Zion Williamson, LaMelo Ball and a few more interesting factors on the NBA’s 5 worst teams

With less than a month left in the 2024-25 regular season, most of the NBA-watching world’s attention is focused on the top of the standings: on the Cleveland Cavaliers and Oklahoma City Thunder finishing off their historic regular seasons, on the state of the MVP chase, on the race to secure home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, and on which stars can lift their squads clear of the play-in tournament.

While those outcomes will likely remain up in the air until the season’s dying days, though, we do have a pretty clear picture of what’s going on at the bottom of the standings — the teams that have, for months now, been playing for ping-pong balls rather than postseason seeding.

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The Utah Jazz, Washington Wizards, Charlotte Hornets, New Orleans Pelicans and Brooklyn Nets own the NBA’s five worst records and net ratings. They are responsible for 10 of this season’s 14 longest losing streaks, led by a truly dismal Wizards team that has produced two separate 16-game skids en route to posting one of the worst point differentials in NBA history.

All five of these teams will likely have better than 40% odds of landing a top-four selection in the 2025 NBA Draft, and at least a 1-in-10 chance of picking first overall. That’s important, because there’s an awfully shiny pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow — a 6-foot-9, 205-pound pterodactyl named Cooper Flagg.

While we wait for the draft lottery, though, the balance of the regular season can still have some value for this horrid handful of teams; even bad teams playing out the string feature some things worth keeping an eye on.

Let’s consider a few of them, running through the most interesting things — to me! — about the NBA’s five worst teams, starting with a big bounce-back in The Big Easy (all statistics as of Wednesday morning):

New Orleans Pelicans: Zion Williamson, reminding

Any hopes of New Orleans building on last season’s 49 wins and top-six net rating were scuttled about two weeks into the new campaign. That’s when Zion reinjured the left hamstring that he’d strained during a play-in tournament loss to the Lakers last April, landing the former No. 1 overall pick back on the injured list alongside Dejounte Murray, C.J. McCollum, Herb Jones and Trey Murphy III.

Before you knew it, Brandon Ingram and Jose Alvarado had gotten hurt, too, and a team that had briefly looked like a contender a couple of times over the past few seasons was 20 games under .500 — dead in the water before Christmas. Only seven teams have lost more player games due to injury than the Pelicans, according to Spotrac; only the 76ers, who’ve lost Joel Embiid and Paul George for the season, have missed a heftier chunk of their team payroll.

Around the dark cloud of the last few months of Pelicans basketball, though, there’s been one bright silver lining. Under cover of obscurity on a going-nowhere squad, Zion has looked … pretty friggin’ awesome?

Looking slimmer and more explosive than he did for most of last season, Zion remains one of the sport’s most unbelievable physical forces. Since his return in early January, Williamson’s averaging 24.9 points, 7.1 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 1.3 steals per game, shooting 59% from the field and earning 7.5 free throws in just 27.9 minutes a night. In that span, only Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Cade Cunningham are scoring more points per game on drives to the basket. Only SGA and Giannis Antetokounmpo are drawing more fouls per minute, and nobody is scoring more points in the paint.

With erstwhile running buddy Ingram now gone to Toronto and so many other players out of the lineup, Williamson’s taken on an even larger role in the Pelicans’ offense, averaging more than 85 touches per 36 minutes, by far a career high. He’s continued to evolve as a playmaker, looking more comfortable manipulating coverages whether facing up or playing with his back to the basket. He’s posting a 1.83-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio and creating 14.2 points per game via assist — both of which would be career highs — with the first two triple-doubles of his career both coming since the All-Star break. He’s also begun developing more of an in-between game, more frequently and comfortably stopping and popping shy of the rim, taking 38% of his shots from floater range and making 53% of them — which, again, would be career highs.

The impressive individual numbers are backed up by overall on-court results. A Pelicans team that owns the NBA’s second-worst net rating this season has been outscored by a comparatively respectable 1.8 points per 100 possessions in Williamson’s minutes over the past two-plus months. Even with all of its other injuries, the 15-win Pels have the point differential of a 37-win team with Zion on the floor, according to Cleaning the Glass; quiet as it’s kept, impact metrics like estimated plus-minus and DARKO peg the version of Zion we’ve been getting as perhaps the best one we’ve ever seen.

The $197 million question, as ever, is whether we’ll get to keep seeing it. Williamson’s perennial soft-tissue and lower-extremity injuries have played a significant role in submarining nearly every season since his arrival in New Orleans, leaving the Pelicans on perpetually unsteady ground. (And, potentially, forced to consider their options on the trade market.)

