2 min read • February 20, 2025
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The NBA All-Star Game has come and mercifully, gone, the format change wasn’t the most exciting part of the weekend, it was the players that didn’t play that were a cause for concern for some teams.
Not that we’re in the final stretch of the season with most teams having between 27 and 30 games left to play, here are some of the more notable teams to keep an eye on as they play their final games of the regular season.
Before the massive Luka Doncic trade that sent shockwaves throughout the league, the Lakers were playing well having won 6 of 7 games before February 1st when Luka Doncic was traded. However, despite playing well, this Lakers team faced a lot of questions that included players like Anthony Davis dealing with plantar fasciitis, Christian Wood having not made his season debut while recovering from offseason knee surgery to all of a sudden having questions surrounding Luka Doncic’s calf, LeBron’s foot/ankle that saw him skip the All-Star game at the last minute.
But the Lakers are clearly in a better position now. Luka has taken a slower approach to managing his calf strain, which should provide more stability as the season goes on. LeBron has seemingly dealt with foot and ankle injuries for two years and that hasn’t slowed him down much at all. Christian Wood was waived, Jared Vanderbilt has seemed to be fully recovered from his foot issues, the Lakers are relatively healthy at the right time to make a real push for some home court advantage in this year’s playoffs.
They are the most dangerous team after the All-Star break, with the most important questions marks in Luka Doncic and LeBron James.
After the Luka Doncic trade, their target acquisition, Anthony Davis had a monstrous three quarters in his debut before pulling up lame with an adductor strain, they very thing Mavericks fans were afraid of. It’s worth noting that Anthony Davis came into his Mavericks debut with a strained abdomen sustained only 11 days prior and there was belief at the time he sustained the injury it would shelve him several weeks. It seems that rushing back early was a costly mistake that may derail the Mavericks season.
Anthony Davis’s injury was the start of their bad luck. They were already thin at center with Dereck Lively out until early April with a stress fracture in his ankle, but the next game after Davis was declared out indefinitely, Daniel Gafford sustained a Grade 3 MCL sprain and will miss approximately six weeks, leaving the Mavericks without a center for the foreseeable future. Add to that Kyrie Irving missing games occasionally with shoulder issues and you’ve got a team trending downwards that is currently 8th in the playoff standings.
Philadelphia is interesting, not from a contention standpoint, but from a draft standpoint. Their disaster of a season so far that has been filled with injuries to pretty much the entire roster except Guerschon Yabusele, has seen the 76ers coming out of the All-Star break with the 11th seed in the Eastern Conference playoff standings, making them a candidate for a lottery pick. However, if the 76ers were to improve their lottery position to draft higher than the #6 pick, that pick would go to the Oklahoma City Thunder, making a bad season even worse if they couldn’t even draft a new player to improve their roster. Expect more rest time for the starters like Joel Embiid and Paul George.
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