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Six and a half minutes remained in the second quarter of a dog fight between the Lakers and a shorthanded Dallas Mavericks team. With a timeout, head coach J.J. Redick calls for a switch in their defense from traditional man coverage to zone, leading to three straight stops and pushing a six-point lead to a more comfortable 13 en route to an eventual blowout win behind a triple-double from LeBron James.

LA heads into the All-Star break ranked 23rd in defense, a position that puts a clear ceiling on any hopeful contender. While it’s not a long-term solution, increased zone implementation has given the team a counter to some of the natural defensive liabilities on the roster while simplifying responsibilities.

​When you are a defense ranked in the bottom seven, you clearly need a shakeup not just with personnel but in schematics or style.

​Since playing the Raptors on January 18, the Lakers increased their zone usage to 17.6%, a number that would lead the league by a mile, as revealed in the graphic shown below during Amazon Prime’s NBA coverage.

The team’s zone is allowing stingy 0.86 points per possession and while that’s not a sustainable level of production on that end of the floor, it reveals the new look defense is having some success.

LA mainly relies on a 2-3 zone defense, featuring two perimeter players and three backside players, moving from man-to-man responsibility to defending an area of the floor.

Watch below as the Lakers settle into their 2-3 zone against the Mavs following a timeout. LA, who struggles with dribble penetration, forces the offense to keep moving the ball across the perimeter while shutting off driving lanes and eating up the clock.

It’s a protection against getting beat off the dribble, which happens frequently as the Lakers play a host of slow perimeter players, and it provides certainty about where defensive help comes from. Jaxson Hayes operates from the middle here but shifts across the floor in sync with his team.

“I feel like it gives all of us a better vision of the offense,” Hayes said postgame. “We are all a little back some more, so we all can see and communicate a little better. We’re not just hugged up on our mans. The paint is a little more crowded, so it’s harder for teams that struggle with shooting to score on it.”

The Lakers give up the highest field goal percentage at the rim at 72.4%. One way to alleviate some of the damage is to prevent teams from getting there in the first place.

The Raptors, who came in with the fourth-highest percentage of points in the paint, were held in check and flummoxed by the Lakers’ zone defense.

One of the points of the zone is to force the offense into multiple passes, creating more opportunities for indecision and mistakes. It can be especially useful for two big lineups that otherwise lack foot speed, helping them stay in front of defenders.

Watch below as Redick uses it against the Raptors with a Drew Timme and Deandre Ayton frontline, leveraging their size alongside LeBron James and Jared Vanderbilt.

Once again, as the ball swings on the perimeter, all five guys on the floor shift into their correct positions. The Lakers close out the driving lanes, fly around, and force a tough, contested step back three from Gradey Dick.

“We’ve ran it a few times a game recently,” Redick said after the Toronto win.  “Sometimes it’s hard, both as a coach and as a player, when you run it, and it’s a good possession of defense, and the other team hits an off-the-dribble three, which has happened this week. One game it happened three times and it can kind of deflate you.

“But we think it could be a weapon for us tonight, we talked pregame about something that I certainly wanted to do and we wanted to do as a staff and the players were bought into it.”

A zone, no doubt, has loud weaknesses, and there’s a reason teams go to it in spurts as a change of pace. Zone busters, or high-volume 3-point shooters, also exist across the league, waiting for the open shot opportunities they create for offenses. In addition, teams running zone can give up more offensive rebounds as box out responsibilities become disoriented.

The first hurdle to get over in a defensive scheme is buy-in from the players, something Redick seems to have in this group.

“Yeah, that thing got us going,” Ayton said of the zone. “I think really just talking and communicating, getting the blood flowing, knowing who got your back out there and the coaches seeing what works here. Just seeing different coverages thrown at the team and seeing what they could throw back at us.”

This defense has provided an unexpected jolt for the Lakers and even if it has flaws, it might be enough to keep them going for the rest of the season, especially if health allows their high-powered offense to find a similar groove.

