Power Rankings: Heat, Spurs still streaking
Week: Team:
Jeremy Lin's New York Knicks in the top 10 of ESPN.com's weekly NBA Power Rankings?
Who's going to argue after the Knicks avenged the first disappointment of the Lin era -- Friday night's home loss to New Orleans -- by halting the defending champs' six-game win streak in a marquee game Sunday afternoon?
You'll have to check out the Miami Heat comment to see how historically impressive our scorching No. 1 team has been lately, avenging losses last week to the only two teams (Milwaukee and Orlando) that have beaten the Heat in February. But the Linsanity these days is such -- along with the wild ups and downs we're seeing weekly from roughly No. 7 all the way down to No. 20 -- that the Knicks have moved up seven more spots. Which follows an eight-slot jump last Monday.
And with Carmelo Anthony returning this week, Thursday night's TNT showdown that sends the Knicks to South Beach is looking like a tasty appetizer for the All-Star Weekend that follows Friday.
Check back every Monday in the regular season for a fresh and fully nonautomated pulse taking of the league's 30 teams, which is compiled with Ricky Rubio-esque dishing from ESPN Stats & Information and the Elias Sports Bureau. Click here to rank the teams yourself, or click here to comment on these rankings.
Also, check out John Hollinger's daily power rankings.
| 2011-12 Power Rankings: Week 8 | ||||
| RANK | TEAM / RECORD | TRENDING | COMMENTS | |
| 1 |  | -- Last Week: 1 | If you believe in statistical omens, check this one out: Miami just won five straight games on the road by at least 10 points before Sunday's home cruise past Orlando. The only other team in league history to win five straight roadies by a double-digit margin: New York in its title-winning season of 1969-70. | |
| 2 |  | -- Last Week: 2 | The Spurs are the rare team that we won't immediately drop after a significant injury because they just went 15-7 without the hurt-again Manu. Rest assured, though, they'd trade it all and take the No. 8 seed in the West off you right now if you could guarantee they'd have a fully healed Manu for the playoffs. | |
| 3 |  | 2 Last Week: 5 | It obviously helps to have three guys who can put up the sort of video-game numbers uncorked Sunday by Durant, Westbrook and Ibaka, but this doesn't hurt: A whopping 95 percent of the minutes doled out this season by Scott Brooks have gone to Thunder returnees. Continuity indeed wins after a lockout. | |
| 4 |  | -- Last Week: 4 | The Knicks were the heavy favorites all along to land J.R. Smith, but I gotta be honest: When CP3 expressed as much confidence as he did last week, as close as he is to J.R., I really thought that the Clips might sneak in there and steal him. L.A.'s hottest team faces far bigger letdowns, though, if Blake's FT woes deepen. | |
| 5 |  | 2 Last Week: 3 | We keep sayin' it: Outside of San Antonio, maybe no team plays through regular-season injuries like Da Bulls. A 7-3 record sans D-Rose, though, doesn't provide much joy because back injuries are so unpredictable. The East's No. 1 seed has to be secondary now to get Rose as right as possible for the playoffs. | |
| 6 |  | 3 Last Week: 9 | During its six-game winning streak, Dallas held opponents to 89.5 ppg on 39.2 percent shooting while Dirk took his total of 30-point games to three this month after none in his first 19 games. Translation: The champs can still be a title contender with that formula even when their main focus is 2012 free agency. | |
| 7 |  | 1 Last Week: 6 | A healthy Spencer Hawes was one of the first contenders to emerge in the MIP race now led by J-Lin. Now? Hawes is simply missed. The Sixers are 8-10 without him and an equally frustrating 0-5 in games decided by four points or fewer, which makes Philly the league's only team without a win in those circumstances. | |
| 8 |  | -- Last Week: 8 | You can understand why the Lakers dream of acquiring a young, athletic point guard: L.A. is on course, at 93.0 ppg, to be the lowest-scoring team in franchise history in the shot-clock era ... worse than the 1954-55 squad that averaged 95.6 ppg. Just not so sure trading Pau, at 31, can fetch that kind of PG. | |
| 9 |  | 4 Last Week: 13 | It has been suggested that a certain young Knicks guard can be counted on to divert some All-Star Weekend spotlight away from a certain local star whose free agency beckons in July. Not so sure about that one. Quite a test for Linsanity to see what sort of dent it can put into the long-awaited ASW frenzy over Dwight's future. | |
| 10 |  | 7 Last Week: 17 | K-Mart's right in a way: All this skepticism about how Melo's going to "fit" isn't fair for a scorer of his stature. But it's also still unavoidable if you watched the way J-Lin's Knicks were flying around against Dallas. The confident kiddies are playing true D'Antoni Ball now. Must-see TV when Iso Melo joins in. | |
| 11 |  | 4 Last Week: 15 | You can reasonably argue there's no All-Star snub bigger than the Future Stars game snub of Nikola Pekovic, who's only averaging 18.3 ppg and 10.5 rpg in February. You can also chalk up another win over a division leader for the Wolves, who just added Philly to the Spurs (twice) and Clips on their list of victims. | |
| 12 |  | 7 Last Week: 19 | Good things happen to teams wearing truly hideous uniforms. What other conclusion can we draw after the Grizz beat Denver on a Dante Cunningham tip-in wearing their usual gear, switched to the dreaded TAMS look for the next game against Golden State ... and then won that one on Tony Allen's late putback? | |
| 13 |  | 3 Last Week: 16 | "No big deal" was Scola's assessment entering Friday's reunion with K-Love. To be clear, though, Scola was talking strictly about the stomp that got Love suspended for two games. Minnesota's third straight win over the Rockets? Fueled by Love's 33 and 17? A definitely big (and galling) deal in the super-tight West. | |
