The Chicago Bulls, New York Knicks, Golden State Warriors and Oklahoma City Thunder won their first round series, but fell short of reaching the NBA's Final Four. 

Chicago Bulls

The Big Questions:

- Can Jimmy Butler become a good starter or even better next season?

- Is ownership willing to amnesty Carlos Boozer in 2014?

- Will they get a few nice bench values like Nate Robinson and Marco Belinelli this summer?

- Do they cut Rip Hamilton to save money?

Notable Free Agents:  Nate Robinson (Unrestricted), Marco Belinelli (Unrestricted), Rip Hamilton (Partially Guaranteed) and Nazr Mohammed (Unrestricted)

2013 Draft Picks Held:  Own 1st Rounder, Own 2nd Rounder

The Lay of the Land: Even after Chicago shed so much of the bench depth that played a huge role in their 2011-2012 season, players like Nate Robinson and Marco Belinelli ended up doing a solid enough job in Derrick Rose’s absence for a full season. Having Tom Thibodeau and his system helps a ton, of course. 

I cannot wait to see if Jimmy Butler can become a huge piece of the Bulls’ future because he has shown some incredible flashes this season. Since Luol Deng only has one more season under contract, Chicago does not have a ton of time to figure out whether Butler fits in better as a Deng complement, Deng replacement, or neither since 2014 would be their only chance in the near future to even have a possibility of cap space (if they amnesty Boozer). Considering we have not seen Rose play in such a long time, it would be surprising to see the Bulls make any big moves before seeing how everything fits together in the 2013-14 regular season. That said, some smart moves with their mid-level could make the team even more dangerous for a full season with a healthy Rose.

New York Knicks

The Big Questions:

- Will J.R. Smith re-sign with the Knicks?

- Seriously, will they be able to keep JR Smith?

- Can New York get a young guy or two in the frontcourt?

Notable Free Agents: J.R. Smith (Player Option), Chris Copeland (Restricted), Pablo Prigioni (Restricted) and Kenyon Martin (Unrestricted)

2013 Draft Picks Held:  Own 1st Rounder (own 2nd Rounder held by Washington)

The Lay of the Land: Thanks to the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, teams over the luxury tax line have an incredibly hard time improving. That change makes J.R. Smith’s decision so much more important since the No. 2 team in the Eastern Conference would not be able to replace him easily if at all. Smith seems happy with the Knicks but would presumably be giving up a ton of money to stay and he has never gotten that big contract despite his immense potential.

Beyond Smith, the Knickerbockers have nine players under contract for next season not including Pablo Prigioni and Chris Copeland.  Since they cannot receive players via sign-and-trade this summer, New York has to hope both will opt to return to the team for at least next season either by signing reasonable deals with the Knicks or by securing matchable deals with other squads. Considering all the money the Knicks already have committed for 2014 outside of him, even the looming opt-out for Carmelo Anthony next summer cannot dictate too many moves at the present time.

Golden State Warriors

The Big Questions:

- Can they retain both Jarrett Jack and Carl Landry without ruining their long-term flexibility? Should they?

- Would they be willing to trade any of their big expiring contracts for a talent upgrade and more money for 2014 and beyond?

- Can they buy a pick in the late first or early second round?

- If either Jack or Landry head elsewhere, can the team effectively replace them given their limitations as a luxury tax payer?

Notable Free Agents: Jarrett Jack (Unrestricted), Carl Landry (Player Option) and Brandon Rush (Player Option)

2013 Draft Picks Held:  None (1st Rounder held by Utah, 2nd Rounder held by Orlando)

The Lay of the Land: After a successful season largely driven by strong years from their stars and quality depth, the Warriors will have to figure out if they can keep two pivotal rotation players. The team acquired Jarrett Jack heading into the last year of his contract and he had a fabulous year, garnering serious Sixth Man of the Year consideration. Carl Landry had a productive season and has a $4 million player option for next summer. Considering their ages (both turn 30 before the start of next season), this could be a chance for them to take a longer contract for the last time. That desire could take them away from the Bay.

