Four Corners: Who most needs to get their act together before the playoffs?

With five weeks left before the end of the 2016-17 regular season, we’re all starting to look toward the future. Which teams need to find another gear to propel themselves into legitimate contention come the playoffs? Which ones look like they’re starting to figure some things out for the years ahead? Which ones continue to appear to have no idea what the hell they’re doing?

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The topic for this week’s Four Corners roundtable: Which team would you most like to see get its, um, crap together before the end of the season? Here are our picks. Let’s hear yours in the comments.

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BEN ROHRBACH: Oklahoma City Thunder

I liked the Cam Payne for Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott swap. Figured it for the best deadline move beyond the New Orleans Pelicans nabbing DeMarcus Cousins for 50 cents on the dollar. Gibson might be the most underrated of a dying breed — the workmanlike power forward who can’t stretch the floor — and McDermott brought a near-40 percent clip from 3-point range to give the Thunder some much-needed perimeter shooting.

So far, though, their production has dipped despite similar minutes to those they were seeing in Chicago. They’re a combined 40 percent from the field, with McDermott just 5-of-21 from deep, and Oklahoma City is operating at a deficit with either of them on the floor. After three straight victories out of the All-Star break, the Thunder have now lost four straight, falling from within striking distance of a home playoff seed to five games out of the fourth seed with 18 games to go.

Meanwhile, Russell Westbrook’s triple-double quest is dangerously close to slipping away:

Not that an individual averaging a triple-double is ever a team’s ultimate goal, but Westbrook’s rage against the NBA machine has been one of the league’s most fascinating storylines this season. I was sort of hoping those trade-deadline reinforcements would help bolster that narrative by improving OKC’s chances of a second-round playoff meeting with Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors. I don’t think anybody would give them much of a shot at an upset, but boy, would that be some fun theater. And if the Thunder ever get their act together enough around Westbrook to make it a competitive series, that’s all the more must-watch drama for us.

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KELLY DWYER: New Orleans Pelicans

New Orleans’ season started effectively last Friday against the San Antonio Spurs, and with a terrific hole out of which to climb. For all the team’s good fortune in sending what was already a disappointing lottery pick and another pair of so-so picks to the Sacramento Kings for Cousins, the mixture seemed to need a tweak as soon as Boogie stepped down from his Zulu float.

The Pelicans lost that game, as they have most contests this season, giving away a four-point lead in the final minute at home in a 101-98 overtime loss. Point guard Jrue Holiday, and not Cousins or Anthony Davis, took the two biggest shots for the Pelicans down the stretch, and missed them both. Holiday shot 46.8 percent from the field before the trade deadline. He’s down to 39.4 percent overall since Cousins joined the team — just 29.4 percent with Cousins on the floor, and 49.1 percent with Boogie off it, according to NBA.com.

That includes a 10-for-18 showing in one of NOLA’s two Cousins-era wins — a game that DeMarcus missed due to a league-mandated suspension for picking up too many technical fouls. The Pelicans are 25-39, a season-worst 14 games under .500, 4 1/2 games out of the final playoff spot in the West with 18 to play, and 2-5 since the deal.

New Orleans is paying for both the sins of Cousins’ fitful final half-season as a King and its own ineptitude in the months leading up to the deal. The Pelicans had just come off of a 23-34 start to the season and was winding down from playing nine of 12 on the road when they eagerly committed to whatever the heck Cousins now provides. The Mardi Gras haze obscured three winless trips following his addition, followed by victory over a distant Detroit squad.

Cousins’ role within the Great Big Man Experiment with All-Star Game MVP Davis won’t be completely clarified by season’s end. We won’t have determined just how well two ridiculously blessed bigs will function together in the modern NBA in just over a month’s time; it’d take years to figure out their placement and standing amongst the greats (to say nothing of the age-old question of whether two fearsome bigs should line up together).

What does need to be determined straightaway, though, is just what sort of scheme this crew is going to run. And if that means punting the 2016-17 season, spending the last 18 games forcing a square peg into a round hole, so be it. The Pelicans acquired Cousins for a song, and despite the potential loss of a lottery pick, the walls won’t collapse if New Orleans finishes with just 30 wins.

That’s the hope, at least. While we try to forget the fact that the Pelicans are extremely lucky that wonderful timing, a North Carolina governor with miscast ambitions, and lacking competence from Sacramento were the only things (along with Buddy Hield, the next Dell Curry — no, that’s not a dig) that put Cousins in a NOLA uniform in the first place.

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We also don’t want to be reminded of the undeserved gift of a 28-and-11 stud that fell in Dell Demps’ lap, and the idea that the Pelicans general manager’s touch could now help ruin the early careers of two of the more talented players in NBA history. Even if the Pelicans presented us with something, anything, down the stretch, the run could save Demps’ reputation with team ownership, and that’s a frightening prospect. It’s been too long with this team.

New Orleans has to give us something in March and April, even if the playoffs cease to be a possibility. The team can’t consider its offseason and 2016-17 season already made, as Cousins spits (earned) invective at heckling fans in two different NBA cities in a week. The group has to provide some kind of spark that won’t leave us sloughing off the talents of Davis and Cousins until the next trade comes along. Or the next GM, or next coach, or next billion-buck contract extension.

We’re not betting that the next five weeks will have us walking into the summer whistling. Nobody involved here has earned our benefit of the doubt.