You can follow Raj on Twitter at @RajChipalu

For what it is worth, Jayson Tatum has yet to make any announcement about his return to the court this season. He has not ruled out the possibility that he could miss the entire season. That makes sense because any number of setbacks could move his timeline back in an abundance of caution.

However, all outward signs seem to indicate that he’s gearing up for a return in the near future. Some recent news indicates that NBC will be airing a documentary on his comeback journey. In addition, many have speculated about the league’s decision to move the March 1st game against Philadelphia into primetime on NBC. Of course there are other, non-Tatum reasons to flex the schedule, and it doesn’t mean it will be his debut.

So I thought I’d throw this topic out. Keeping in mind that he has said in the past that he wants to return in a home game, when do you think he’ll return?

Here’s a quick look at the schedule coming up:

• Feb 19 – 25: One long road trip out West, with games against the Warriors, Lakers, Suns, and Nuggets
• Feb 27: Home against Brooklyn
• Mar 1: Home against Philadelphia
• Mar 2: Away at Milwaukee
• Mar 4: Home against Charlotte
• Mar 6: Home against Dallas
• Mar 8 – 12: Road trip to Cleveland, San Antonio, and OKC

So let us know in the comments, when do you think he’ll return?

Derrick White is testing the validity of the old NBA adage that it is a “make or miss league.”

Despite enduring a career-worst scoring efficiency season, he is still grading out as one of the league’s most impactful players. This should not be possible. Even in the analytics era, we should still be able to cling to the concept that putting the orange ball in the basket is the key indicator of how good a player and a team is.

However, both Derrick White and the 2025-2026 Boston Celtics are, so far, successfully bending the reality of that widely accepted truth. 

Efficient scoring is typically a staple of the Derrick White Experience. Each of the past three seasons, White has posted a true shooting percentage of 60%, ranking him 24th among guards from the 2022-2023 season to the 2024-2025 season. This season, efficient scoring has elluded him. D White is in the midst of a 52% true shooting season, which would have placed him at 156th among guards over the same three season stretch. 52% is an abhorrent number. But it has not mattered when it comes to impacting winning.

There is no perfect “catch all” metric, however a widely accepted one is Estimated Plus Minus (EPM) that Dunks and Threes created. Again, not perfect, but it typically spits out the best guys at the top of the league each year without many outliers. For example, last season’s top-10 players were: Shai Gilgeous Alexander, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Wembanyama, Steph Curry, Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton. This season, despite his ice-cold shot-making, Derrick White ranks 11th in EPM. So how is D White doing it? The answer is simple: he’s doing everything else at an extremely high level. Shot blocking, playmaking, rebounding, and of course, making Derrick White plays. 

Let’s quickly zoom in on just how impactful Derrick White has been for the Celtics this season. When White is on the court, the Celtics have a  +11 net rating. This would rank them second in the NBA, slightly behind OKC, who currently have an +11.5 net rating. When Derrick White is off the court, the Celtics have a +1.7 net rating. This would rank the team at 14th in the NBA. That is a monstrous on/off swing of 9.3 points per 100 possessions. For context, let’s compare that on/off swing to the elite of the elite: 

• Nikola Jokic – 15.2
• Shai Gilgeous Alexander – 9.9 
• Cade Cunningham – 7.3
• Luka Doncic – 6.6
• Kevin Durant – 4.6 
• Anthony Edwards – 0.3 

Derrick White is putting up superstar numbers. More accurately, he’s putting up superstar NBA nerd numbers. 

Derrick White agrees. On the most recent episode of Derrick’s podcast “White Noise”, his co-host, Alex Welsh, shared a message that White sent to their group chat. 

“I don’t have All Star numbers, just All-Star impact.”

Derrick White is correct. He impacts the game at not just an All-Star level, but an All-NBA level. Sadly, White’s cold shooting likely cost him his first All-Star appearance. 

