Loose Balls Mark Deeks

Be as effusive with your praise of Nikola Jokic as you dare. He has earned it. The uber-Brad Miller is a sport-changing talent, an all-timer, someone with a gravitational effect on the entire league.
Be fairly liberal in your appraisal of this year's Denver Nuggets, too. They are replete with offense, sporting a colossal seven players averaging double figures in scoring, all formulated around their historically good offensive lynchpin.
The fun is there. The scoring is there. The aesthetics are there. And the results, by and large, are there as well. However, the defence is not. And it is difficult to see how the Nuggets can find a way using the personnel that they have now to stem the tide. 
 
- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA on what's left of Twitter, email me at mark.s.deeks@gmail.com, or find me on Tinder somehow. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks.

All good things must come to an end. Having lost five games in a row, the hot start that the Utah Jazz got out to this season seems to have fully cooled off. They came out of the gates storming with an unlikely amount of synergy, and peeled off 12 wins in their first 18 games. They were considerably better than everyone expected, including those who expected them to be better than everyone else expected.
The same growing pains that it was thought they would inevitably hit, though, are seemingly finally here. But on the plus side, Lauri Markkanen has shown no sign of cooling off.
Markkanen has been playing more like Finland Lauri than NBA Lauri. That is to say, the Jazz have been giving him an expanded role on the offensive end, just like the Finnish national team do. Markannen is by far the most talented player in Finnish basketball, and so when he plays for his nation, he is empowered to do more than he has hitherto mostly been in the NBA.  Clearly enjoying his new style and new level of play, he has become a go-to guy for the Jazz in a way that he never was in either Cleveland or in Chicago.
 
- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA on Twitter, or email me at mark.s.deeks@gmail.com. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks. For less of my stuff, go outside.

Across successive NBA Collective Bargaining Agreements, instruments have been put in place to protect teams against the threat of losing their best young talents to free agency, theoretically correcting a situation brought about by years of travel in the opposite direction.
Restricted free agency is an imperfect tool, though, and there does still exist a pathway through which young players can up sticks and leave careless teams. And the Chicago Bulls might be about to have this problem with guard Ayo Dosunmu.
This podcast looks at the history and parameters of what is known as the "Arenas Provision", the ramifications thereof, and shoehorns in a reference to Derrick White for good measure. It gets a bit arcane. Be warned.
 
- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA on what's left of Twitter, email me at mark.s.deeks@gmail.com, or find me on Tinder somehow. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks. 

Father time, they say, is undefeated. But you can at least negotiate with him.
In what will indisputably be the latter stages of his career, Cleveland Cavaliers big man Kevin Love is holding back the inevitable. As the hair greys and the team around him transforms, he remains the mainstay, the lone holdover from the championship era, the bridge to the past. And he also remains very good.
It has been quite the reputational transformation for Love, a man who 18 months ago was thought to represent everything wrong with the Cavs. In contrast, he now represents everything that is right.
 
- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA or mark.s.deeks@gmail.com, for feedback and aggressive spam email campaigns. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks. 

For whatever reason, Deandre Ayton has become the barometer by which the Phoenix Suns are often measured. The man who has simultaneously been a big-minute starter and an afterthought, who they did not much value yet whom they gave a maximum salary to, who they would not extend but who they would match an offer sheet for, and who can be both underwhelming and irreplaceable, occupies an enigmatic place in the hearts and minds of his own team's fanbase, let alone the wider basketball world.
To look at his total body of work outside of any microcosms, though, sees some positive through-lines emerge. And of late, in the absence of Chris Paul, he has been putting it together.
 
- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA or mark.s.deeks@gmail.com, for all your complaints. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks. 

The Philadelphia 76ers drafted Tyrese Maxey with the 21st overall pick in 2020, directly between Precious Achiuwa and Zeke Nnaji. He had averaged 14.0 points, 4.2 assists and 3.9 rebounds per game in a heavy minutes share in his only season at Kentucky, but had not really shone in any area of the game; while he had few weaknesses and played with energy, he was not a huge athlete, a sub-par shooter, inefficient from many areas of the court as a scorer, unremarkable as a defender, and with mostly scoring inclinations as a playmaker.
It quickly transpired, though, that Maxey's stand-out attribute was his work ethic. The player before us today is a hundred times better than the Kentucky Wildcat of two and a half years ago. Indeed, he is one of the most rapidly-improving players in the world.
 
- @MarkDeeksNBA (follow me on Twitter before it, or I, die)