with Leonard and PG now a Clippers, give me your Top 8 teams out west. My top 8 in no order: Clippers Rockets Warriors Blazers Utah Lakers Spurs Denver
In order (when healthy) 1. Portland 2. Los Angeles Clippers 3. Denver 4. Utah 5. Houston 6. Golden State 7. Los Angeles Lakers 8. Dallas
Houston did not get better. Golden State will not be that great. Dallas is very young. I don't know.... it's gonna be a crazy season.
I'm making the same prediction on the Lakers I made before last season. Lakers do not make the playoffs.
1. Clips 2. Denver 3. Portland 4. Jazz 5. Lakers 6. Rockets 7. Sacramento 8. Warriors 9. Spurs 10. Dallas
Clips Utah Denver Portland Lakers Rockets Warriors Spurs Clips and Jazz are markedly improved. Portland is better but we won't see the full version till Feb/March by which time I think some of the other teams have several games lead on them.
I'm going to format mine a bit differently. "+" means improved, "-" means got worse, "~" means stayed the same. Here's last years final standings: 1z --Golden State Warriors -- 2y --Denver Nuggets + 3x --Portland Trail Blazers ++ 4y --Houston Rockets - 5x --Utah Jazz +++ 6x --Oklahoma City Thunder --- 7x --San Antonio Spurs ~ 8x --LA Clippers ++++ e --Sacramento Kings ~ e --Los Angeles Lakers +
Nice format. I think Denver will be better just because of an additional year of seasoning...they were SO young. Blazers have a better fit offensively but are worse defensively on the perimeter and have a lot of new parts to get chemistry with. Also, Nurks not back.
Interesting to see it like that. Please dont take this as just me trying to pick a fight, just some thoughts come to mind when I see this. Spurs must be really banking on DMurray coming back strong this year. I do like the pick up of the Morris brother. But LMA and Derozan I think have seen their best years (Derozan I guess isnt that old, it just doesnt seem like he’s continued to add things to his game). I like the ++ for Portland but I probably wouldve only given them one +, it’ll be interesting, if any of the young guys play well and Dame can get “good whiteside” it could he a +++, but theres a lot of question marks for the Blazers this year, young guys, Nurkic’s health, Whiteside, Im excited! The Jazz I love conley when he’s healthy, but he’ll be 32 this year and the last time he played more than 70 games was the 2013-2014 season. Last year he was fairly healthy and got to 70, but I think he’s got some injury concerns.
The only good thing is that every top 5-6 team in the west has injury concerns. The only team that seems to have missed that bug last year were the Rockets and Denver.