Now that we have established the level at which Derrick White impacts winning, let’s examine how he’s doing it. It starts on the defensive end, and it starts with White being the best shot-blocking guard since Dwyane Wade. White is currently averaging 1.4 blocks per game. There are three guards in the history of the sport who have averaged at least 1.4 blocks per game: Michael Jordan (twice), Tracy McGrady, and Derrick White. Even Dwyane Wade reached only 1.3 blocks per game in 2008. And if we’re being honest, T-Mac is six-foot-eight, hardly a guard. In a vacuum, Derrick White providing center-like rim protection is mind-boggling.

Now, when you put it in the context of the 2025-2026 Boston Celtics, you start to understand why advanced analytics are head over heels for Derrick White. While Neemias Queta is doing a wonderful job protecting the rim this season, as soon as he goes to the bench, the Celtics do not have a traditional rim protector. Luka Garza has been a revelation for the Celtics, but he would never be mistaken for a rim protector. Neither would the recently acquired Nikola Vučević.

There have also been large stretches of the season when Joe Mazzulla has opted for no big men on the court. Enter Derrick White. Opposing offensive players are shooting 5.1% fewer shots at the rim when Derrick White is on the court. That puts White in the 97th percentile. That number indicates that players are deterred from going to the rim when Derrick White is out there. Not quite in a Victor Wembanyama way, but in a Derrick White way. When opponents actually challenge Derrick White at the rim, they are shooting 10.4% worse than they typically would. For context, Rudy Gobert is currently forcing opponents to shoot 10.1% worse at the rim. There is no need for a traditional rim protector when you have Derrick White. White has been comfortably the best guard defender in the league this season and has a case for the most valuable defender as well. 

However, the individual scoring efficiency has not been there for Derrick White this season, but he is still helping drive an elite offense. One of the tenets of the 2025-2026 Boston Celtics is taking care of the basketball. Derrick White ranks in the 90th percentile in turnover percentage (while having a career high in usage). Not only does White do an excellent job of not turning the ball over, he also excels at generating assists. Derrick is generating 14.2 potential assists per 100 possessions, which places him in the 95th percentile. It feels as if there are infinite ways D White pushes things forward on offense for the Celtics. The team plays faster with Derrick on the court; their two-point field goal percentage is higher, and they generate more shots at the rim. Derrick White is the skeleton key that unlocks every lineup he finds himself in.  

If a player is going to get traded, they should try to get traded to Derrick White’s team. He will make them feel right at home. Welcome to TD Garden, Vuc.

The last piece of Derrick White’s game that rounds out his superstar impact, is the Derrick White plays. These plays are unquantifiable. Know in your heart that these plays are the final infinity stone in Derrick White’s infinity gauntlet. 

A superhero analogy is the only analogy applicable because the only explanation for Derrick being able to steal this ball is that he’s actually Spider-Man. 

Derrick White is a microcosm of the 2025-2026 Boston Celtics. The Celtics have a true shooting percentage of 57.9% this season. That puts them smack bang in the middle of the league at 15th. Meanwhile the Celtics rank second in offensive efficiency. Joe Mazzulla, Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, and Co. are figuring out how to be an elite basketball team without being an elite shot-making team. Don’t turn the ball over, protect the rim, make the right play, crash the glass, and be willing to die on the court every night. 

It is NBA gospel to believe that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, shining stars as they were in the East (and West), enabled the league to rise into the firmament, to become the Goliath it has since become.

Upon their arrival in 1979, they polished pro basketball’s profile, burying its sordid, drug-addled past and paving the way for the Michael Jordans and the Kobe Bryants and the LeBron Jameses.

And verily, David Stern and Adam Silver have said, it is good.

Julius Erving, forever the epitome of decorum and decency, is an unlikely blasphemer. And yet, Dr. J said this entire idea is “bullshit” in the 2025 book “Magic in the Air,” by Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski.

Erving believes that the NBA’s ascension can be traced not to the Bird-Magic bump but rather the league’s merger with the ABA in 1976 – that the resulting infusion of talent and flair led to a quantum leap.

The Good Doctor acknowledged in Sielski’s book that Magic and Bird brought “a great rivalry” from college to Los Angeles and Boston, respectively, where it became white hot. It was, Erving said, “a good story.”

