NBA Hater Report: Paolo Banchero's blemish is getting bigger; Stephen Curry can't save Warriors

Meanwhile, the Cavaliers are trending toward rock bottom after the first scoreless OT in a decade

Welcome back to the NBA Hater Report: A breakdown of some of the players, teams and trends around the league that are drawing the ire of yours truly. If you're not a fellow pessimist, proceed with caution. 

Paolo Banchero's big blemish

The Magic fell to the Knicks in the NBA Cup semifinal on Saturday, and the month-long momentum they've been riding could be about to hit a wall -- unless Paolo Banchero has something better in store than what he has showed in his short time back from the groin strain that kept him out for 10 games. 

The Magic went 7-3 in those games and have a plus-3.4 net rating with Banchero off the floor this season, per Cleaning the Glass. And now it's all on him as Franz Wagner could be out for the next month, at least, with a high ankle sprain (reporting has indicated anywhere from a two- to six-week recovery window), and now Jalen Suggs, who limped off the court on Saturday and flew back to Orlando from Las Vegas to have testing done on a bum hip, looks like he's also headed for hiatus. 

Suggs has been extraordinary this season. From his defensive roots an increasingly diverse offensive garden has quietly been growing, and this season it's nearing full bloom. Career high scoring efficiency. More attacks on the basket. Suggs' +13.2 CTG net rating makes him, statistically speaking, the Magic's most impactful player, while more and more people would now identify Wagner as the team's best player.

So where does that leave Banchero? Nobody is questioning him as the team's most talented player, but next year a $200 million max extension kicks in, and on a team that went all in on Desmond Bane to win now, no longer can the inefficiencies be written off as mere development debt. 

Banchero has always been a moderately accurate midrange scorer who pretty much can't hit the ocean if his boat is sitting outside the 3-point line. He's making a career-low 26% of his 3s so far this year -- which includes an abysmal 2-for-24 mark of the dribble, per synergy. Last year he was 30% on off-the-dribble 3s, and he shot just 40% on all dribble jumpers despite that designation making up 77% of his shot profile. He missed all seven of his 3s against the Knicks on Saturday. His 48.7 eFG%, per CTG, is his worst mark since his rookie year and ranks in the 14th percentile among all forward, just above Jonathan Kuminga, who can't even get on the court for the Warriors. 

Banchero's size-to-skill ratio is among the most impressive in the league, but the shooting has to improve if he's going to become an All-NBA player, or more immediately, if he's going to carry the Magic through what could be an extended time without Wagner and Suggs. Recent lineup data may suggest this Banchero solo mission is doomed before is starts. 

2025-26 LINEUPS	NET RATING	OFFENSIVE RANKING
Banchero w/o Wagner	-5.4	12th percentile
Banchero w/o Suggs	-6.9	14th percentile
Banchero w/o Wagner and Suggs	-10.9	6th percentile

Last season, with a bigger sample size, doesn't look any better. 

2024-25 LINEUPS	NET RATING	OFFENSIVE RANKING
Banchero w/o Wagner	-9.5	12th percentile
Banchero w/o Suggs	-1.9	24th percentile
Banchero w/o Wagner and Suggs	-10.7	11th percentile

To be fair, the Magic are better equipped this season to support Banchero without his two main co-pilots. Desmond Bane can, and needs to, ratchet up his offense, Anthony Black is a vastly improved player and Wendell Carter Jr. has gone from a 23% to 42% 3-point shooter. 

Still, this is on Banchero to at least keep Orlando's head above water during this stretch, and going forward he's the key to their chances of actually competing for a conference crown. Because the truth is, in his four years in the league, he's only marginally changed as a player. He's forcing his way downhill, and to the rim, a little more, settling for long mid-range shots and holding the ball overall a little less. But for the most part Banchero is operating in a fashion all too familiar to the growing contingent of critics who understand his baseline level is a very good player but, for a No. 1 overall pick on the last year of his rookie deal, believe it's time to start expecting something closer to great. 

Not even Steph can save the Warriors

So much for all that supposed Warriors momentum built on the back of Pat Spencer's own little Linsanity run. Stephen Curry has been back for two games and Golden State has dropped both of them, first to the Timberwolves (who were playing without Anthony Edwards) when Curry had 39 and then to the Blazers on Sunday despite Curry's 48 points and 12 3-pointers. 

