open looks.

A team that has dodged bullets for 80 percent of the season could certainly continue to do so for the final 20 percent, but the sounder bet is on New Orleans’ opponents hitting treys at league-average rates over the next few weeks. When that happens, the Pelicans will slide toward the middle of the pack on D.

Maybe it seems ridiculous to suggest the current league leader in blocks will more than triple his average in one of his few remaining games, but if you haven’t realized that almost no statistical achievement is beyond Victor Wembanyama’s lengthy reach, you haven’t been paying attention.

Wemby’s current single-game high of 10 blocks proves a dozen is well within his grasp, and he managed that feat in only 29 minutes against the Toronto Raptors on Feb. 12. If that game wasn’t a complete blowout and he logged another handful of possessions, 12 swats would have been in the bag.

The sheer variety of blocks Wembanyama can accumulate only helps his case. The point-blank rejections are easy enough; Wemby blots out the rim at close range and has the recovery speed to track down drivers who think he won’t be able to cover the distance between the foul line and the backboard in one loping step.

Wembanyama’s real edge comes in space, where his quick feet and incredible wingspan allow him to pile up blocked isolation jumpers (insofar as anyone is bold enough to isolate against him anymore) and even threes.

Lastly, we should all be aware that Wembanyama’s numbers, including blocks, are trending up across the board. He’s increased his swats per game from 3.2 before the All-Star break to 4.6 after it, and he totaled 13 blocks in his first two March appearances. Better still, the Spurs are ever so slightly loosening the reins on Wemby’s playing time, adding about two minutes per game since the middle of February.

Combined with increased confidence and know-how, that extra court time is going to produce some absurd statistical milestones—one of which will be the first 12-block game since JaVale McGee pulled it off in 2011.

Doc Rivers’ arrival seems to have settled the Milwaukee Bucks’ defensive issues, as they’re 12th in points allowed per 100 possessions since swapping out Adrian Griffin, much more in line with their baseline of the last several years. Quietly, though, Milwaukee’s offense struggled in the first few weeks of Rivers’ tenure.

With Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo finally developing the two-man chemistry everyone thought would materialize instantly (but didn’t), things are about to get a lot better on the other end as well.

“I think we are more patient,” Antetokounmpo told Eric Nehm of The Athletic. “But again, we don’t just talk about it only, we practice it. … Now, organically, you can see it coming out in the game, and I’m happy about that.”

The Bucks ran 28 pick-and-roll actions involving Giannis and Dame on March 10 in a 124-117 road win against the Clippers, their highest total of the year. Say what you want about Rivers’ lack of accountability and his ugly elimination-game track record, but know that he’s also a coach who keeps things simple in the best ways.

Rivers is a well-known spammer of pick-and-roll sets involving his two best players, an old-school practitioner of “if they can’t stop it, run it again” repetition.

Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. James Harden and Joel Embiid. And now: Dame and Giannis.

If the defense holds up and the necessary mind-meld between the Bucks’ two superstars continues to strengthen, it might be best to view the Bucks as belonging in a tier of their own. Though the standings say the Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks and even Orlando Magic have a real shot to overtake Milwaukee for that No. 2 spot in the East behind the Boston Celtics, it now seems likelier that Milwaukee will separate itself from the pack below it and may even make up a little ground on the indomitable top seed above it.

While all the hand-wringing about the NBA’s scoring spike this season often feels overblown, it’s nonetheless true that 2023-24’s average offensive rating of 115.6 is the highest it’s been in decades. Whether that’s actually a problem depends on how much you enjoy watching players score points and your susceptibility to clickbait catastrophizing on social media.

That said, it certainly appears as though the league is viewing the scoring uptick as a flaw in need of correction.

The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported on Wednesday that “…the NBA Competition Committee met Tuesday to discuss ways to incorporate more defensive freedom for players when it comes to physicality, evaluating how to potentially allow more of it, its merits and more.”

If you scan the data, the NBA may have actually been tinkering with the offense-defense balance (via officiating) long before the Competition Committee convened.

Consider this:

And this:

Marc Stein reported in his newsletter that “there has been no directive from the league office to referees to call games differently,” but the numbers strongly suggest something is changing about how games are officiated.