The Warriors have cornerstone Stephen Curry locked up now, but will eventually need to pay Klay Thompson and Harrison Barnes while enigmatic big man Andrew Bogut has one more year left before unrestricted free agency. Golden State should be less aggressive in retaining Jack and Landry if the players want the Warriors to commit to them for longer than the team is comfortable with considering those factors. Finally, the team could make the decision to give up possible space in 2014 by trading expiring deals belonging to Andris Biedrins and/or Richard Jefferson for quality players signed for more years. Considering the desirability of next year’s free agent crop and the oppressive nature of the luxury tax, they might be able to improve the team that way though it would limit their flexibility in future offseasons.

Oklahoma City Thunder

The Big Questions:

- Do they re-sign Kevin Martin?

- Can they turn the Toronto lottery pick into an immediate contributor?

- Will they use the amnesty on Kendrick Perkins?

Notable Free Agents: Kevin Martin (Unrestricted) and Ronnie Brewer (Unrestricted)

2013 Draft Picks Held: Own 1st Rounder, Toronto’s 1st Rounder, Charlotte’s 2nd Rounder (own 2nd Rounder held by Minnesota)

The Lay of the Land: The same financial reality that led to the James Harden trade persists for Oklahoma City. While we cannot expect Kevin Martin to get paid an amount similar to his current $12.5 million, the Thunder do not have a ton of room to retain him with what could be a respectable market for an efficient scorer who can start or come off the bench. Fortunately, the Thunder have young guys on the roster who can try and take the role as well as a lottery pick from Toronto. These players could either take the role themselves or be used as assets in a deal to bring the right piece to OKC.

Sam Presti also has to make a decision on Kendrick Perkins because shedding the final two years of his contract would allow the team to be more creative in filling their more important holes in the rotation. That could be kicked down the road to Perkins’ final season (when Thabo Sefolosha becomes a free agent) but now is the right time to pull the trigger if they want a strong No. 4 after Durant, Westbrook and Ibaka.

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Kansas fans are still smiling about Andrew Wiggins’ decision to attend the school. In this edition, I explore how the rest of the Big 12 will look in 2012-13.

For a description of the model that generated these rankings click here.

For an explanation of column headings click here.

Kansas: As I noted on Twitter, if you think Kansas should have a better projection, you may be right. The historic data may not give us an accurate read on Andrew Wiggins. If he is the best high school prospect since LeBron James, that literally means there hasn’t been a comparable freshman in my data. On the other hand, if we can learn something from past freshman phenoms, the lesson is to be careful. In 2010, pundits everywhere claimed that Harrison Barnes was the No. 1 player in the country and one of the greatest prospects on the planet. Then Barnes had such a dreadful freshman season that he stuck around for his sophomore year. And even if Wiggins is great, on a young team with an entirely new starting lineup, there will likely be a few hiccups.

Oklahoma St.: You know your team is headed in the right direction when this is one of your top off-season questions:

Can JUCO center Gary Gaskins replace what Philip Jurick gave Oklahoma St. last year? Jurick wasn’t much of an offensive player, and he was in foul trouble way too often, but he did provide some nice size, shot-blocking, and rebounding when he was on the court.

Yes, the Cowboys return 93% of their offensive possessions on a team that almost won the Big 12 last season. With Markel Brown throwing down more windmill dunks, LeBryan Nash hopefully maturing into his high potential, Michael Cobbins continuing to dominate the paint, and All-American candidate Marcus Smart returning to school, the future is bright.

The only negative piece of news I can find is this. ESPN dropped recruit Detrick Mostella out of its Top 100. (I’m still counting him as a Top 100 recruit until the final consensus rankings are out.)

Baylor: I provided a more detailed summary of Baylor’s lineup last week, but here are a few more thoughts: Losing LJ Rose and Deuce Bello is not a big deal. They had ORtgs of 69 and 86 last year. In fact, Baylor actually moved up from 25th to 24th in my model with the announcement that Rose is gone. He won’t be wasting a handful of possessions in meaningless games this year. And with the recent news that Denver’s Royce O’Neale will be transferring to join the team, Baylor could move even higher. (I want to hear more confirmation that O’Neale will be eligible immediately before I move him into the lineup.)

