Continuing on with my look at the Eastern Conference, here are the leading contenders for a spot in next year’s Finals.  In reality, barring unforeseen injuries, anyone other than the top three teams coming out of the East would be a major surprise, and Cleveland is only in that group because LeBron James has proven to be exceptionally difficult to eliminate, regardless of the personnel around him.  So, here’s my top five:

5.  Philadelphia 76ers

Ever since the trade of Allen Iverson a couple years ago, the Sixers have been stockpiling young talent.  About midway through last season, that talent began to gel, leading to a fantastic second half, a spot in the playoffs and a surprising 2-1 lead on Detroit in the first round.  They came back to earth after that, getting soundly thumped in the final three games of that series, but the foundation was in place for a return to contention.  Then, this offseason, the Sixers made a major splash, adding one of the few consistent 20 and 10 guys in the league in Elton Brand.  If Brand is indeed healthy, Philadelphia is poised to make a run at home court advantage in the first round.  With a solid point guard in Andre Miller, a first rate post player in Brand, a shot-blocking force in the middle with Sam Dalembert, an explosive slasher in Andre Igoudala and young talents like Louis Williams, Willie Green and Thaddeus Young, the Sixers are in the best shape since the won the East behind A.I. and Dikembe Mutombo in 2001.  This year, I expect a win total between 50 and 55, and an excellent chance at reaching their first conference final in eight years.

4.  Orlando Magic

Wow, did Dwight Howard suck in Olympic play.  Some would say that his performance was an indication that he’s still too young to be a genuine, carry-a-team superstar.  I’m not one of those.  Remember how bad Tim Duncan looked during his Olympic experience?  All he’s done since then is win a couple of NBA Titles.  FIBA rules just don’t allow for solid interior post players to dominate as they would during NBA games.  That’s probably why big guys from Europe are more likely to play like much smaller guards rather than using their size and strength to dominate.  Howard will be even better this season than he was last year.  The addition of Mickael Pietrus will turn out to be one of the better free agent signings, and Anthony Johnson gives them an actual backup point guard instead of a masquerading two-guard like Keyon Dooling.  I still believe that Jameer Nelson’s best role would be playing about 25-30 minutes a game as a scorer off the bench with point skills, and that the Magic won’t ascend to genuine championship level until they acquire a pass-first point guard who excels in post entry passes, but with Howard dominating the paint, and versatile scorers like Hedu Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis, Orlando will spend the entire season in the upper half of the East. 

3.  Cleveland Cavaliers

What is there left to say about LeBron James at this point?  About the only thing he hasn’t yet done is dominate an NBA Finals or win an MVP Award, and it seems like those accomplishments are only a matter of time.  My first reaction to the trade for Mo Williams was almost negative.  I like the addition of another guard who can actually score, and I’ve never believed that a team with a guy like LeBron really needs a pass-first point guard anyway, but I really liked the contributions Joe Smith brought to the team.  Unless 19-year-old J.J. Hickson is ready to step in right away, losing Smith leaves them a little thin up front, with Ben Wallace and Zydrunas Ilgauskas aging rapidly.  Not that Smith is a spring chicken by any means, but there’s something to be said for strength in numbers, not to mention a guy who comes off the bench, plays solid post defense, offensive rebounds and has a nice little 15-foot jumper.  I think the more pressing need was for a shooting guard better than Wally Szczerbiak, something Danny Ferry probably could have picked up at the local Wal Mart.  Still, I suspect there’s another major move coming at some point this season.  If this roster stays as is, the Cavs will be no better than fifth or sixth in the East and still a very dangerous postseason opponent likely to pull an upset or two.  I believe a move will come, another big time player comes to town and the Cavs will be even money to beat both Boston and Detroit and return to the Finals.