“But truth be told,” he told the author, “I think in terms of the popularity of the league, the league was never more popular than it was after the ABA joined the league. Eleven All-Stars in that first All-Star game were from the ABA. That’s what saved the league.”

Both things can be true, of course. Erving and the ABAers brought talent, style and panache to a league sorely in need of all three. But in migrating to the two most storied franchises, Bird and Magic gave the NBA sizzle beyond measure. And that obscured all else … at least until MJ came along in 1984.

Recent media offerings have brought the ABA’s role in the NBA’s resurrection to the fore, none better than Luke Epplin’s new book “Moses and the Doctor: Two Men, One Championship and the Birth of Modern Basketball.” With a painstaking eye for detail and a novelist’s knack for narrative, Epplin – who in fact once dreamed of becoming a novelist – underscores the impact not only of Dr. J but another ABA alum of note, Moses Malone. And it is artfully framed around the Sixers’ 1982-83 championship run.

“My biggest thing is character,” Epplin, 47, said before a book signing last Tuesday, the day “Moses and the Doctor” was released.

That’s befitting of a man who had trained to be a novelist at Washington University in St. Louis, and who continued to write fiction into his 30s. Then he came to a realization.

“I sucked,” he told those who gathered at the signing, at a bookstore near Rittenhouse Square.

But, he added, “I use the techniques I developed as a failed novelist to write these kinds of stories.”

He did that in his 2021 book “Our Team,” about the Cleveland Indians of the late 1940s, and he does it here. In the process he echoes, at least to a degree, not only Sielski’s book, but also one authored in 2025 by Paul Knepper entitled “Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet,” as well as an Amazon Prime documentary released last week called “Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association.“

And really, what better characters are there than Doc and Moses? What better story is there than theirs? Erving was soaring and elegant, Moses down and dirty. They were perfect complements to one another, a veritable yin and yang.

While apart, their successes were considerable. Dr. J won two championships as a New York Net while keeping the ABA afloat, and Moses established himself as one of the greatest rebounders in history after becoming the first player to make the prep-to-pro jump. Epplin nonetheless argues that their tales were pockmarked with failure.

Malone broke in with the Utah Stars as a 19-year-old in October 1974, then bounced from team to team. Indeed, one of pro basketball’s great what-ifs is how things might have turned out if the Portland Trail Blazers, his first NBA landing spot, had held onto him, given the subsequent injuries suffered by Bill Walton. As it was, Malone never appeared in a regular-season game for the Blazers, who traded him to Buffalo, leading to another what-if: The Braves (now the Los Angeles Clippers) had Bob McAdoo! And Ernie DiGregorio! And Adrian Dantley! And the eternally underrated Randy Smith!

Moses played exactly two games in Buffalo before he was shipped out to Houston, where he blossomed. Even led the undermanned Rockets to the 1981 Finals, at which point he argued that he and four guys from his native Petersburg, Va., could take down Bird and the mighty Celtics. We’ll never know, but certainly the Rockets couldn’t; they lost in six games.

Meantime Erving, acquired by the Sixers from the cash-strapped Nets in the fall of ‘76, was experiencing his own frustrations. As part of a talented but dysfunctional ‘76-77 Philadelphia club, he lost in the Finals to Walton’s Blazers. Then Doc fell short against Magic’s Lakers in the ‘80 and ‘82 Finals as well.

By that point Dr. J was a beloved figure – the sport’s foremost ambassador, a high-profile pitchman and the perfect teammate. Bobby Jones, with whom Epplin spoke for his book, once told me for one of mine that unlike other superstars, Erving was “an encourager.”

“He wasn’t arrogant,” Bobby said. “He didn’t consider himself better than anybody. He worked as hard as anybody, if not harder. Didn’t put anybody down for the mistakes that they made. That’s easy to do at that level, when the game’s on the line or something’s on the line. He knows he can do it, but you’re in a position where you have to do it, and you don’t, it takes strength of character to say, ‘We’re in this together. We win together, we lose together.’ I think that was probably, to me, his greatest quality.”

That is as great a testimonial as any teammate could offer another, but that’s Bobby. And that was Julius. Which is why everyone – and I mean everyone – wanted to see him win an NBA championship.

