Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie is having a breakout season, but no matter how well he performs, he’ll likely be relegated back to his sixth-man role once Kyrie Irving and Caris LeVert both return from their respective injuries, Zach Braziller of the New York Post writes.
“If you don’t roll with it, you will be out the league,” Dinwiddie said. “You don’t have a choice. I could be out here trippin’ and I’ll be gone. If you roll with it, we figure it out and I get to stay and sometimes, every so often, I’ll have like a big game.”
Here’s more from around the Atlantic:
- If Irving, LeVert, and Dinwiddie can all stay healthy, the Nets have a powerful backcourt rotation that is only matched by few around the league, as Malika Andrews of ESPN.com relays. “We have no idea what our ceiling is because we are not even close to healthy,” Dinwiddie said. “We really have no idea how good we could be. It is encouraging to know that our floor is continuing to rise.”
- Before he injured his hand, Gordon Hayward was thriving and it was because of the Celtics‘ commitment to ball movement, Steve Bullpett of the Boston Herald writes. Hayward struggled last season in a slightly different on-court environment. “Yeah, if he gave the ball up, it wasn’t coming back,” said president of basketball operations Danny Ainge. “I mean, I think it was everybody trying to figure out like how they could earn their opportunities, and there wasn’t enough to go around to feed everybody.”
- The first quarter of the season has made Vegas bookmakers more optimistic about the Celtics‘ chances of winning the NBA Finals, Darren Hartwell of NBC Sports Boston explains. Boston is listed as 18-to-1 odds in SuperBook USA’s latest offerings. The team was 40-to-1 a month ago.