2.  Boston Celtics

The Celtics were a perfect storm of talent and motivation last season en route to their first title in 22 years.  They jumped out of the gate to the tune of 30-3, and held on down the stretch, taking the best record in the league by a relatively wide margin.  After some early playoff struggles, they came together to finish off Detroit and Los Angeles to finally hoist the trophy.  This season, the motivation from years of playoff failure for their big three of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen will be somewhat lacking.  And I think the loss of James Posey will affect them more than some people believe.  All that being said, they are still, without question, one of the best teams in the league and a repeat title is very possible.  If Rajon Rondo ever gets even an adequate jump shot, he could be one of the top point guards in the league for the next decade or so.  Kendrick Perkins, Leon Powe and even Glen Davis all have the potential for significant improvement, as well.  The recent signing of Darius Miles is pretty intriguing.  Portland wrote him off with what they called a career-ending injury, but I suspect some of that had to do with his attitude and the Blazers desire to be rid of his large contract and malcontent nature.  If he can still play even close to the talent he showed a few years ago, Boston may very well repeat.  I expect a little bit of a letdown, especially early in the regular season, but an eventual record approaching 60 wins again and a solid playoff run that comes up just short this time around.

1.  Detroit Pistons

The Pistons resisted making major changes this offseason after losing their third consecutive Eastern Conference Finals, meaning that they will enter this year with basically the same club as last year.  This may be the last go-round for the veteran starting five of Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, Rasheed Wallace and Antonio McDyess, and anything short of another title will definitely mean the end of their time together.  Rodney Stuckey emerged late last year and in the playoffs as the obvious heir-apparent to Billups, and he will only get better this year, along with high-energy reserve Jason Maxiell.  Detroit is even taking a shot at salvaging the career of another guy with talent who hasn’t worked out anywhere else with Kwame Brown, a task they’ve excelled at in the past.  But Brown may be their toughest challenge of all.  I believe that some of the same motivators that helped the Celtics last year will work for the Pistons this year.  I expect Detroit to jump out early and end up with the best record in the East, possibly the entire league.  The Pistons major problem ever since winning the title in 2004 has been a lack of focus in the playoffs, losing games they shouldn’t have and consistently digging themselves into holes they couldn’t always climb out of.  This year, I think they keep their focus and return to the NBA Finals after a three-year absence.

So that’s how I see the Eastern Conference going into this year.  As always, there will be trades, injuries and unexpected performances, both good and bad, that will change the makeup of the conference.  But right now, this is how I see it ending up.  Next, the bottom five in the West.

Continuing on with my preseason look at the Eastern Conference, here are teams 6 through 10.  Last season, three teams at .500 or worse made the playoffs.  That is not going to happen again.  I believe it’s going to take 42-45 wins to get into the post season this year.  All five of these teams have the capability of getting that done.

10.  Toronto Raptors

Toronto is a trendy pick to move up in the East after trading for Jermaine O’Neal, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that he’ll stay on the floor all season, or be the kind of player he was five or six years ago.  That being said, the Raptors were just 41-41 last season.  They might actually have a better record this year and still miss the playoffs.  I like the move to clear out T.J. Ford and hand the full time point guard reins to Jose Calderon.  I expect him to end up in the top five in the league in assists, averaging double figures.  This team’s main drawback is a total lack of interior strength.  Their best big guys, Chris Bosh, Andrea Bargnani and O’Neal, all play small, and that will kill them in the end.  Still, they should be in playoff contention, coming up just short.

9.  Milwaukee Bucks    

I liked the Bucks chances better before they traded Mo Williams.  They did land Luke Ridnour in the deal, but he has been nothing short of miserable the past couple of years playing on really bad Seattle teams.  If he can regain some of the form he showed a few years ago when Seattle reached the second round of the playoffs, the Bucks will have an excellent shot of landing a playoff spot, and possibly making some noise when they get there.  With Richard Jefferson, Michael Redd, Charlie Villanueva, Andrew Bogut and explosive rookie Joe Alexander, he’ll have plenty of chances for assists, but a rejuvenation is far from secure.  If he can’t get it back together, Milwaukee will be in major trouble at the point, and that will cost them a chance at postseason play.  I’m guessing Ridnour will be solid yet unspectacular and the Bucks will miss the postseason by a hair, possibly going down to the final day of the season.