It’s also why he was beginning to wonder if he ever would. He cried in the Los Angeles Forum’s visiting locker room after the Sixers were eliminated by the Lakers in six games in the ‘82 Finals.

To revisit the Biblical theme: Julius wept.

When Epplin learned of this, it immediately struck a chord. 

“I thought, there’s the break right there: Why is Julius Erving crying?” he told last week’s gathering.

The answer is simple: Dr. J would not be fulfilled without a title. His tale would be incomplete.

Then Moses came to Philly via trade, bringing with him the means of completion and redemption. No longer would the Sixers be bullied inside. No longer would they have to live with inconsistency at center, as had been the case with the eternally entertaining and eternally frustrating Darryl Dawkins. (Caldwell Jones had been around, too. But he was more a complementary piece than the dominating force Moses was, and was ultimately jettisoned in the Malone trade.)

The following spring, back in the Forum, the Sixers finished off a sweep of a Lakers team that by the end was without McAdoo, James Worthy and Norm Nixon due to injury – i.e., two Hall of Famers and a terrific guard.

No matter, though – the Sixers were the best team all year, storming to 65 victories and then nearly fulfilling Moses’ fo’, fo’, fo’ playoff prophecy. (And consider how Moses, famously averse to media interactions, uttered two of the greatest quotes in NBA history – this one, and the one about the dudes from Petersburg.)

It is a testimony to Malone (who died in 2015) and Erving that they were able to meld their talents, that they knew they needed each other at that point in their careers. And it is testimony to Epplin that he was able to deftly navigate this most fascinating period in the history of the Sixers, and the league. That he was able to retell a tale that needs to be retold, for the sake of context. It is inarguable that Bird and Magic brought a great deal to the table, but Moses and Dr. J are among those deserving of a seat, too. In this book, each is given one.

The 2026 NBA All-Star Weekend gave us a lot to chew on. There was Kevin Durant’s alleged burner scandal, an absolutely terrible dunk contest, and a pretty good All-Star Game featuring a Kawhi Leonard takeover and Victor Wembanyama raising the competitive stakes. No one talked about tanking for a few days, and that’s really all the league can ask for.

There’s always some viral moments when the best players in the world gather together for the weekend, especially with the way cameras and microphones are constantly rolling these days. After Sunday’s All-Star Game, Anthony Edwards covered his mouth to make an off-handed comment to Atlanta Hawks star Jalen Johnson. It sure sounded like Edwards, an Atlanta native said “I can’t wait to come home,” and added “y’all got so many wings, and (Jonathan) Kuminga nice, too” I remember interviewing Edwards from his Atlanta high school in 2019 when he could only dream about being America’s biggest NBA star. Now that it’s actually happened, maybe he’s dreaming about returning to his hometown.

Watch the clip here and judge for yourself.

The Hawks acquired Kuminga from the Golden State Warriors at the trade deadline. Atlanta entered the All-Star break at 26-30 in 10th place in the Eastern Conference after trading away Trae Young earlier this season.

Is it panic time for the Wolves? Not yet. Edwards is under contract through the 2028-2029 season. Minnesota has gone to back-to-back Western Conference Finals since drafting Edwards with the No. 1 overall pick in 2020, and they have four more playoff runs with him under contract before he can test free agency.

The NBA hasn’t had a superstar change teams in free agency since Kawhi Leonard did it in 2019. New York and Los Angeles are usually the markets elite players want to end up in, so it’s interesting to hear Edwards speculate about going home to Atlanta. Life is always easier in the Eastern Conference, so maybe that’s part of the appeal.

It’s possible that Edwards is just talking about going home to Minnesota after the All-Star Game here. Maybe he’s talking about chicken wings, not small forwards. If that’s the case, why did he cover his mouth?

Ultimately, Wolves fans have nothing to worry about for now, and Hawks fans can’t get too excited. Edwards is under contract, he plays for a really good team, and he won’t have the opportunity to test free agency for a long time. It’s just another viral moment from this All-Star Weekend.