Power Rankings: Red-hot Heat No. 1
Week: Team:
It was always going to take some sort of slip by San Antonio, no matter how well Miami's been playing, for the defending champs to bump the scalding Spurs out of the top spot in ESPN.com's weekly NBA Power Rankings.
Cue San Antonio's home loss to Phoenix last week, followed by the loss of Tony Parker for an estimated four weeks to an ankle sprain, to make it academic now that the Heat, having stretched their winning streak to a whopping 14 games, are your new No. 1.
The longest win streak of LeBron James' career means Miami -- amazingly for the first time since the opening week of the regular season -- has made it back to the summit of these rankings ahead of all the Western Conference contenders who'll be beating each other up in the playoffs. Indiana has retained its top-five slot, thanks largely to an 8-3 mark against the rest of the East's top five, but seven teams in the top 10 reside in the West, with Oklahoma City bumping San Antonio down to No. 3 thanks to a momentous road victory Sunday at Staples Center over the No. 4 Clippers.
The rankings, as always, were compiled with peerless assistance from ESPN Stats & Information and the Elias Sports Bureau. Click here to rank the teams yourself. And click here to review all the Trimester award winners in the latest Weekend Dime.
Also, check out John Hollinger's daily Power Rankings.
| 2012-13 Power Rankings: Week 18 | ||||
| RANK | TEAM / RECORD | TRENDING | COMMENTS | |
| 1 |  | 1 Last Week: 2 | LeBron is bidding to become just the fourth non-center in NBA history to average at least 27 points while shooting no less than 56 percent from the floor; Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and Adrian Dantley are the only predecessors. Side effect: Miami's 14 straight wins include nine by double digits. | |
| 2 |  | 1 Last Week: 3 | We might have just witnessed the most significant weekend of OKC's season (or at least the regular season). The Thunder were in a 3-7 road funk before moving to 3-0 for the season against the Clips. Have to favor 'em now to snag the West's top seed if Tony Parker indeed misses a month. | |
| 3 |  | 2 Last Week: 1 | The Spurs are 4-1 sans Tony Parker with only a loss to the Heat. So maybe, as Jeff Van Gundy predicted on TV, they'll do better without him than we all think. You know, though, that they'll be ultra-cautious and forfeit the West's top seed if they have to if TP needs more than a month to heal. | |
| 4 |  | 1 Last Week: 5 | No sense gushing about the gaudy .704 winning percentage that the Clips toted into Sunday's big home date with OKC after they fell to 0-3 for the season against the Thunder ... and not even two weeks removed from getting blasted at Staples by the Spurs. They needed a trade, didn't they? | |
| 5 |  | 1 Last Week: 4 | Couple of red flags for Indy, possibly? New face of the franchise Paul George is averaging only 15 ppg on the road compared to nearly 21 ppg at home. And his Pacers, in news that sounds somewhat related, happen to be the NBA's only division leader out of six with a losing record on the road. | |
| 6 |  | 1 Last Week: 7 | As good as the Nuggets have been at home over the years, they haven't started this well in the altitude -- tops in the West at 25-3 -- since the first two seasons ('76-77 and '77-78) after the NBA/ABA merger. They're also one of just two teams, alongside the Clips, with three W's over the Lakers. | |
| 7 |  | 1 Last Week: 6 | Only two teams out there have managed to avoid a three-game road losing streak this season: Miami and these Grizzlies. What they've got to avoid from here, though, is any standings slippage. If you're on a crash course with Denver for Round 1, you've got to be the higher seed. Need to. | |
| 8 |  | -- Last Week: 8 | The Rockets were due to bust out against their fellow Texans after nine straight L's to the Mavs, but busting out in general has long since become a habit. These Rockets are up to 20 games this season with at least 115 points, which they last achieved in 1990-91 by scoring that many 21 times. | |
| 9 |  | 2 Last Week: 11 | Sixty-one. An iconic number in sports that, for the Lakers, has nothing to do with Maris & Mantle. For 61 days, until Sunday's one-point win over Atlanta, L.A. was a sub-.500 ballclub. Which is the longest we've seen the Lakers under .500 since a 91-day span in 2002-03 after Shaq and Kobe's three-peat. | |
| 10 |  | 2 Last Week: 12 | Some good news after two-plus months of 18-17 mediocrity: No one below the Knicks in the East standings is playing consistently well enough to make you think they can bump 'em out of the top three. Especially if New York weathers this forthcoming stretch with nine of 13 on the road. | |
| 11 |  | 2 Last Week: 13 | Grateful that the Celts always seem to have at least one home game during Sloan conference weekend for the committee (of one) to drop into the Garden, soak up one more dose of Pierce and KG old-schooling while Avery Bradley harasses folks all over the floor, then grab a postgame slice. | |
| 12 |  | 3 Last Week: 15 | Down by three with 13 seconds to go in Indy, Tom Thibodeau trotted out the fivesome of Marco Belinelli, Jimmy Butler, Luol Deng, Vladimir Radmanovic and Joakim Noah for the first time all season. And they clinched an L that sealed the Pacers' first triumph in the season series since 2003-04. | |
| 13 |  | 4 Last Week: 9 | The Dubs just wrapped up 14 of 19 games on the road and close with 16 of their final 22 games at home. So they're probably not as catchable as they've looked lately, with Steph Curry becoming just the third player in 17 seasons to average 36-plus points over a four-game span and lose 'em all. | |
