Agreed. Pretty thoughtless article I think. We played pretty ugly ball early last season and won games simply from sheer overwhelming talent-due largely to Oden/Pryzbilla controlling the paint. If we stay healthy, we wont even have to play well to win 50 games again. Houston is going to be good as well. Well coached and healthy. I think the top 4 will be LA, OKC, Portland and Houston simply because those are the 4 most talented/best system teams. Everyone else is next tier. It's all about staying healthy though.
The Thunder are only $5.7 mil under the cap at this point. They don't have enough cap room or high dollar contracts to make a deal for Paul plus one of NOH's ugly other contracts that would be necessary to entice the Hornets to trade him.
But it got hits, which was the goal. To anyone here who runs a blog: Have weekly rankings and plant the URL on message boards. The difficulty is to get readers to leave the posts on your own board. The more thoughtless the rankings are, the more responses.
Haha! Well mine must not be thoughtless because they don't get many responses, and I actually post them directly on this site.
8 seed? the lakers, blazers, and rockets are the best 3 teams in the west with how the rosters currently stand.
Link? I'll give you a hit. You want a Hawaiian Punch? (You're probably too young to remember those TV ads during the cartoons.)
That's a pretty big failure without much analysis. Remember a couple of key items. The Thunder flew under the radar last season as a "non-playoff team" as teams looked at them, and had literally the "perfect season" with their main three players all playing injury free 82-games season. That won't happen again, and teams won't take them lightly. Durant will finally get the recognition as a star by fellow teams and there is no way he score 30ppg again by sneaking up on everyone. So the 8th seed Thunder will have a snowball's chance in you-know-where of repeating the luck they had last season without adding CP3 or something other than the scraps they added. They may move up with Utah and Phoenix's downfall, but not up in to the top 4. I don't think Utah will be able to recover from losing half of their talent in time to be more than maybe the 8th or 9th fighting for that final playoff spot. And Phoenix with Amare gone and Nash a year older isn't going to get home court again. I do like the move of Houston moving back into the playoffs with Yao, but likely just to replace a fallen Utah team. Golden State could be in the mix too if they have a "perfect season" like the Thunder had last season for a change, which they didn't. Portland will be fighting for that #3 seed with Denver, and it depends on health for Portland. Obviously CP3 changes that to a #1 seed, but we'll wait until that happens to reset the West.
To me Phoenix is the biggest roll of the dice. They could go high or low. Steve Nash can turn a lot of players from adequate to great, but can he do it with Hedo, who needs to handle the ball. Nash is best with catch and shoot guys.
that line of thinking is incredibly dumb. that would mean the heat can't be considered a top 4 team in the east before this season because they didn't make the 2nd round last year. teams aren't constrained to only repeat their past performances. it is almost a certainty that the blazers will be more healthy in the upcoming season than they were last season and that alone makes them definitely a top 4 team in the west as far as preseason rankings are concerned.
the thunder may eventually become a top 5 team in the nba. that's not going to be this season though(barring huge moves). the thunder have done well for themselves this offseason with aldrich being a perfect addition inside to give defense and rebounding and them adding extra perimeter depth but it's not realistic at all to expect them to vault to the top of the league. they just haven't added the talent or be expected to make the internal improvement in one year to do so.