The optimist, though, can see a future in which a two-man partnership between Williamson and Murphy bears real fruit. (The ascendant wing sniper averaged 23 points and four assists per game on .609 true shooting over a half-season stretch before suffering a season-ending shoulder injury.) It’s a future in which lineups pairing them with a healthy Jones, Alvarado and rising big man Yves Missi return to the kind of swarming defensive play on which the last few competitive New Orleans teams were built — one in which this dire season is redeemed by the arrival of another touted prospect (perhaps another all-court monster out of Duke?) capable of putting the Pelicans back on the path toward contention.

You might have to squint pretty hard to see that glass-half-full vision. When Zion’s looking like this, though, it’s enough to make you keep doing it.

Washington Wizards: Khris Middleton, the adult in the room

I was watching Wizards-Pistons last week, because I have a rich and interesting social life, when something struck me: Washington just kept getting good shots down the stretch.

This seemed odd, considering the Wiz own comfortably the worst offense in the NBA and were, at the time, neck-and-neck with the crunch-time-deficient Bucks and Heat for the ignominious honor of being the most punchless team in the league when the score’s within five points in the final five minutes. And yet, there they were — against a resurgent Pistons team that sits ninth in defensive efficiency this season — repeatedly getting whatever they wanted with the game in the balance.

One reason why? They put the ball in Middleton’s hands and let him make the decisions. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good decision:

None of that is jaw-dropping, Luka-whipping-a-blind-pass-over-his-shoulder stuff. It’s just good read after good read, on-time feed after on-time feed. Generally unflashy, uniformly beneficial, part-of-your-balanced-breakfast basketball. That, 13 years into his career, is Middleton’s brand — one that’s led him to three All-Star appearances, an Olympic gold medal and an NBA championship. And it’s one that seems to be agreeing with the terrible young Wizards.

Middleton’s individual numbers in D.C. won’t blow you away: 11.3 points, 4.2 rebounds and 3.7 assists in 22.8 minutes per game across 11 starts, shooting 44.4% from the field and just 24.3% from 3-point range. But consider:

Which, through one lens, means Middleton has basically been the difference between the Wizards being the Lakers … and being the worst team in NBA history.

That, obviously, is an overstatement, delivered partly to make sure you haven’t fallen asleep midway through reading a blurb about the Wizards in the middle of March. (Congratulations on staying awake!) Directionally, though? It seems about right.

“He’s a closer, has been for a very long time in this league,” Wizards head coach Brian Keefe recently said. “And we are going to take advantage of having him on our roster.”

Washington’s offense has gone from bottom-of-the-league to merely bottom-10 in Middleton’s minutes, turning the ball over less and getting to the foul line more with superior organization. Small-sample-size caveats abound, but the Wiz have scored at a top-10 clip in the half-court with Middleton on the floor.

Their defense has improved dramatically — tied for 13th since the All-Star break! — thanks to an uptick in forcing turnovers and limiting 3-point attempts, especially from the corners. They’ve been better at both with Middleton, who’s averaging 2.2 steals and four deflections per 36 minutes as a Wizard.

For a team as bad as Washington — one still in “the deconstruction phase,” one force-feeding minutes to the litany of 19- and 20-year-olds populating the NBA’s youngest roster — the journey to sustainable success begins with learning how to not suck. How to create not just a shot, but a good shot, and how to take not just any shot, but your shot. (Here’s where we note that Washington’s recent lottery picks — Alex Sarr, Bilal Coulibaly, midrange monster Bub Carrington, Kyshawn George — have all seen their shot quality improve playing alongside Middleton.) How to not just study film or drill game-plans, but actually translate them in practice. Where to be on defense, when you need to be there, and how that might change based on personnel.

It might sound hokey or trite, but those basics are the building blocks of winning basketball. For Keefe and his staff, laying that kind of foundation gets a little bit easier when you’ve got a foreman like Middleton who can supervise on the job site.

The fate of the next competitive iteration of the Wizards likely depends on bright young things like Sarr, Carrington, George, Coulibaly and their upcoming lottery picks developing into consistently positive two-way players. Giving them a no-nonsense veteran craftsman to teach them how to use their tools … well, that seems like a pretty good decision.

Charlotte Hornets: LaMelo Ball, in the eye of the beholder

This is LaMelo Ball:

This is also LaMelo Ball:

The gift and the curse.