Iowa St.: Fred Hoiberg just refuses to have a rebuilding year. He has added four JUCO players this off-season. By bringing in transfers three years in a row, he has ensured he has enough veterans to compete each season.

Part of me thinks this is because he is hoping to jump to the NBA. Hoiberg doesn’t want a down-season to wreck his reputation. But if the quick fixes keep working, it is hard to argue with the strategy.

The only real question mark is at PG where freshman Monte Morris has been rising up the recruiting ranks, but still isn’t high enough to be a guaranteed star. Still, with all those JUCO players supporting Georges Niang, Melvin Ejim, and Top 100 prospect Matt Thomas, this team should finish in the top half of the Big 12.

West Virginia: Right now I have West Virginia as the 45th best team in the nation, which would put them squarely on the bubble. But I have complete confidence that Bob Huggins will be back in the tournament. And it isn’t just based on his history of winning. The roster turnover for West Virginia is ideal. Deniz Kilicli, Jabarie Hinds, and Dominque Rutledge had ORtgs of 92, 86, and 84 last year. They were the three least efficient players in the West Virginia lineup. And their departure should hasten the improvement in the West Virginia offense.

I will never understand why Bob Huggins felt so compelled to build his offense around Kilicli. He may have been big and bearded, but he was a poor rebounder, poor finisher, and he had bad hands. Trusting Kilicli was one of Bob Huggins worst decisions at West Virginia.

But Huggins refuses to have another team that lacks interior strength. Huggins is bringing in Top 50 recruit Devin Williams in the paint, two JUCO paint players, and three more freshman forwards. The message is pretty simple. Bob Huggins is tired of his post-play being a liability.

Texas and Kansas St.: I stared at this for awhile, because it surprised me that Texas has a better defensive projection than Kansas St. The bottom line is that the teams had equivalent defenses last year, the coaches have almost identical historical defensive performance (Rick Barnes is seriously under-rated as a defensive coach), and thus it came down to two other factors. First, Texas has more Top 100 recruits. Having athletic players helps on defense as well as offense. Second, Texas returns a larger percentage of its rotation, which should help with continuity.

Still, I suspect Bruce Weber will do even better defensively than what you see here. And he’ll need to given what Kansas St. loses. The Wildcats return just 44 percent of their possessions from last season, and with no elite recruits coming in and no high potential players on the roster, the offense is simply going to take a huge step back.

The Kansas St. player most likely to break out is probably Thomas Gipson. He has been a relatively efficient aggressive player his whole career, and with more playing time, his PPG and RPG numbers should skyrocket.

Shane Southwell and Will Spradling are also quality players, but both have flags that make the model question whether they can become stars. For Southwell, there is a concern whether last year’s hot three point shooting will be sustainable. Southwell suddenly jumped from being a guy who couldn’t buy a three pointer to a 44 percent three point shooter last year, and there may be some regression. And Spradling was super-efficient, but rarely shot. It isn’t clear whether Spradling can maintain his efficiency while taking a larger role on the team.

But even if the Kansas St. offense falls off dramatically, the Texas offense still looks worse on paper. Returning Top 100 recruits Cameron Ridley, Prince Ibeh, Javan Felix, and Jonathan Holmes should make some progress. But even if they do, this still won’t be a good offensive team.

Oklahoma: The Big 12 is really becoming the land of JUCO transfers this year. When Amath M’Baye unexpectedly declared for the draft, Lon Kruger realized he would be starting over in the paint and brought in three JUCO big men to try to fill the void. But I’m surprised he didn’t bring in a JUCO transfer at the PG position. With Sam Grooms departing, there is a real empty spot at that position too. Isaiah Cousins has the highest assist rate of any returning guard, but he struggled with turnovers. And that probably means that unranked freshman Jordan Woodard will be asked to run the show. Without high potential players in the paint or at the PG spot, there just isn’t a lot of upside for this team. The model projects them to win five less conference games than a year ago.

