Elevator Doors: March Blandness
March is simultaneously the best and worst month for basketball fans. The best: The NCAA Tournament continues to deliver the goods. While we haven’t had a ton of upsets/Cinderella runs – I have my transfer portal-related theories as to why that is – we have had a lot of hard-fought basketball, tourney heroes (, Jr.,…
Elevator Doors: The MVP Bowl
What can two games in the middle of March tell you about how NBA MVP voters are going to approach (what is supposed to be) an 82-game award? These two games in question told us a little bit of nothing, and a little bit of everything. On Sunday and Monday, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s Oklahoma City Thunder…
Elevator Doors: From bad to worse
You know those semi-inspirational quotes you see floating around social media occasionally? They sort of make sense, but they are mostly nonsense. They are always attributed to a person who definitely didn’t say it. They reach for profundity, but they mostly end up ringing a little hollow. I’m thinking of that one that goes “luck…
Elevator Doors: Everything is Day to Day
When it comes to the injury report – and to life in general – we are all day-to-day. Last week, the San Antonio Spurs announced that Victor Wembanyama would miss the rest of the 2025 season due to “deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder” – a blood clot, in layman’s terms. This is nothing…
Elevator Doors: An All-Star Game By Committee
Have you ever been part of a brainstorming session? I have a day job where brainstorming sessions are a semi-regular occurrence. The office blocks out an hour or so and everyone you work with joins in a conference room or a Zoom session. The assembly has a common goal driven by a one-sentence concept. Everyone…
Elevator Doors: Trade Deadline Recap
Elevator Doors: Stray thoughts from the snow globe Look, we’re all a little dizzy. The days leading into Thursday’s NBA trade deadline shook up the league in ways we can’t even begin to comprehend yet. The implications of the still-shocking Luka Doncic trade and the ensuing deals that rippled outward are still being sifted through.…
Elevator Doors: Emergency Luka edition
Elevator Doors: What is the full story? It was pitch black – 6 a.m., well before sunrise – when my son, Andrew, came into our bedroom to tell me the news. “Mom said Luka is on the Lakers!?!” I thought I was still asleep and that I was having one of those strange half-dreams where…
Elevator Doors: The vibes-only midseason check-in
At Elevator Doors HQ, we love stats and analytics as much as anyone. We admire and appreciate new and inventive ways to measure basketball performance, and we constantly strive to incorporate these metrics into our rigorous analysis. But sometimes, we just go with our gut. For me, watching basketball is primarily an emotional experience. The…
Elevator Doors: Chemistry takes time
Bear with me for just a moment, but I am going to write about my son’s basketball team. I promise to keep it brief, but there is a larger point about what we’re seeing in both college ball and the NBA that I think can best be explained by watching youth basketball. Andrew is nine…
Elevator Doors: What is culture?
Jimmy Butler is a wrecking ball. It’s his best and his most destructive quality as a basketball player. Anyone reading this website is surely aware of Butler’s dissatisfaction with the Miami Heat. It follows a similar pattern of dissatisfaction with his stops in Philadelphia and (especially) Minnesota. Ever since Butler overperformed his draft status in…
Elevator Doors: Second-Year Stock Watch
A few weeks ago, we checked in with the 2024 draft class, and we found some encouraging trends and performances into what had been viewed as a potentially disastrous crop of rookies. Why were scouts so down on last year’s class? It’s likely a variety of reasons, but it didn’t help that it was preceded…
Elevator Doors: A Christmas Day Miracle? Almost.
People within NBA circles like to call the All-Star Weekend a showcase for the league, where the best of the sport’s past, present, and future come together and celebrate what makes it the best sport in the world. It is not successful in that regard. The game is a joke. The showcase events are (mostly)…
Elevator Doors: NBA Cup: Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down
The second annual NBA Cup is in the books. How are we feeling about it? There seems to be a lot of handwringing and brow-furrowing in NBA circles about potentially waning interest in their product. With TV ratings in freefall ahead of a new multi-billion-dollar broadcast deal, events such as the NBA Cup take on…
Elevator Doors: As Bad as It Gets
When we first opened the Elevator Doors about a month ago, I started with almost 1,000 gleefully delirious words about the experience of watching Nikola Jokic play basketball. The best player in the sport has somehow elevated his game to another unprecedented, unforeseen level. He is currently either first or second in every major counting…
Elevator Doors: Rookie Watch Part 1
Remember how this was supposed to be the worst NBA draft class of all time? In the weeks/months/years leading up to the 2024 NBA draft, anyone with a platform went out of their way to let everyone know how much they hated this year’s crop of prospects. “No superstars.” “Worse than 2000.” “Trade out if…
Elevator Doors: Coaching Remains a Mystery
We have access to more information about basketball than we’ve ever had at any point in the game’s 133-year history. Synergy, Second Spectrum, Cleaning The Glass, Basketball Reference, NBA.com’s official stats page – if you want to know some arcane piece of minutiae, no matter how obscure, you can track it down. An infinite series…
Elevator Doors: As Good as It Gets
Elevator Doors: As Good as It Gets I look at my son and tell him with all the sincerity I can muster: “It will never get any better than this.” Andrew is nine years old. He is obsessed with basketball. I passed my Denver Nuggets fandom onto him, never expecting that the burly Serbian center…
2024 NBA Draft: Western Conference Grades
Dallas Mavericks 51. , France The Mavericks moved up a few spots in the second round and drafted a long, athletic wing from France. Ajinca struggled shooting the ball for much of the year, but proved in past years the ability to knock down the three ball. His athletic profile should allow him to develop…