8.  Atlanta Hawks      

After years of futility, the Hawks finally broke through and nearly pulled the greatest upset in NBA playoff history, taking a Celtics team that was almost 30 games ahead of them in to standings to a game seven.  Just having Mike Bibby on the floor for a full season should be enough to get them over .500.  And it’s a distinct possibility that Marvin Williams will blossom now that Josh Childress is playing in Greece, Al Horford will take a step up into All Star territory and Josh Smith will move into superstar range.  And that’s not even mentioning Joe Johnson, who is still Atlanta’s best player.  Depth is the main concern, I think.  An injury or two that causes key players to miss significant time will derail the entire season.  My guess is they will be better right out of the gate this year, and two of the three key young guys will step up their games, crashing the post season for the second year in a row.  The short bench will be their downfall, however.  The Hawks are a year and a few shrewd personnel moves away from legitimate contention.

7.  Washington Wizards      

This is kind of a difficult team to figure.  They may have been better off letting Gilbert Arenas walk and spending that money elsewhere, but they gave him an enormous contract despite missing nearly the entire season with an injury, and the team performing very well without him.  Caron Butler, if he can stay away from the injuries that have hurt him throughout his career, looks to be a guy blossoming into a genuine star, and with Brendan Haywood looking like an actual player for the first time in his career and young big guy Andray Blatche looking as though he has a nice upside, the Wizards won’t be just the same old run and gun team.  Look for some of the toughness they displayed in the Cleveland series to carry over into this year, and winning home court advantage in the first round is a possibility.  But I expect they will again have some injury issues that will cost them a few games, and Agent Zero’s new contract will look even worse by the end of the season.  They’ll probably just be happy if they don’t have to face LeBron James and the Cavs in the first round again.

6.  Chicago Bulls       

This is the team I think will move up the most in the East.  Remember, just two seasons ago, Chicago swept the defending champions in the first round, before last season’s catastrophe, led by a disgruntled and massively overrated Ben Gordon.  From all reports, Gordon is done as a Bull, and to me, that is definite addition by subtraction.  It would have been an enormous mistake to pay him $10 million per year.  Chicago is much better off giving the bigger and more defense-minded Thabo Sefolosha more minutes than dealing with the streaky, much-too-small, defenseless Gordon any longer.  The main reason I think the Bulls will move into the playoffs is that I don’t think their roster is done.  I suspect there may be a major move coming up sometime this season.  The Bulls still have an abundance of pieces to package together, and their inability to put together deals for Pau Gasol, Kevin Garnett or any other quality player over the past few seasons has held this team back.  This year, I believe they get it done.  With the right deal, they could move up even higher.  I expect a slow start as Derrick Rose learns the pro game, but a strong finish, and a reconstituted team that could possibly pull a major upset come playoff time.

Next Up:  Top Of The Heap

 

I’m excited.  The NBA season is almost upon us, and after all of the player shifting, wheeling and dealing, I thought I’d run down my list of the best teams in each conference from the bottom up in sets of five.  I’ll start with the inferior but improving East.  Here are my bottom five clubs.  None of these teams will even sniff a playoff spot, and four of the five could well be competing for the top pick in next year’s draft.

15.  New York Knicks

Finally, the long reign of terror known as Isiah Thomas has ended.  Mike D’Antoni takes the helm of one of the least talented teams this side of Oklahoma City.  D’Antoni intends to instill his run and gun style of play but this isn’t Phoenix and Chris Duhon is most definitely not Steve Nash.  There are a few useful players on the roster, but the big-time talents are notoriously lazy.  And other than rookie Danilo Gallinari, nobody in this group has any real upside in their games beyond what they’ve already shown.  I would be very surprised if D’Antoni can coax more than 25 wins out of this bunch.  Most likely, this will be one of those dreaded rebuilding seasons that starts poorly, leads to a player purge and ends with a top five lottery pick.  D’Antoni might get a little bit of a pass from the fickle New York fans as long as the team at least plays with energy and enthusiasm while continuing to reshape the roster and shows some kind of promise for the future, but the Knicks ground up a Hall Of Fame coach like Larry Brown after just one season, it will be interesting to see how long D’antoni hangs around if this ends up as a Heat-like 15-67 type of year, and it just might.