Texas Tech: I stared at the Texas Tech projection for awhile because it really doesn’t make sense to me. Certainly, I expect Tubby Smith to turn Texas Tech’s defense around. For Texas Tech’s defense to improve to 102.7 seems like a cakewalk. But I was puzzled that the model is so optimistic about Texas Tech’s offense. Basically, this is a case of addition by subtraction. The only key player Texas Tech loses is Josh Gray.* And Gray used way too many possessions (15 of 80 from 3) for an inefficient player (81 ORtg) while running the point for the Red Raiders. Of course backup PG Daylen Robinson wasn’t any better (70 ORtg). And you can see why Tubby Smith’s first move at Texass Tech was to go sign a JUCO PG in Robert Turner. Turner may not have major upside, but his job should simply be to get the ball to the other players and stop wasting possessions. Jaye Crocket, Jordan Tolbert, Dejan Kravic, and Dusty Hannahs may not have been good players, but they were average. And just making sure the team gets an average shot each possession will be a serious upgrade from last season.

Of course, to some degree the model may be falling for the “bad shot fallacy.” I.e., when a team runs its offense and can’t get a good shot, the PG often ends up jacking up threes as the shot-clock expires. Josh Gray wasn’t the only bad player on the team last year. But with a new coach and most players back, some upward trajectory is certainly possible.

*Ty Nurse is also gone but he almost never shot the basketball.

TCU: It feels like TCU should be making a bigger move in the right direction. Kyan Anderson was a remarkably solid PG on a dreadful offensive team. Devonta Abron looks like he might be a legitimate Big 12 post player. Meanwhile transfer Karviar Shepherd is the first consensus Top 100 freshman to attend TCU since at least 2000. But TCU was an absolutely dreadful D1 team last year. And with only 44% of the teams minutes returning, the Horned Frogs will be breaking in a bunch of new unranked players again next year. When transfer Trey Ziegler joins the team in 2014-2015, there might be some real upward mobility. Until then expect more of the same.

On Wednesday, as the Oklahoma City Thunder were knocked out of the playoffs, the Miami Heat moved on to their third consecutive Eastern Conference Finals. Russell Westbrook’s season-ending injury dramatically weakened Oklahoma City, but Miami did a far better job without Chris Bosh, their second most-important player, when he missed 10 playoff games last year. While the situations aren’t identical, the Heat are ultimately the measuring stick by which the Thunder should be judged. In that respect, Scott Brooks comes up woefully short in comparison to Erik Spoelstra.

Spoelstra, operating in the shadow of Pat Riley and LeBron James, has done an excellent job since losing to Dallas in the 2011 NBA Finals. Not only has he managed the egos of the Big Three, he hasn’t been afraid to alter his team’s identity in order to find the right mix. In contrast, Brooks has pounded square pegs into round holes for years, refusing to make the adjustments necessary to win a playoff series against an evenly matched team. To understand how poor a job Brooks has done in Oklahoma City recently, let’s imagine what he would have done in Spoelstra’s shoes.

If Brooks were coaching the Heat, Joel Anthony would be the starting center. Anthony, a 6’9 245 defensive specialist, was a mainstay in the Miami rotation for four seasons. An undrafted free agent who clawed his way into the NBA, he is an excellent shot-blocker whose work ethic earned the respect of everyone in the Heat organization. However, his anemic offensive game was exposed in the 2011 playoffs, where he had a 7.9 PER. Spoelstra has steadily eased him out of the rotation ever since. Anthony has played only 17 minutes this postseason, going from a starter to end of the bench player in two years.

Anthony, like many defensive-oriented centers who can’t score, is less valuable in a more perimeter-oriented NBA. Spoelstra recognized this, moving to a smaller line-up with Chris Bosh at center. Brooks, in contrast, has faithfully stuck with Kendrick Perkins for years, despite ever diminishing returns. The 2012 NBA Finals, when Perkins couldn’t defend the smaller Heat players on the perimeter or punish them on offense, should have been a wake-up call. Instead, Perkins rewarded Brooks’ faith with a -0.7 PER in this year’s playoffs, the lowest mark in NBA history.