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ERIC FREEMAN: Los Angeles Clippers

When Doc Rivers coached the Boston Celtics, he often said that no team had ever beaten them in a series when their starting lineup was healthy. If Rivers leaves the Clippers without having progressed to the Western Conference Finals, he will be able to say that no one ever beat his team when they weren’t dealing with a poltergeist.

The story of the Clippers in the Chris Paul-Blake Griffin era has been a tendency to disappoint, often in shocking ways. A team that blows a 3-1 lead in the conference finals one year and comes back the next to lose a series because its two best players got hurt is positively snakebit. There has been considerable talk that this season could be the last one together for this core group, and if that’s the case, then they better hope they don’t experience another disastrous finish again this spring.

For that reason alone, it would be nice to see the Clippers enter and continue through the playoffs as their best selves. If this is the last hurrah for Paul, Griffin, DeAndre Jordan, and their role player friends, then we might as well see how they perform when they’re all active and ready to prove everyone wrong.

That does not mean that they necessarily need to progress to the conference finals. If they hold on to their current No. 5 spot in the standings, they will not have home-court advantage and could very well lose in the opening round. The Clippers have done very little to prove that they belong among the NBA’s elite — they regularly lose to the best teams in the league (often via blowout), seem more concerned with arguing calls than dealing with their aftermath, and don’t clearly have the level of talent necessary to win a title even under the best circumstances. We’re not dealing with a sleeping giant here. The Clippers have had plenty of chances to prove themselves and never done it.

Even so, it would be nice to see them finish out this season on their own terms. No one wants to see an incomplete story. Let this group go out fighting, at least if they want to.

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DAN DEVINE: New York Knicks

I know, I know. As long as you’re wishing for things, Dan, you might as well ask for a pony. But a boy can dream, and man, would I like to see the Knicks take an honest self-inventory over these next few weeks, and proceed accordingly.

The Knicks are bad. They have produced points at a roughly league-average clip all year, no matter which shape of offense they’ve run, and have for what feels like the 138th consecutive season ranked among the league’s five or six worst teams in defensive efficiency. They are 26-38, sitting in 12th place in the East and 5 1/2 games out of the conference’s No. 8 seed with 18 games remaining.

They are closer to the third-worst record in the NBA, and thus the third-best odds of landing the No. 1 overall pick in the 2017 NBA draft, than they are to the playoffs. They have reached this point despite team president Phil Jackson embarking last summer on a win-now plan that included trading center Robin Lopez (a solid rim protector and screen-setter making a little under $14 million a year for the next three seasons) and point guard Jerian Grant (who’s on a low-cost rookie deal through 2020 and, as it turns out, can shoot a little) for Derrick Rose (an awful fit in the Knicks’ preferred offense who hits free agency this summer and wants a max contract) and Justin Holiday (who’s been just fine, thanks, but who also hits the unrestricted market after the season), and then committing $18 million a year for the next four seasons to What Once Was Joakim Noah to take Lopez’s place, which he was unable to do before undergoing knee surgery.

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Trying to walk two paths at once — attempting to return to contention right now to maximize the end of Carmelo Anthony’s prime with stuff like the Rose deal, while also using the one-year-rental nature of Rose as evidence that they’re remaining lean and limber for a bigger-picture retooling around Kristaps Porzingis — didn’t make much sense in theory, and it hasn’t worked in practice. For the fourth straight spring, the Knicks find themselves spinning their wheels, seemingly uncertain which direction to turn. One idea: spend the next five weeks doing your damnedest to be at least as bad as you’ve been since late October, because now that you once again own all your own first-round draft picks, it’s actually profitable to do that.

Think you’ve found something interesting in recently re-signed rookie point guard Chasson Randle? Awesome. Keep him parked at the end of the bench for a while. Let him showcase that talent in practice. Let Rose try to rack up as many points as he can in pursuit of a pumped-up season-ending stat line that might help inflate the offers he’ll receive in free agency. Let your already bad defense continue to stink with Rose at the tip of the spear.

Quit trying to prove how scrappy you can be by knocking off the Orlando Magic twice in a week. Steer into the skid. Acknowledge that the best thing for the future is giving yourself the best possible chance of landing a running buddy for Porzingis in a draft teeming with point guard talent. Think seriously about which path is most likely to make you a consistently competitive team — and then dismiss that thought about the triangle, because the answer is “trying to build an honest-to-God defense” — and start building. Show a commitment to taking the long view, for once.

Then, this summer, let Rose walk. Try to re-up Holiday. Take a whack at unrestricted free agents who can credibly guard their own positions; if you can’t quite afford Justin’s brother Jrue or George Hill, think smaller, and be ready in case an opportunity arises, like if the 76ers are foolish enough not to exercise their team option on Robert Covington.

Either go to ‘Melo and tell him clearly that you’d like to rebuild and want to try to find him a new home, or decide that ship has sailed and quit being passive-aggressive and crummy about it. Either way, try to work with him. Keep Noah parked on the bench until he proves he can move and jump again (which, fingers crossed, I’d love to see, because functional Joakim Noah is a joyous thing to be celebrated) and give the combination of Porzingis and Willy Hernangomez some runway to find out what you’ve got there.

Try — really, truly, honestly try — to just be boring for several consecutive months, while making a concerted effort to solve your defensive and point-guard problems for the first time in ages. No more delusions of grandeur, no more puffed-up and unwarranted exceptionalism, no more airing of grievances and venting of spleens. Just a look in the mirror, an acceptance that what you see is a bummer, and a decision to try to do better … starting by deciding to wait five weeks to really try to do better.

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