Mailbag! Most Pleasant Surprises, Pick and Roll vs. Pick and Pop, and More

Got a few pretty good mailbag questions from various sources over the last week or so. We’re going to dig right in without much in the way of a preamble.

From Jacob via chat: Who have you been most pleasantly surprised by this season? And new All-Star format, on paper, yay or nay?

My most pleasant surprises, in no particular order:

• The Cavs. Duh. Especially the dual Darius Garland and Evan Mobley resurgences, which I am planning to dig into for Film Findings one of these weeks.
• The Rockets. And especially how delightful it is to watch them every night. When you think about what a chore it was just two years ago, it’s remarkable how far they’ve come.
• The ease with which Karl-Anthony Towns has fit with the Knicks. I knew the offense would be good. I didn’t know it would be this good.
• The full-scale Dyson Daniels breakout. He is absolutely insane.
• The Pistons’ competence. What a nice change of pace.
• The Grizzlies rediscovering themselves even amidst various injuries. Turns out that having your best player(s) on the floor even occasionally, helps a whole lot.

That seems like a good list, even if I am definitely forgetting a few things.

As for the All-Star game: I am totally agnostic on the new format because I’m probably not gonna watch the game (games?) anyway. I typically watch games to learn things that are going to be useful and there is almost nothing useful to be learned from an All-Star game to begin with. There will definitely be nothing useful learned from this. I hope people enjoy it, or at least enjoy it enough to quiet any of the complaints about how the All-Star game sucks for a while.