Offenses have been scoring at historic rates for so much of the season that a late downturn probably won’t prevent the establishment of a new scoring record. But from here on out (and heading into next year), the offensive surge will level off.

Being the best player on the best team (or at least the team with the most wins) used to pretty reliably produce MVP victories, but Jayson Tatum’s status as the No. 1 option on the Boston Celtics won’t even get him into the top four in this year’s race.

In some order, those positions belong to Nikola Jokić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Dončić and Giannis Antetokounmpo. All of those players have had better statistical seasons than Tatum but, right or wrong, some voters are going to feel uneasy about leaving him out of inner-circle MVP consideration.

They’re going to compensate by putting him on the All-NBA First Team. Not just some voters, by the way. All of them.

Giannis was the only unanimous first-teamer last year, and he’s made a habit of securing that no-questions-asked honor. Barring a true shock, he’ll get every first-team vote for the sixth straight time this season. Tatum will join him, despite legitimate cases from Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant and a handful of others.

Team success still trumps that of the individual, and something will just seem a little off if the ridiculously dominant Celtics don’t get some kind of recognition come awards season. One imagines any voter entertaining uncertainty about Tatum vs. Leonard vs. Durant vs. Whomever breaking the tie in favor of the ultra-durable leader of a Boston team that might wind up winning eight or 10 more games than any other squad.

Every team endures ebbs and flows, rough patches and general inconsistency throughout the course of the season, but the New York Knicks have had two remarkably distinct identities in 2023-24.

Basically, they either have OG Anunoby on the floor, or they don’t. The former beats the daylights out of teams, while the latter struggles to survive.

Anunoby is finally active again following surgery on his elbow, and New York went full “Hulk smash” in his very first game back, bludgeoning a Philadelphia 76ers team 106-79 just one day after losing to those same Sixers by a 79-73 margin that looks like a typo in today’s era of supercharged scoring.

That difference is reflective of Anunoby’s full-season impact to a striking degree.

Overall, the Knicks’ net rating is plus-25.8 points per 100 possessions in 529 minutes with Anunoby and minus-3.6 in 1,103 without him.

The upshot: New York suddenly looks far more likely to hold on to its No. 4 seed in the East, a welcome development after Orlando briefly seized it a few days ago. The Indiana Pacers, Philadelphia 76ers and the perennially terrifying Miami Heat are all within a couple of games of the Knicks in the standings, but (checks notes) none of them has Anunoby on the roster.

Julius Randle still hasn’t been cleared for contact, per SNY TV’s Ian Begley, and neither has Mitchell Robinson, per The Athletic’s Fred Katz. That’s not ideal, but Anunoby’s return paid dividends immediately and should be enough to keep the Knicks in their current spot in the standings.

The Knicks are going to keep their No. 4 spot and the home-court advantage that comes with it, but the Los Angeles Clippers are suddenly looking at a less encouraging fate.

Kawhi Leonard missed a 124-117 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks on March 10 due to left groin soreness, and he saw just 12 minutes of action in a 118-100 defeat at the hands of the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday. This time, it was thoracic spasms (which…no, thank you) that knocked him out of action and resulted in him leaving the arena early.

It’s not just Leonard showing signs of late-season wear; questionable tags are popping up all over the place—from Paul George’s left knee knocking him out to James Harden playing through a left shoulder strain.

As a result, the Clips are blowing leads and losing touch with the top three teams in the West. This, after a 26-5 run from Dec. 2 to Feb. 5 had them looking like a real threat to finish first in the conference.

It’s too early to sound the alarm at full volume, but this isn’t what you want to see from a Clippers team whose biggest potential pitfall was always the health of its top players. Leonard showed a level of durability this season he hadn’t touched in years, reaffirming his status as one of the half-dozen best players in the league when healthy.

Now, though, it’s starting to feel like the exact worry that many shared about him and his team is becoming reality.

Defensive uncertainty and all, the fifth-seeded New Orleans Pelicans are piling up wins. The Phoenix Suns, getting healthier at No. 6, are lurking. Even the Sacramento Kings and Dallas Mavericks could make things interesting if L.A. really falls off. Between dangerous pursuers and mounting health concerns, the Clippers’ position among the West’s top four won’t last.

Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report’s Dan Favale.