Predicting Which 2022-23 NBA Hot Starts Won't Last
We're two weeks into the 2022-23 NBA season, and several teams and players still refuse to cooperate with expectations. The nerve!
Don't the Utah Jazz and San Antonio Spurs know we spent the summer writing them off? Aren't they aware that the longer they appear to be competent (and, sometimes, actually good), the more tough questions we'll have to keep asking ourselves? If you're part of the NBA discourse, you tend to make predictions. And when those predictions fail to come true, it's confusing.
Is up actually down?
Did Tim Duncan and Tony Parker discover de-aging technology and quietly suit up for the Spurs?
Do I know anything?
Luckily, it's early. And even more fortunately, many of the hot-starting teams and players we'll cover here have statistical indicators beneath the surface that will eventually bring them back into line with our preseason forecasts. In other cases, predicting regression is easier because the strong start in question is just objectively unprecedented and, logically, can't continue.
Don't worry, everybody; order will soon be restored.
San Antonio Spurs
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The San Antonio Spurs didn't intend to put a winning roster on the floor this season, a fact made plain when they dealt a then-25-year-old All-Star Dejounte Murray to the Atlanta Hawks for a package headlined by draft picks.
Whatever doubt remained about San Antonio's expectations disappeared on media day when head coach Gregg Popovich offered gambling advice.
You can imagine the surprise inside and outside the Spurs organization after the team won five of its seven October games, with four of those victories coming against opponents that made the 2022 playoffs. Fortunately for San Antonio's rebuilding/tanking effort, reasons to doubt the sustainability of this hot start go beyond those telegraphed offseason moves and Popovich's frank comments on his team's outlook.
A key number also marks the Spurs' October competency as a mirage.
Based on their point differential of minus-2.2, the Spurs already have two more wins than they should. We've known for years that a team's point differential is a far better predictor of future success than its win-loss record. It's not like the league will rescind those results, but the discrepancy between San Antonio's expected and actual wins—even at this early juncture—suggests a course-correction is imminent.
The Spurs sit in the bottom 10 in points allowed per 100 possessions, opposing three-point shooters have been unsustainably cold from the corners and Josh Richardson is posting a true shooting percentage so laughably far above his career high that we need not even address it—except to say that the journeyman wing probably won't finish the season at his current level of efficiency, which would be one of the best marks in history for a non-center.
Beyond that, San Antonio owns the second-highest turnover rate in the league, a symptom of a roster construction that includes only a single experienced point guard in Tre Jones. One of the absolute best ways to curb success is to spend huge swaths of each game without a capable playmaker on the floor. Barring a talent infusion at the point, the Spurs are bound to regress offensively.
Expect the Spurs' success to continue in spite of the underlying numbers and overarching organizational drive to lose if you want. But as Pop said, maybe don't bet on it.
Bennedict Mathurin, Indiana Pacers
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Bennedict Mathurin is the best bet to win Rookie of the Year this side of Paolo Banchero, and the Indiana Pacers' explosive and skilled wing seems destined to make multiple All-Star games. Please read that sentence six or seven more times as context for what's coming next.
Mathurin can't keep this up.
If the 6'6" Arizona product sustains his current level of production, he might warrant consideration for Rookie of the Century. The guy racked up scoring totals of 19, 26, 27, 17, 15, 11 and 32 in his first seven games, all off the bench. Related note: Chris Duarte and Aaron Nesmith should be advised that their playing-time allotments are not safe.
No first-year player has ever concluded a season with Mathurin's current line of 20.4 points per game on a 45.6/42.9/86.4 shooting split. Debbie Downer time: Generally speaking, it's fair to assume that when something has never happened before, it's unlikely to happen for a first time.
That shouldn't detract from everything Mathurin has done to this point. The athletic flashes and scoring touch he's shown so far prove Indiana got a keeper at No. 6 in the 2022 draft. Whatever role-playing expectations arose as a result of Mathurin's predraft scouting report are long gone. Those dreams of him developing, eventually, into a three-and-D support piece? Also obliterated.
Mathurin has a star's ceiling, and he's scraped up against it more than once already.
Mathurin lands here despite factors like his imminent move into the first unit that will actually give him more opportunities to produce. As impressive as he's been to this point and as good as he's likely to be going forward, the fact is nobody is quite this great over a full rookie season.
Utah Jazz
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You knew the Utah Jazz had to be next, right?
Like the Spurs, Utah has significantly outperformed its point differential in the early going. And just as Josh Richardson highlights a cast of anomalously hot shooters in San Antonio, the Jazz have enjoyed the brief and staggering era of "Kelly Olynyk: World's Greatest Marksman."
In fairness to Olynyk, he's a quality shooter for a big man. But the 31-year-old vet isn't going to can 57.1 percent of his triples over the course of the season. Nor will he continue to anchor a surprisingly stout defense. Olynyk has fallen short of regular-starter status in the past because of his limitations on that end, and yet Jazz opponents are shooting 12.2 percent worse at the rim when he's been on the floor.
A regression to the mean on both ends from a single player won't send the Jazz spiraling on their own, but Olynyk's over-his-head start is a microcosm of what we should expect from everyone else on the roster—except Lauri Markkanen, who is awesome and will sustain this breakout in his age-25 season.