“LaMelo, in my opinion, he’s kind of a broadcaster’s dream,” famously excitable Hornets play-by-play man Eric Collins said earlier this season. “He’s kind of a broadcaster’s nightmare sometimes. But he’s a dream for me because I love unpredictability. You don’t know what you are going to see and when it’s going to happen.”

It’s why so many fans love LaMelo so much: the caffeinated command in transition, the naked ambition of those logo bombs, the jolt of electricity that runs down your spine with every half-court lob and “how did he see that?” dime out of the pick-and-roll. The vision of a postmodern lead ball-handler: size, vision and feel; a threat to pull from anywhere; a fireworks show perpetually poised to pop.

It’s also why so many coaches and media members have a hard time fully giving themselves over to his charms: the lethargic hook pass when the defender’s got it scouted, the drives into triple coverage seemingly devoid of a Plan B, the obstinate insistence that this time he can split the double, the unerring belief that a contested runner from 18 or a four-dribble stepback from 30 with 11 on the shot clock is the best look you can get. The dreams of a hyperefficient, hyperspeed future, curdled.

Ball has 15 games with 30 or more points this season — 19th-most in the NBA. He also has 24 games of shooting 40% or worse from the floor on 10 or more attempts — tied for seventh-most. Five years into his career, LaMelo isn’t just playing the same maximalist tune; he’s cranking it up to skull-rattling volumes, guaranteeing you feel something while watching him, and leaving aside the question of whether you can make any sense of it. (LaMelo Ball: Lynchian?)

Had Ball played enough minutes to qualify for the league leaderboards this season, he’d rank 11th in points per game (25.4), ninth in assists per game (7.2) … and fifth in turnovers per game (3.5). He’s ninth in touches per game, tied for seventh in average time of possession and No. 1 with a bullet in usage rate, finishing 35.9% of Hornets possessions with a shot attempt, foul drawn or turnover.

Only 11 players in league history (minimum 1,000 minutes played) have ever finished a season with a higher usage rate. Most of them have MVP awards in their trophy cases. The only player taking more shots per game this season than LaMelo (21.5)? SGA (21.6), who might soon have one in his.

Whether that seems like the right kind of company for LaMelo to be keeping can vary from game to game — or even play to play.

Watch LaMelo, and you might find yourself stunned by the audacity of the plays he tries to make and the shots he attempts. He plays almost like he’s trying to get away with something. Maybe he is: According to Synergy Sports’ tracking, among the 26 players launching at least five “low shot quality” looks a night, LaMelo ranks 25th in points scored per possession.

Keep watching, though, and you might also find yourself asking the question once posed by the legend Jordan Crawford: “Who else gon’ shoot?”

Sure, there’s Miles Bridges and Mark Williams. But they’re already combining for about 28 shots a night (and LaMelo’s assisted on about 20% of their baskets this season as it is). Brandon Miller’s out for the season. Grant Williams is, too. Tre Mann hasn’t played since early November. Seth Curry can still shoot it, but he’s a deep-rotation player a few months shy of 35; Josh Green runs the floor hard and can hit spot-up 3s, but you don’t exactly want to hand him the keys to your offense.

Charlotte’s rotation in Tuesday’s matchup with the Hawks, which Ball missed with a sore right wrist, featured a slew of young dudes who play hard — Damion Baugh, DaQuan Jeffries, Marcus Garrett, Nick Smith Jr., Wendell Moore Jr. — but who haven’t exactly established themselves as bankable NBA-level scorers or creators. In a related story, the Hornets got drilled by 32 points, running their record without LaMelo this season to 2-22; they’ve been outscored by 3.6 points per 100 possessions in his minutes and by an obscene 12.2 points-per-100 when he’s not on the court.

It’s all left the Hornets in an odd, uncomfortable state: The sad they are with him is less than the sad they are without him. (It’s kind of a reverse Wambsgans situation.) And in the absence of a better alternative, or any reason to believe one’s about to waltz through the door … well, might as well just let LaMelo cook and see what happens. At least you won’t be able to take your eyes off of it.

Utah Jazz: Isaiah Collier, dealin’

Nearly three years after trading Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, Danny Ainge and Co. are still looking for Utah’s next centerpiece. (An illuminating passage from a recent piece by Sarah Todd at The Deseret News: “The Jazz do not view the 2024-25 season as the third year of a rebuild. Instead, they see it as part of the teardown. In their eyes, the rebuild hasn’t started.”) That incentivizes them to tank, which they’ve done with aplomb — too well for the league office’s liking, in fact — and which sucks for myriad reasons.