14.  New Jersey Nets

When looking at the Nets roster, the first question that comes to mind is, “who is going to score points for these guys?”  Other than Vince Carter and Devin Harris, there are no offensive players on this team.  I fully expect them to be amongst the lowest scoring teams in the league, if not the lowest.  Maybe Yi Jianlian will show some of the promise that he came into the NBA with and maybe Brook Lopez and/or Chris Douglas-Roberts will become a rookie sensation.  Maybe not.  The Nets have a better chance of landing the number one pick than they do of getting within 15 games of a playoff spot, and that’s in the East where 37 wins got it done last season.  With all the talk about the Nets and the Knicks being the lead contenders in the LeBron James sweepstakes two offseasons from now, I have a hard time believing that rosters this poor are going to improve enough to attract what will probably be the best player in the game at the time, no matter how much money they have to offer.  The only real question for the Nets this season is how long will it be before they find a taker for Vince Carter.

13.  Miami Heat

My first inclination with the Heat was to put them higher up on the list, but does any team in the league have less depth than Miami?  They are no more than an injury away from ending up with another sub-20 win season.  Dwayne Wade has looked fantastic in International play this summer and looks like he might be back to the player he was two years ago, but he had better have some wide shoulders, not to mention healthy ones, to carry this team.  The only chance they have to get anywhere near the playoffs is if they stay healthy all year and Michael Beasley turns in a Rookie-Of-The-Year type of campaign.  And even then, that last playoff spot had better be in the 37-win neighborhood again or it will be out of reach no matter what.  That’s not to say that the Heat won’t have a big impact on this season’s playoffs.  I expect that both Shawn Marion and Udonis Haslem will be suiting up elsewhere by the end of the season.  Look for another poor start despite big numbers from Wade, and another top five lottery pick added to the mix next year.

12.  Charlotte Bobcats

If nothing else, it will be fun to watch Larry Brown pull out what’s left of his hair trying to deal with Raymond Felton as his point guard.  If the players don’t just tune out his constant complaining and backstabbing like they did in New York, Brown will most likely get Charlotte playing solid defense behind Emeka Okafor, but points may be hard to come by.  I recall seeing bunches of criticism lobbed at Orlando a few years back for taking a high school kid with the top pick in the draft over the four-year college national champion Okafor, but that decision turned out to be a franchise-defining one in the wrong direction for Charlotte.  Had Orlando gone for the college experience over the potential talent, Dwight Howard would be suiting up in Okafor’s place, and the Bobcats would be an up and coming club in the East.  Instead, they’ll just continue to tread water in the lower third of the conference.  Maybe Brown has one last magic trick in his bag (and he had better to avoid doing ever-lasting damage to his reputation after the combo of the Kincks debacle and Olympics failure) and can get the Bobcats to play over their head, but it’s more likely that 30 wins will be about as good as it gets and a new point guard will be suiting up next year, if not sooner.

11.  Indiana Pacers

The Pacers are one of those teams I don’t quite know what to make of.  Part of me thinks that, if they can find the right combination of players, they can be decent.  But another part of me looks at the makeup of this club and thinks, “these guys suck.”  The last I checked, Jamaal Tinsley is still on the roster and, in my opinion, is still the best point guard on the team, even after adding T.J. Ford and Jarrett Jack, but he has proven time and again that he can’t stay on the floor, and I expect he’ll be elsewhere soon.  Mike Dunleavy actually looked like a player last season for the first time in his career, but don’t be surprised if he regresses a bit this year.  Still, there is enough talent here that the Pacers should be better than the other four teams on this list, but that’s not saying much.  If they get to 35 wins, they should be happy.  There are many more parts needed here before the Pacers get back to playing at the level they did in the ‘90s.  But on the plus side, they won’t be let down by Jermaine O’Neal anymore.