| 14 |  | 7 Last Week: 7 | The committee (of one) will not be placated by a narrow home win over the Nets and a rout of the eminently stomp-able Bobcats. Not after the Pacers came to Dallas, wowed the watching committee in person and then acted like the season ended right there by dropping six of the next seven with little fire. | |
| 15 |  | 1 Last Week: 14 | Sorry. Not ready to co-sign the theory that the Blazers' West-leading six wins by 20-plus points suggest great potential when they're No. 30 in games decided by five or less at 2-10. Always fearful about looming injuries, Portland has surely suffered psyche-wise as well from its late-game woes. | |
| 16 |  | 4 Last Week: 12 | More fodder for those of you, like me, who feel like J-Smoove should have been Atlanta's All-Star over Joe Johnson: JJ averaged 19.8 ppg in January but is down to 14.3 ppg in February. He hasn't averaged fewer than 15 points per game in any calendar month, according to Elias, since December 2004 in Phoenix. | |
| 17 |  | 6 Last Week: 11 | Depth is what was supposed to make them special in this lockout-compacted season, but even the Nuggets don't have enough in reserve to win minus Gallinari and Nene with their offense-by-committee approach ... as evidenced by their ongoing 2-8 nosedive. We repeat: Wilson Chandler can't re-sign fast enough. | |
| 18 |  | 8 Last Week: 10 | Nobody got sucked into the Beware Boston talk more than me because of the Celts' still-reliable D, but now I can only echo this late-night tweet from radio play-by-play man Sean Grande after the second loss to Detroit in the space of five days: "It's hard to look on the bright side ... when you can't see one." | |
| 19 |  | 1 Last Week: 18 | Two road games left in Utah's long, back-to-earth month. They're still a top-three team when it comes to points in the paint ... but likewise still a bottom-three team in 3-point shooting. Also troubling: Millsap's response to his All-Star snub has been a dip in scoring of nearly six ppg from January to February. | |
| 20 |  | 7 Last Week: 27 | With a loss to the lowly Nets in its first game of the month, Detroit became the first team in the league to sink to 20 losses this season. Remember that low point? All they've done since is go 7-2, which includes two wins over the lowly Nets ... but also two wins and 194 points against uber-stingy Boston. | |
| 21 |  | -- Last Week: 21 | If Nash is destined to finish this season in Phoenix, this weekend's detour to Orlando looms as the high point of his 2011-12 with the playoffs already out of reach. He's at 14.2 ppg and 11.0 apg, along with .543 shooting, at age 38. In his first MVP season at 31, Nash averaged 15.5 ppg and 11.5 apg while shooting .502. | |
| 22 |  | 2 Last Week: 20 | Does the fact that this team has no 30-year-olds on the roster (unless you count the injured Kwame Brown) make it harder or easier for Warriors fans to accept the fact that Saturday's loss at Memphis was the Dubs' ninth already this season when they were within a point, leading or tied with 90 seconds to play? | |
| 23 |  | 2 Last Week: 25 | It wasn't the sort of dazzling drive he delivered to beat Boston and Dallas, but Kyrie's two FTs with 0.4 seconds left Sunday night to finish off Sacramento marked the third time in Cleveland's past five victories that the rook -- after missing three games due to that concussion -- served up the Cavs' game-winning points. | |
| 24 | New Orleans 7-23 | 5 Last Week: 29 | Can't find it now, of course, but there was a good line on Twitter -- after the league-run Hornets shocked the world by becoming the only team ever to beat Jeremy Lin as a starter -- about how they were always going to play over their heads in NYC to impress their owners. Anyone know who came up with that one? | |
| 25 | New Jersey 9-24 | 3 Last Week: 28 | Maybe his return from a lengthy injury absence won't excite Magic fans, but the Nets need Brook Lopez back for more than just DH12 trade proposals: They're averaging a mere 30.7 points per game in the paint without Lopez, which has New Jersey on course to record the fourth-lowest figure in the past 15 seasons. | |
| 26 |  | 3 Last Week: 23 | Swen Nater was the Buffalo Braves' last starting center and is thus legendary to me. So it's a great privilege to ignore all of the Bucks' recent misery and focus on the fact that Ilyasova's 29 points and 25 boards in New Jersey was a first for the Bucks since Nater had a 30-and-33 game in December 1976. | |
| 27 |  | 5 Last Week: 22 | I tend to believe that the city of Sacramento will ultimately manufacture the arena deal needed to keep the Kings in town, but I've got another issue to raise with Mayor Johnson while we wait for that drama to play out: Can you still play, KJ? No team needs a real point guard more than your hometown team. | |
| 28 |  | 2 Last Week: 26 | If we weren't already headed for the most delicious rookie/soph game of all time -- with Rubio and Blake on the same squad and Jeremy Lin added to the party right after Commissioner Stern vowed not to add him -- John Wall fuming about Shaq and Chuck drafting 11 players before him pretty much clinches it. | |
| 29 |  | 5 Last Week: 24 | The Raps guarded J-Lin about as well as anyone's guarded him so far. Which we'd celebrate with more gusto if they didn't just lose at home to a Charlotte team that has seven 30-point losses already, something only two teams in the past 25 seasons did more often: Denver in '90-91 (10) and Philly in '93-94 (nine). | |
| 30 | Charlotte 4-27 | -- Last Week: 30 | His Airness was always going to have a good 49th birthday ... with or without the win over Toronto that halted the Bobs' 16-game losing streak. How do we know? The way MJ was trending Friday on Twitter tells you that the masses barely even associate him with a squad that wouldn't win the D-League. | |
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