In a bizarro world where Brooks coached Miami, Mike Bibby would still be part of his rotation. Bibby started all 20 playoff games for Miami in the first year of the Big Three. However, his playoff experience couldn’t make up for his diminishing foot-speed. In their loss to the Mavericks, Bibby was a 6’1 spot-up shooter who couldn’t stay in front of JJ Barea; getting Barea a $20 million contract was one of the best assists of his career. Bibby, now out of the NBA, isn’t much worse than Derek Fisher. Fisher hasn’t had a PER above 10.0 in four seasons, yet Brooks has consistently given him as many minutes as he can handle.

There’s a domino effect to playing Fisher so much. While Reggie Jackson barely played as a rookie, Norris Cole was given the opportunity to grow into a role in spite of his mistakes. Both were backup PG’s drafted at the end of the first-round in 2011, but Cole hasn’t had to waste time behind a guy who can’t play. In their first two seasons, Cole has played over 1,000 more minutes than Jackson, whose still getting his legs under him as an NBA player. Jackson could have an an Eric Bledsoe-like breakthrough next season, but he still would have lost playing time to Fisher if Westbrook had been healthy.

Of course, even if Brooks had been as flexible as Spoelstra, the Thunder might not have gone further in any of the last three years. A coach can only do so much; in a seven-game series, the best team almost always wins. The real concern isn’t that Oklahoma City lost to Dallas, Miami and Memphis in the last three years, but how they’ve done so. They were knocked out 4-1 all three times. That tells you the coaching staff isn’t having success making adjustments against a better opponent, probably because Brooks never makes any. When you’re down 3-1, why not alter your starting lineup? What do you have to lose?

When the Heat faced the Pacers last season, Spoelstra emptied his holster trying to survive without Bosh. He used a different starting lineup in each of the first four games, before settling on a small-ball mix that often had Battier and LeBron James defending the Indiana big men. It’s easy to forget now, but after a 94-75 drubbing in Game 3, the grand experiment in Miami looked doomed. If Spoelstra had stuck with Anthony and Bibby the same way Brooks stuck with Perkins and Fisher, the Heat would have lost. Without Bosh, their margin for error was narrow enough for poor coaching to make a difference.

If Westbrook had stayed healthy, the Thunder would have been the odds-on favorite to return to the NBA Finals. That doesn’t mean Brooks is a great playoff coach; it means having two Top 10 players in their prime makes his job a lot easier. When evaluating coaches, it’s important to be process-oriented rather than results-oriented. Brooks has consistently left points on the board in each of the last three seasons and has shown no ability to learn from his mistakes. Worst of all, his refusal to adjust his rotation reveals a potentially fatal flaw in how he evaluates players.

Whenever he’s asked about Perkins and Fisher, Brooks points to their contributions in the locker room. However, it’s nearly impossible for an unproductive player to be a team leader, especially one keeping more talented players on the bench. How can you hold others accountable if you don’t hold yourself to the same standard? Fisher and Perkins can talk about sacrifice and playing for the team, but it rings hollow when they don’t practice what they preach. James Harden, an All-NBA player, came off the bench for the Thunder. Kendrick Perkins can’t swallow his pride and do the same?

It’s one thing for a coach to not play the match-up game well; it’s another when he can’t bench a player because he’s worried about his ego. There’s a reason Spoelstra so tirelessly preaches “family” in Miami. At some point in the last three years, he’s had to ask all of his players to sacrifice either playing time or shot attempts for the good of the team. In Oklahoma City, Harden is the only player whose ever had to sacrifice. Does Westbrook need to be attempting 3.7 three-pointers a game when he shoots them at only 32 percent? That’s inefficient basketball. You can’t beat Miami playing like that.

Replacing Brooks after a 60-win regular season might seem rash and unfair, but it would hardly be unprecedented. The Pistons fired Rick Carlisle in 2003, the Bulls let go of Doug Collins in 1989 and the Lakers removed Paul Westhead in 1982. For a coach, growing a young team takes a different skill-set than getting a team through the playoff gauntlet. Sometimes, a front office has to take a PR hit for the long-term good of the franchise. The Thunder made a business decision and parted ways with Harden nine months ago. Now, they need to be just as cold-blooded with Brooks.

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