Next up:  The Middle of the Road

Now that I've watched the first round of the NBA Draft, and read a bunch of the draft winners and losers columns,  I think I've concluded on an easy way to wrap up this draft:  They're all losers.  I'm not really excited about anybody in this draft class.  I have a feeling that in a few years, we'll be talking about this draft class in the same breath with the 2000 draft as the worst since the lottery. 

If you listen to the analysts, every player in this draft was a monster, everyone has a wingspan 8 inches longer than their height, everyone is either a freakish athlete or a smart player with a high basketball I.Q.   Just once, especially late in the second round, I'd like to see Jay Bilas or somebody say, "You know, this guy just sucks.  He's slow, plays no defense, has horrible shot selection.  Sure, he scored 20 points per game on the last place team in the SEC, but he had to fire up 30 shots a game to do it."  How can everybody in the draft be a superstar in the making?  Obviously, they all have some skills or they wouldn't even be considered, but come on, most of these guys out of the top 15 or 20 have just average skills.  Stop talking them up like they can all be Hall of Famers.

In five years, if there's more than a half dozen guys out of this draft making a major impact on an actual contending team, I'll be surprised.  There are a few guys who'll probably put up big numbers on perpetual lottery teams (I'm looking at you, OJ Mayo) but those guys are basically useless if you want to win.

How good will Derrick Rose be?  Who knows, but does it matter?  A team led by an elite point guard hasn't won a title since Isiah Thomas in 1990, 18 years ago!  All this talk of needing an elite point guard is so much BS.    And don't try to tell me that Tony Parker is a point guard.  LeBron James is more of a point guard than Tony Parker is.  Don't get me wrong, Parker's great and his game is perfectly suited for championship contention, but he's not a pure point guard.

How good will Michael Beasley be?  An undersized power forward.  For some reason, the name Kenyon Martin comes to mind.  It's also a bad thing, in my mind, if you're a guy coming into the draft and there's more than one person out there comparing you to Derrick Coleman.  Sure, Coleman had skills, but is there a better example of a waste of superstar talent than Coleman?  Probably, but he'd be in the argument any way around it.   Plus, Pat Riley doesn't like him.  You could tell by the look on his face as he was doing an interview after the pick.  I wouldn't be surprised to see a trade at some point soon if anyone comes calling.

Both these guys have an abundance of talent, and in the right situation with the right guidance and the right attitude, they could be stars.  I think Beasley has a better chance if he stays with the Heat because of Riley and Dwayne Wade.  But Rose coming into a dysfunctional situation with a first-time-at-any-level head coach?  Has anyone ever wasted their potential as much as the Bulls have over the past three years.  They were overloaded with sought-after talent and high draft picks thanks to the Knicks.  It looked like all the pieces were in place for a trade or two for an established veteran to pair with some youth and be a contender.  But they did nothing useful, except dumping Tyson Chandler (who just helped the Hornets to the second best record in the West) for P.J. Brown (who just helped the Celtics win a title) and J.R. Smith (who now scores points in bunches off the Nugget bench), and that trade was useful to everyone involved but the Bulls.  What a waste.  A 19-year old point guard's gonna clean this mess up?  Unless he's got a post up game I haven't seen, good luck to him.

I guess the draft is all about possibility and potential.  But I'm just not feeling this one at all.  Usually, there are a handful of guys that I feel like have a chance to be solid pros and possibly stars, but I don't see it with any of these guys.  I'm sure somebody will pop up and become a good player, but I'm guessing its not going to be the Kevin Love's, Russell Westbrook's or the token-Italian-guy-drafted-by-Mike-D'antoni.  (It is reassuring to see that, no matter who's running the Knicks, they still know how to screw up a draft.)  After all, the best player out of the 2000 draft by far was second round pick Michael Redd.

My guess is that a small school, relatively unknown player's going to have a bigger impact that the big name, primetime school guys.  (Say, Courtney Lee for instance).  Anyway, I guess we'll all just have to wait and see.