But as much as all parties involved would probably prefer to just hit “sim to end” on this season and proceed to the draft, though, you do still have to play the games. Sometimes, head coach Will Hardy wishes his young charges were a bit more ready to do so.

“The frustrating part is that there’s so much opportunity on our team right now,” Hardy recently told reporters. “And all of these young players are getting an opportunity to show us who they are, what they are, and that opportunity needs to be met with the desperation that it deserves.”

Credit, then, to Collier — the No. 1 prospect in the 2023 high school recruiting class, who fell to 29th in last June’s draft after an up-and-down year at USC — for making the most of his opportunity to show us who he is: a fast, physical, boulder-rolling-downhill point guard with an ahead-of-his-years understanding of how to read and move around the chessboard.

After a rough start scrounging for minutes behind Keyonte George, Collin Sexton and Jordan Clarkson, and that saw him struggle mightily to put the ball in the basket when he did get some tick — 30% from the field, just 14% from 3-point range through 20 games — Collier got a trial run as a starter when George went down with a left heel injury in early January. When George underwhelmed upon his return, Hardy turned back to Collier, perhaps as a means of giving George “a bit of a wake-up call … about what it takes to earn minutes in the NBA.”

Whatever the genesis of the opportunity, Collier has grabbed it with both hands, earning Western Conference Rookie of the Month honors in February for his work as a facilitator. He’s averaging 8.1 assists in 30.3 minutes per game since fully taking over the starting job, sixth-most in the NBA in that span, creating points via dime at roughly the same clip as Luka Dončić and Devin Booker. Collier has posted 24 games of eight or more assists this season, tied with SGA for 10th most in the NBA, and 11 games with double-digit helpers — the same number as Dončić, Booker, Russell Westbrook and Josh Giddey.

“I think he’s playing the game with a chip on his shoulder,” teammate and fellow rookie Cody Williams recently told Tony Jones of The Athletic. “I think he knows that there weren’t 28 players better than him in the draft, and he came into this season wanting to prove that.”

His primary pathway to doing so: a straight line, aimed directly at the basket. Collier is top 30 in the league in drives per game since entering the starting lineup, adept at using his 6-foot-3, 210-pound frame to gain an advantage on a defender, hit the gas to extend it, get two feet in the lane and collapse the coverage. Once there, he’ll use his vision to find a waiting pair of hands — a shooter in the corner, someone stationed in the slot ready to catch-and-go, a cutter flashing into open space — and an impressively deft touch to deliver the ball to them.

Cross-court lasers with either hand, cotton-soft dump-offs to dunker-spot lurkers, perfectly weighted pocket passes on the roll: you name it, and Collier’s got it in the bag. He’s also flashed an attractive combination of patience coming off a pick and impatience when he senses an opportunity to push the pace in transition, and an understanding of how to break coverages. (My favorite dime in that clip might be when Collier looks at how the Suns are set up, calls Walker Kessler up for a ball screen and sends George over to set a pindown for Lauri Markkanen, knowing Phoenix will try to top-lock Markkanen … which opens up the back cut for an easy lob dunk.)

It’s an impressive level of craft for a 20-year-old — the kind of table-setting you can imagine eventually being part of an actual NBA offense. Provided, of course, Collier can make strides in the other non-negotiable areas for a modern guard.

“I know what I have to work on this summer,” he recently said. “It’s definitely not a secret.”

It starts with the shot. Collier has faced questions about his jumper going back to his prep days, and shot 33.8% from 3 and 67.3% from the free-throw line at USC. Those have persisted into the pros, where he’s shooting just 41.2% from the field, 23.5% from 3-point range and 28.4% on jumpers overall for the season.

The good news: Those numbers have risen since Collier’s move into the starting lineup, headlined by a sharp uptick in finishing inside the restricted area (from 55.7% before his promotion to 70.8% since) and at the charity stripe (from 60.5% before to 70.1% since). Maintaining those improvements while nudging up from midrange and beyond the arc will be vital for Collier to become a consistently positive player. Pairing that with analogous growth as an on-ball defender will be vital for not turning the 37-year-old Hardy’s brown hair prematurely gray. (“I want Isaiah to work on being solid and staying in front of his guy,” the coach recently said. “That would help our defense a lot.”)

Markkanen is a bona fide core piece: someone who has proven he can produce at an All-Star level as a big-wing scorer and floor-spacing shooter. Kessler has established himself as the kind of high-end paint protector and rim-running lob threat who fits on any good team. The jury’s still out on pretty much everyone else on the Jazz roster … but with every good read, every slick delivery, and every open mouth fed, Collier increases his chances of joining that club.

