The NBA is a cruel place if your franchise is underperforming and going in the wrong direction, and that will be the case for these teams this offseason.
They say that the worst place to be in the NBA is the middle of the pack because it means you are not good enough to contend for a championship but not bad enough to bottom out completely and land a top draft pick. Although the Miami Heat are proving this theory to be not entirely true in the bubble, in the case of most organizations, the dreaded middle is to be avoided.
It is why a 60-win Atlanta Hawks team that couldn’t get past LeBron James in the Eastern Conference was eventually broken up, with a Memphis Grizzlies outfit consisting of Mike Conley Jr. and Marc Gasol another example out west. There can only be one winner each season. For the handful of organizations that are good but not great, continued low-level success becomes a kind of purgatory.
That being said, tanking completely doesn’t always work either. The Philadelphia 76ers did this to draft Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. Years down the road of building around these two, look as far away from a championship as ever. There may be no right way to get back to the top, but there is also no doubt that a franchise with a bleak outlook is easy to spot too.
This is what the following three teams that made this list are: Organizations that are going to head into this offseason in a troubling position for entirely different reasons. Even sure-fire playoff rosters can have a troubling outlook, as is the case here.