Arsenalist

NBA.com has taken a page out of ESPN (pretty much copied them) and started to rank teams on a weekly basis – also known as the NBA Power Rankings.

This week sees NBA.com and ESPN.com rank both their top five the exact same:

1. Phoenix
2. San Antonio
3. Utah
4. Dallas
5. Detroit

No surprises or major arguments against the rankings, although ESPN has taken the liberty to rank the Raptors 22nd (up from 26) while NBA.com still has them at 25 (from 27). NBA.com reasons:

You can’t really fault the Raps much for having their streak snapped by the Suns, especially with Amare playing as he did.

while ESPN.com says:

Raps are this week’s Seattle, winning three in a row after bad news on Bosh. Not only that, Raps are the only Titanic team with a winning record (7-3) at home.

I get the feeling that whoever’s in charge of writing these meaningless rankings just looks at the teams record this week and either bumps them up two, keeps them the same or demotes them a couple spaces based on a winning record, even record or a losing record, respectively.

They should just get rid of the “power ranking” system and have two categories.

1. Teams that are likely to make the playoffs as of now.
2. Teams that are likely to end up in the lottery.

Then you can rank the teams in 1 and 2 all you want but at least this will involve some more skill and knowledge on the part of the writers as they’ll have to decide if a streaking Raptors team could actually make the playoffs over Boston.

Finally, give some credit to NBA.com as their official website has gotten a lot better this year with RSS Feeds, less images and more CSS, immediate highlights, much neater box scores and a lot better navigation. Of all the major sports leagues, NBA.com is only behind NFL.com when it comes to having the best website. This of course doesn’t change what the best sports website in the word is: soccernet.com.