Brooklyn Nets: Jordi Fernández, redefining winning

When you’re 23-46, you’re probably not going to get much play in the Coach of the Year conversation. You could argue, though, that what Fernández has accomplished in his first year on the Nets bench ranks among the league’s more notable coaching accomplishments.

“I’m so impressed with Jordi,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr recently told reporters. “I think he’s crushing the job with a difficult hand to play.”

Fernández took over a team coming off a 32-50 campaign and just beginning the process of building something from the ashes of the Kevin Durant/Kyrie Irving/James Harden experiment. He was handed a mix-and-match roster — contending-regime holdovers, blockbuster-trade leftovers, second-draft do-overs — and asked to stitch something together that could pass the time while Sean Marks and Co. began steering the franchise into the skid.

A quarter of the way through the season, Fernández had that roster a game under .500, in play-in position, with a top-10 offense. Which, you know, just wouldn’t do.

“We’re going to have to be systematic with some of the decisions we make,” Marks told Brian Lewis of the New York Post earlier this season. “And they may not always be in line with winning the next game or putting the most talent out there.”

Thanks to a combination of injuries and subtractions — Cam Thomas suffering a hamstring injury, trades shipping out Dennis Schröder and Dorian-Finney Smith, etc. — Brooklyn’s hot start quickly faded, and Fernández set about cycling through his allotment of 10-days and two-ways in pursuit of something like stability. Before you knew it: seven wins in nine games straddling the All-Star break, a sudden surge to top-10-defense status and a return to within a half-game of the play-in spots.

That, too, proved fleeting. Brooklyn’s lost 11 of 13, sinking back toward the cellar and jousting with a 76ers team led by a suddenly rampaging Quentin Grimes for bottom-five status and the improved lottery odds that come with it. And yet, with rare exceptions, the losses tend to share a similar character: coming down to a possession or two late, with five players fighting for their next NBA opportunity — guys like Keon Johnson, Trendon Watford, Ziaire Williams, Jalen Wilson, Tosan Evbuomwan, Maxwell Lewis and Tyrese Martin — playing with their hair on fire, like they don’t know they’re supposed to roll over.

“Watching him prepare for these games — not knowing who’s going to play, not knowing who’s going to start, or who can finish, who can’t play, minute restrictions, etc.,” Nets guard D’Angelo Russell said last month. “For him to still find a way to get straight wins and keep everybody’s energy and spirit high, I think the future’s bright here.”

The road to that future begins with Fernández developing a template for how his teams will play. They’ll get up a ton of 3-pointers: 41.8% of Brooklyn’s shot attempts have come from beyond the arc, the sixth-highest share in the league, according to Cleaning the Glass. They’ll prioritize ball and player movement: The Nets are fifth in the NBA in passes per game, fifth in average distance covered on offense and ninth in assist rate. They’ll try to scrounge up every last extra possession they can; they send waves of bodies to the glass, ranking 11th in offensive rebounding rate.

On defense, they’ll fly around like banshees — fourth-fastest average speed on defense, fifth in opponent turnover rate, fifth in charges drawn — and play with what former Nets bench boss and current Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson called “extreme physicality.”

“I think they’re fouling a lot, which is fine,” Atkinson told reporters. “They made a commitment. They have an identity.”

Atkinson knows all too well how difficult it can be to do what Fernández is doing: securing a commitment and establishing an identity on a first-draft squad, with players who know they probably won’t be part of whatever version of the roster is eventually deemed fit to print. He did it himself in Brooklyn, nearly a decade ago, dragging the Nets out of the depths of the post-Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce era, installing a style of play and creating a culture that could turn a roster of misfit toys into a playoff team. Eventually, that led Brooklyn to grasp for a higher class of winning. It didn’t work out.

If, in a few years’ time, the Nets are once again ready to try to jump up a weight class, it’ll probably be because Fernández has succeeded as Atkinson did: by turning the unglamorous work of development into the sort of consistent success that can lure a brighter brand of star into Barclays Center. For now, though, it means redefining winning — turning every rep, every session, every choice into a step toward becoming something more.

“Seeing these guys getting better, seeing these guys fighting all the way until the end — those are wins for us,” Fernández told reporters in January. “Winning starts now. We’re not waiting to win. It’s just that what winning means for you is different … we feel like we’re winning a lot of things right now.”