| 14 |  | 4 Last Week: 10 | The Lakers really haven't played as well as their 13-5 mark since Jan. 25 suggests, but I still say that the Jazz -- even after winning their season series with L.A. -- are at the greatest risk to drop out of the top eight given Golden State's home-heavy schedule ... and Houston's unconscious offense. | |
| 15 |  | 1 Last Week: 16 | Remember last Monday's line about how the Hawks are 15-2 when Al Horford scores 20? The record isn't quite as gaudy after road L's to the Suns and Lakers dropped Atlanta to 17-4, but Horford has scored 20 or more in a career-high nine straight games. His previous longest run? Two. | |
| 16 |  | 4 Last Week: 20 | The Bucks had all of two wins in February -- over Orlando and Philly -- when they got to Texas last week. The fight they showed to sweep a Dallas-Houston back-to-back and then hold off Toronto in OT suggests that all of last month's trade speculation was messing with these guys' heads. | |
| 17 |  | 2 Last Week: 19 | On the rebounding front: J.J. Hickson is up to nine 15-and-15 games this season -- second only to Dwight Howard -- but LaMarcus Aldridge recently went seven straight games with six boards or fewer. That's Aldridge's longest such streak since a 16-gamer during his rookie season in 2006-07. | |
| 18 |  | 4 Last Week: 14 | D-Will has been a better player, bad ankles and all, since returning from the All-Star break. Brook Lopez leads all centers with 26 20-point games. And still Brooklyn has given LeBron little reason to amend his All-Star Weekend statement that omitted the Nets as a threat to Miami in the East. | |
| 19 |  | 2 Last Week: 21 | If heads drop in DC in the wake of Bradley Beal's twisted ankle, you can understand why. It happened the same week Beal registered his ninth and 10th 20-point games of 2013, second this calendar year among rookies to Damian Lillard's 13. (Cleveland's Dion Waiters is third with seven.) | |
| 20 |  | 2 Last Week: 18 | After two full-fledged debacles -- blowing a 25-point lead in Memphis and then giving up 136 points in Houston -- Dallas can't even delude itself into thinking that the playoffs are still in play. The Mavs, at this point, will be fortunate to make it back to .500 just once to finally hack those beards away. | |
| 21 |  | 1 Last Week: 22 | Have you noticed that the Cavs are a sneaky 10-7 since starting 10-32? I'll tell you who has noticed: Cavs fans. It's a loyal, loyal bunch not happy that freshly named Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month Dion Waiters was denied the sort of props Bradley Beal got from the evil Trimester committee. | |
| 22 |  | 5 Last Week: 27 | Records you never thought the Suns would set: Marcin Gortat, Markieff Morris and Wesley Johnson shared team-high honors with 14 points apiece in an OT win over Minnesota. Phoenix is the first NBA team in the shot-clock era to win an overtime game without a single player scoring 15 points. | |
| 23 |  | 6 Last Week: 17 | The feel-good factor stemming from the Raps' first winning month in TWENTY dating back to January 2010 didn't last long thanks to that OT loss in Milwaukee that realistically dashed any faint playoff hopes after a 7-5 February. P.S.: Rudy Gay is shooting 38.7 percent from the floor as a Raptor. | |
| 24 | New Orleans 21-39 | 1 Last Week: 23 | More about the Hornet we can't stop writing about: Elias says Greivis Vasquez is one of only three players in NBA history to lead their team in assists (either outright or tied) in each of the first 60 games of the season. Jason Kidd did it with the Nets in 2001-02; John Stockton did it four times. | |
| 25 |  | 3 Last Week: 28 | Let's take a 20 from the relocation gloom to talk a little hoops here for a change: Sacramento became just the fourth team in history to win a road game by 20 points or more after a double-OT game the previous night with its rout of Orlando on the heels of that unexpected thriller in Miami. | |
| 26 |  | 1 Last Week: 25 | The Bynum saga is only getting sadder with the news that more surgery looms, but you'd struggle to find a GM who wouldn't have made the same trade Philly did. Had to gamble on Drew after maxing out with the previous group and probably have to bring him back given how young he is. | |
| 27 |  | 1 Last Week: 26 | A long-awaited spell of Derrick Williams productivity, Ricky Rubio's ongoing return to full-speed form after his ACL tear and Kevin Love's vow to come back this month sets up the Wolves to be Washington of the West. The quality team we expected all along, that is, but way too late in the game. | |
| 28 |  | 4 Last Week: 24 | I know that the Pistons miss Andre Drummond -- we all miss Andre Drummond, no one more so than longtime ESPN.com NBA editor Royce Webb -- but how does Detroit go from beating San Antonio by 10 on Feb. 8, to losing to the Tony Parker-less Spurs by 39 just 23 days later? | |
| 29 |  | 1 Last Week: 30 | Questionable as you might find it that I included Nikola Vucevic in the MIP section of the latest Trimester report when his team is in the midst of a 4-31 free fall, but please bear in mind that he's third in the NBA with 33 double-doubles this season. After just two in 51 games last season in Philly. | |
| 30 | Charlotte 13-46 | 1 Last Week: 29 | Michael Jordan's Bobcats fell behind by as many as 43 points in Sunday night's hammering by Sacramento. It's the fifth time over the past two seasons Charlotte has been down by 40 or more, while none of the other 29 teams has faced that sort of deficit more than twice -- this season or last. | |
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