If you’re one of those people who say they hate surprises, you’re probably lying to yourself. Studies have shown that most people love surprises, as noted in an experiment from Emory University where scientists studied the subjects’ brains while they received intermittent bursts of either water or fruit juice.
“We find that so-called pleasure centers in the brain do not react equally to any pleasurable substance, but instead react more strongly when the pleasures are unexpected,” said Gregory S. Berns, one of the leaders of the 2001 study. “This means that the brain finds unexpected pleasures more rewarding than expected ones, and it may have little to do with what people say they like.”
If that’s the case, this has been an extremely pleasurable NBA season. While some things have gone according to plan, like the Phoenix Suns being really good and Giannis Antetokounmpo terrorizing the league, the season has been full of unexpected twists and turns, both good and bad.
Below we have ranked the seven biggest surprises of the 2021-22 NBA season.
Please check the opt-in box to acknowledge that you would like to subscribe.
Thanks for signing up!
Keep an eye on your inbox.
Sorry!
There was an error processing your subscription.
Sure, there were rumblings. But did we actually think it was going to happen this season? There was reported mutual interest dating back to last season between Harden and 76ers president Daryl Morey to get the superstar guard to Philadelphia, but the Brooklyn Nets entered the season as the consensus favorite to win the NBA title, so it seemed unlikely that Harden would be dealt before the offseason, if at all.
Then Kyrie Irving refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, rendering him inactive for every Brooklyn home game (and some road games), Kevin Durant suffered a knee injury that kept him out for six weeks, and suddenly we were seeing a lackluster effort from Harden nearly identical to what we saw during his disgruntled final days in Houston. Things reached a nadir in Sacramento, when Harden scored just four points on 11 shots, his lowest scoring output in at least 30 minutes since 2014, and gave little to no effort on the defensive end.
We certainly knew Harden had this kind of tactic in him, but not many expected to see it this season. Common thinking was that if Durant returned healthy and the vaccine mandate was eventually lifted (which it might be), the Nets would still have a strong chance to win the title no matter their playoff seed.
Instead Harden wanted out, and now the 76ers have jumped Brooklyn in the championship odds. Quite an unexpected development.
2. The Lakers disaster
I can see you filing through your old tweets looking for the one where you predicted that Russell Westbrook would be a bad fit with the Los Angeles Lakers and that their roster around LeBron James and Anthony Davis was too old. Yes, the concerns were there. But be honest with yourself — you didn’t think it would be this bad. Like, ninth-seed bad. Like, seven games under .500 bad.
Sportsbooks projected the Lakers to win somewhere around 52 games this season. With slightly more than a month left in the season, they’re sitting at half of that total. The crazy thing is, James is having a phenomenal and relatively healthy season as a 37-year-old, with his highest scoring average since his first stint in Cleveland back in 2010. Even with that, the Lakers have been this bad, partly due to Davis only playing in 37 games and Westbrook’s lack of significant production.
The Lakers have a negative net rating with James and Westbrook on the floor together, and things get even worse, falling to minus-5.5, with Westbrook on the court without LeBron. For players who have attempted at least 200 3-pointers this season, Westbrook has the third-worst percentage in the league at 28.4. He’s shooting 56 percent in the restricted area, per NBA.com, which is the worst for any player with at least six such attempts per game, and he’s making just 32 percent of his shots in the paint outside the restricted area, second-worst in the NBA for players with at least 150 attempts.
“This trade could go down as the worst trade in Laker history,” Lakers great Magic Johnson said of the deal that brought Westbrook to L.A. from Washington in exchange for Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Montrezl Harrell and the No. 22 pick in the 2021 draft. “I’m tired of the excuses. It’s time to take ownership and say I’ve been playing poorly but hopefully I can turn it around.”
Westbrook’s poor performance has come with the added drama of fourth-quarter benchings, potential demotions to the reserve unit and all the speculation leading up to the trade deadline and beyond. That being said, it can’t all be blamed on him. The Lakers’ defense, first in the league last season and third during their championship season in 2019-20, has slipped to 17th, as head coach Frank Vogel’s seat has become perennially hot. Further, Davis hasn’t been at the MVP level they need him to be, even when he has been on the court.
Pretty much everything that can go wrong has gone wrong for the Lakers this season, with the exception of LeBron, and they’ve greatly underperformed even the most modest of preseason expectations.
The writing was on the wall after the Grizzlies overachieved their way into a first-round playoff matchup with the Utah Jazz last year, but not many expected the Grizzlies to get this good, this fast. Their preseason win total was set by sportsbooks at around 41, and Memphis has already reached 44 wins with 16 games left in the season as it looks to secure the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference.
Their top-10 defense is right around where it was last season, but the biggest change has come on the offensive end, where the Grizzlies are currently fourth in the NBA after finishing 15th last season. Obviously much of that improvement is the result of yet another leap, both literally and figuratively, from Ja Morant, who has turned himself into a bona fide MVP candidate who can drop 52 points while doing absurd things like this on any given night:
Memphis has also been able to do all of this with Dillon Brooks, widely considered at least its third-best player entering the season, playing only 21 games. A ton of credit goes to head coach Taylor Jenkins for his system, strategy and rotations, along with the front office for crafting a deep, talented roster at a rock-bottom price. Desmond Bane has emerged as a secondary scoring threat while Jaren Jackson Jr. continues to blossom on both ends of the floor. The scariest part about the Grizzlies? They have one of the youngest rosters in the entire league, and they’re only getting better.