Let me repeat that: The Warriors got 87 points and 19 3-pointers from Curry in his two games back and couldn't beat a team playing without its best player or the 10-16 Blazers. Hell, they couldn't even win Curry's minutes. The Warriors are now 0-3 against Portland this season, and 13-14 overall. 

I wrote about this very thing in my Nov. 17 Hater Report. At the time, Curry had just pulled off back-to-back magic acts, scoring 95 points to beat the Spurs twice in three days, and I said it was not sustainable for even a player as great as Curry to keep doing that. It was going to catch up to the Warriors, and now it has. 

Somehow the Warriors came into Sunday with the second-ranked defense in the league, but this is one of the ratings that doesn't match the eye test. This team is not that hard to score on. On some nights, they're actually pretty easy to score on. It's the defensive equivalent of a streaky shooter. 

Meanwhile, the offense ranks 22nd, which should be next to impossible for a Curry team, and oh by the way Jonathan Kuminga is back to catching DNP-CDs. 

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I don't even have the energy to go over this Kuminga mess again. But I'll tell you this: You would be hard pressed to find another player in the league, or hell, anywhere in the world, with Kuminga's ability and proven track record of production that can't get one minute of playing time. 

There are a lot of layers to this, no doubt. Lineup mixes are delicate. Golden State plays a unique style that isn't in Kuminga's wheelhouse. His effective field goal percentage is an eye sore. But at the end of the day, a guy this talented getting this buried on the bench, on a team that needs, pretty specifically, the one thing he can do at a high level (a downhill athlete), no less -- is crazy. 

Cavaliers headed down dark path

The Cleveland Cavaliers have lost six of their last nine games. It's the Eastern Conference, so they're still only one game back of the No. 3 seed, but for a team that won 64 games a year ago, this is trending in a rock-bottom direction. On Sunday, the Cavs lost to the Hornets after they failed to score a single point -- missing all 10 of their shots -- in overtime. 

That's not easy to do. The last time a team went scoreless in an entire overtime period was over a decade ago. It was the Bulls. In 2015. Congrats to the Cavs for joining that exclusive club -- against one of the worst defenses in the league, no less. 

Two days before that, Cleveland needed 48 points and eight 3-pointers from Donovan Mitchell (who is having to turn into Superman way too often this season) just to dig out from a 17-point hole to beat the Wizards by four. The Wizards! We're talking about probably the worst team in the league, and you need damn near 50 points from your star just to pull a rabbit out of your hat? 

"This is a good win, but it's also not a good win," Mitchell said after the Washington escape. "Yeah we pulled it off and we figured it out, but we can't be in this situation."

Every good team -- which the Cavs are supposed to be -- finds itself in this very situation now and again in which they play to the level of a vastly inferior opponent, but it's happening too often of late for these Cavs, who prior to the Hornets/Wizards brain farts lost to a Warriors team that was playing without Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green.

Yes, the Cavs have been dealing with injuries all season. Darius Garland, Jarrett Allen, Sam Merrill, Lonzo Ball and Larry Nance Jr. have missed a combined 63 games. Max Strus hasn't even played yet. Now Evan Mobley is out 2-4 weeks with a calf strain, the injury that has every team in the league erring way on the side of caution in terms of allowing players back on the court for fear of it being a precursor to Achilles tears. 

Garland, most notably, has been limited to 10 games and is clearly not even close to 100% after having offseason toe surgery; his 14.4 PPG is his lowest output since his rookie season and his 35/26 shooting splits are a stain on any stat sheet, let alone that of a two-time All-Star. 

There are positives you can talk yourself into. The Cavaliers rank either inside or just outside the top 10 in offensive, defensive and net rating. Not great, but certainly not terrible. When the core four of Mitchell, Garland, Allen and Mobley has shared the court, albeit for just 127 possessions so far, they have blitzed opponents by 26 points per 100 possessions, per CTG. 

But when you take even one of them out, things start looking pretty dark pretty quickly. And one glance at Cleveland's post-Christmas schedule suggests they won't be coming into the light any time soon.