More tellingly, Utah has benefited from a string of step-up efforts in clutch situations, as The Athletic's Tony Jones noted following a one-point escape over the Memphis Grizzlies:
"In the season-opener against Denver, it was [Collin] Sexton, with his nickname 'Young Bull,' revving past Nikola Jokić for the back-breaking score. Two nights later, it was Markkanen posting up a smaller Austin Rivers in the late stretches of overtime for the most important shot of the game. Two nights after that, Olynyk hit a spinning game-winning finger roll stumbling down the lane against the Pelicans. On Saturday night, it was Malik Beasley knocking home a 3 to give the Jazz a four-point lead and doing a shimmy while the crowd celebrated."
Clutch luck is a lot like win-loss record in its hazy predictive value. The better indicator that Utah is playing unsustainably well lies in the variety of its close-and-late contributors. Think of it like a quarterback controversy in football; if you have more than one option to man the position, it actually means you don't have any good ones. With the possible exception of Jordan Clarkson, who is—shocker—also playing better than he has at any point in his Jazz career, Utah doesn't have anyone who passes for a closer. Eventually, that's going to result in this streak of late-game salvation coming to a close.
All that said, there's a distinction worth making between Utah and San Antonio. Namely, the Jazz will probably have to trade their way out of this surprising success. Utah quietly has a balanced mix of rotation and staring-caliber NBA players on its roster. Jarred Vanderbilt, Mike Conley, Beasley, Olynyk and Rudy Gay have all played significant roles on playoff teams in the past. Sexton is an overqualified bench scorer, and rookie Walker Kessler has already proved to be a deterrent in the paint.
This team is good enough to post a win total in the 40s if left untouched, even after regression comes calling. In that sense, the biggest reason Utah's hot start won't last is because the front office, which proved it was willing to make drastic changes in pursuit of a goal, won't allow it.
Oklahoma City Thunder's Defense
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Currently in the third year of a Process-level rebuild, the Oklahoma City Thunder, like the Spurs and Jazz, are an obvious pick to cool off as the season progresses. That's no great revelation for a team that employs just two players over 25 and whose goal for the season probably includes a win total below that quarter-century figure.
With four wins in their first seven games, the Thunder are succeeding in a basic sense but failing in a grander one. A 46-win pace was never the plan.
Fortunately for OKC, this thing is going to come crashing down in a hurry, and there's a specific stat that points to imminent and substantial regression.
Based on the location and frequency of the shots Oklahoma City's defense is allowing, opponents should have the highest effective field-goal percentage in the league. Good luck has suppressed teams' shooting accuracy against the Thunder, and the result is an actual opponent effective field-goal percentage that sits just outside of the top 10.
Oklahoma City allows the second-highest share of opposing shots at the rim in the league, and it compounds that by surrendering the third-highest percentage of shots from the deep corners. Basically, every team that plays against the Thunder has an ideal shot profile from an expected-value standpoint. But because opponents are shooting so much worse than the league average from those spots, OKC is skating by with what appears to be a solid defense.
Give it time, and the Thunder will find themselves paying the price for the kinds of shots they're allowing. When that happens, the tank can continue in earnest.
De'Aaron Fox, Sacramento Kings
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De'Aaron Fox suffered a bone bruise in his right knee on Oct. 31 against the Charlotte Hornets, but that's not the reason his excellent start warrants a little side-eye, though it's true that the Sacramento Kings point guard is no stranger to production-sapping injuries. He hasn't played 60 games in a season since 2018-19. But again, we're not leaning on his health history.
Instead, we're expecting some pullback from the lefty speedster because Fox is shooting the ball a little too well to generate belief he can keep it up.
Through his first six games, Fox put up a 60.6 effective field-goal percentage that ranked in the 94th percentile at his position. While it's reasonable for a player to raise the bar in his age-25 season, Fox's improvement is too significant to be real. His previous career high in effective field-goal percentage was just 52.4 percent. It's unwise to think Fox will keep hitting mid-rangers at a 53.0 percent clip or that he'll continue finishing an absurd 83.0 percent of his attempts at the rim. If he were to sustain those figures, he'd basically replicate a vintage Chris Paul season on two-point jumpers while also converting at close-range better than prime Shaquille O'Neal.
Beyond the obvious fact that he's not likely to outperform a future and an established Hall of Famer from their favorite scoring spots, Fox also has some peripheral stats that should cause concern.
Once one of the best foul-drawing point guards in the league, Fox's free-throw attempts per game are lower than they've been since his rookie year. And his free-throw rate (number of foul shots attempted per field-goal attempt) has never been worse. When those mid-rangers and point-blank shots stop falling at all-time clips, the absence of cheap and efficiency-boosting free throws will result in a production nosedive.
It should be noted that Fox is hitting his threes at a 38.7 percent rate, which stands as the best of his career. Maybe if he's truly improved from beyond the arc (which wouldn't take much for a lifetime 32.1 percent shooter), the efficiency decline won't be quite as steep as it seems. Either way, though, Fox is making shots today that he's highly unlikely to keep making. If he proves this prediction wrong, he'll almost certainly wind up getting All-NBA consideration.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Accurate through Tuesday, Nov. 1. Salary info via Spotrac.