4. Cleveland’s return to relevance
While most saw the Grizzlies’ momentum growing, the same can’t be said for the Cleveland Cavaliers, who finished with the fourth-fewest wins in the NBA last season. Sportsbooks set their projected 2021-22 win total around 27.5, which appears laughable after the season the Cavs have produced. They’ve already destroyed that estimate, and are within striking distance of a top-four seed in a gauntlet of an Eastern Conference. Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen have both already developed into All-Stars, while No. 3 overall pick Evan Mobley is the front-runner for Rookie of the Year with his spectacular two-way play.
Speaking of two-way play, the biggest surprise of Cleveland’s season has been its defense, currently fourth in the league with a 106.7 defensive rating after finishing 25th last season and dead last the two seasons before that. Head coach J.B. Bickerstaff has zagged against the small-ball trend, starting three 7-footers in Allen, Mobley and Lauri Markkanen for most of the season. As a result, they’ve allowed the fewest points per possession around the rim in the entire NBA, according to Synergy Sports.
With season-ending injuries to Collin Sexton and Ricky Rubio, the Cavs offense hasn’t come around as quickly. But they’re in almost every single game because of their suffocating defense — which sounds baffling given how bad they’ve been on that end over the past several seasons.
“Every game we win is going to have to start on the defensive end of the floor,” Bickerstaff said. “That’s the grind we have to play with. That’s the only way we give ourselves a chance.”
The Chicago Bulls are on pace to far surpass their projected preseason win total of 42.5, but some experts and fans probably aren’t too surprised to see them as a top-four seed in the East. What surely nobody saw coming was DeRozan playing his way squarely into the MVP discussion with a career-high 28 points per game as a 32-year-old. If anything, DeRozan’s scoring was expected to decrease next to bucket-getters Zach LaVine and Nikola Vucevic. Instead he’s become one of the league’s leading scorers through his midrange mastery.
DeRozan is making 50 percent of his 9.5 midrange attempts per game, according to NBA.com. No other player in the league takes more than 7.4 midrange shots per game. His 50 percent clip is second only to Kevin Durant for players with more than five midrange attempts per game.
The scoring average is one thing, but DeRozan’s clutch play is what has really separated him as an MVP candidate. He’s shooting 50 percent from the field in clutch situations, according to NBA.com, helping the Bulls to a plus-11.4 clutch net rating — the fifth-highest mark in the league. The pinnacle of DeRozan’s ice-cold veins came on back-to-back game-winning, buzzer-beating 3-pointers on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
Speaking of 3-pointers, while they’re still not a huge part of his game, DeRozan is shooting a career-high 36 percent on 1.8 attempts per game from behind the arc this season. He may not win the award, but the fact that DeRozan is even being considered as an MVP candidate is one of the biggest surprises of the year.
6. Steph Curry’s unprecedented shooting slump
Some variation of the phrase has been uttered after every poor shooting performance from Steph Curry this season: “Don’t worry. He’ll break out of it eventually.” The problem is, he hasn’t. Not yet anyway.
Our Brad Botkin broke down the ups and downs of Curry’s streaky shooting, but the fact remains: Curry is shooting 38 percent from the 3-point line — a strong accuracy level for any mere human, but more than three points lower than his career-low mark of 41 percent. He’s also shooting a career-worst 43 percent from the field, discounting his five-game 2019-20 season.
Most telling, perhaps, is Curry’s percentage on “wide open” 3-pointers, which NBA.com defines as attempts with the closest defender six or more feet away. Last season, Curry made 47 percent of them. In 2018-19, he made 52 percent. This season, he’s making “just” 41 percent of them. What used to be essentially a layup for Curry has now become a more difficult proposition. We’re simply not used to seeing the greatest shooter in basketball history miss open attempts like these, particularly this badly.
Again, everything is relative. Curry is having a very good shooting season. He’s just not having a Curry-level shooting season, which the Warriors need if they’re going to compete for a title.
7. What happened to the Hawks?
Red flags went up during just the first week of the season, when Trae Young called the regular season “boring” and said that Atlanta needed to “find that motivation.” The concern has turned out to be warranted. The Hawks got the band back together after making an unexpected run to the Eastern Conference finals last year, and were poised to, at the very least, be in the mix for a top-four seed this season.
Instead they’ve struggled from the get-go, finding themselves below .500 and fighting for a play-in spot with just over a month left in the regular season. They would have to win pretty much all of their remaining games to reach their projected preseason win total of 46.5. Their defense, which was 13th in the league in the final 38 games of last season after Nate McMillan took over as head coach, has fallen to 27th this season.
The Hawks have also been dismal in the clutch (games within five points with five minutes remaining), landing 27th in the NBA with a minus-15.5 net rating and going 12-14 in those games. After McMillan took over last season, they went 12-5 in those situations with the league’s third-best clutch net rating at plus-16.1.
A potential hangover from last postseason could have been expected, but not many could have predicted the Hawks sitting at No. 10 in the East this far into the 2021-22 season.
