Just spent about 2 1/2 hours listening to Bill Simmons and Joe House go through all the NBA teams and make picks on the over/under for all of them. First 1:15 on the leastern conference, 2nd half on the west. As far as the Blazers are concerned, Simmons attempted to skip us entirely, then when reminded of our existence, he basically responded with "meh". He says that we haven't gotten any better (having done nothing but adding Kaman), that the West has gotten better, that we basically stumbled to the finish after a hot start, and that we'll probably finish in the high 40's. His co-host, however, picked us to go over 50, says that he sees CJ thriving in Mo's minutes, and thinks that Bill picks against us on principle (which Simmons vehemently denied). As for the rest of the west, both of them picked DAL and GSW as not only over 50.5 and 51.5 wins respectively, but as absolute locks, and picked the over on Memphis at 48.5 as well, going so far as to say that they wouldn't be surprised to see any of those three teams in the NBA finals. They have LAC and OKC as their unapproached top 2 in the conference, and took the under on OKC (good news for us?). It appears their estimated playoff seedings are as follows: 1 SAS 2 LAC 3 GSW 4 OKC 5 DAL 6 MEM 7 POR 8 HOU
Just listened to it as well. I kinda had the same feeling as Simmons going in to the preseason. Watching CJ, Leonard, and Dame all improve though, I can't help but feel like all these media types are underestimating us yet again. I said around 48-50 wins and a lower playoff seed. Might bump that up to 53-57 wins and HCA. BTW, that mediocrity in the middle of the season coincided with LA's absence. People tend to forget that. But BS has a point about denying House's accusation though. He locked us in to take the over last season.
Simmons is still bitter that Portland and Seattle got the #1-#2 picks and his beloved Celtics got the worst possible pick.
So to get this straight...OKC without Durant for the first month or two of the season is a few games better than POR returning their whole core of a 54-win team?
Some things I don't understand from this podcast and the various other predictions out elsewhere. 1. Vince Carter is washed up, but everyone thinks he will make MEM elite. 2. GS apparently has the deepest bench in the league. And everyone is predicting they're going to be a top 3 team in the west. And EVERYONE is forgetting Steph's ankle history and Bogut's various maladies that pop up every year. 3. Anthony Davis is a top 3 player in the league? Not yet. 4. Blake Griffin is not an MVP candidate with CP on his team. 5. Everyone intimates our season last year was a fluke, even with a playoff series win.
I generally like Grantland's coverage a lot and think they are usually pretty spot-on, but I do feel like they give the Blazers short shrift a lot of the time.
When teams have a big jump in their W-L record, they usually regress the next season. The Blazers' own recent history bears that out. Remember the last time the team won 54 games?
The last time we won 54 we won 50 the next year with injuries to both our centers (season-enders), Roy, Batum and LMA. I think the last time we had a 20-game jump we also had a jump the next year to 63 wins, and another Finals appearance the next year. edit: Sorry, forgot about 2000. We regressed from 59 to 50 wins after trading Grant for Kemp and Jermaine for Davis and signing Ramblin' Rod.
6. Houston lost their 3-5 best players and only really replaced one of them, with an inferior player, while Portland lost their 6th best player and added a superior 6th man, yet we and they are going to regress the same number of wins. 7. Steve Kerr, who has never coached, is a massive upgrade over Mark Jackson, who coached the Warriors to their best record in over 20 years (3rd most wins in franchise history). 8. The "tougher western conference" will affect all teams except the Spurs, Clippers, Warriors, and Mavs.
I'm so tired of seeing the mavs and warriors getting so hyped... They have so many injury prone players at key positions.
i've found 17 teams that have had a 20+ win increase from one 82-game season to the next going back to the last time the Blazers did it (1990). Of those, 8 had a higher win percentage the next season, 8 had lower, and one basically didn't change (Bulls went from .756 in 2011 to .758 in 66 games in 2012). The average change is basically 0, with a standard deviation in the win % of .064 (about 5.2 wins) Looking further at the 6 instances in which a team increased its win total by 20 then decreased by 4 or more the next season: in one instance, the team traded away its top scorer for a bag of nothing (Curry, 2005 Bulls); in every other instance, a major contributor from the prior good season missed 25+ games due to injury (B. Lopez '13, Garnett '09, Ford '08, Amare '06, Gasol '05). So in all reality, history suggests that unless we have a major injury, we should not regress this year.
More from Grantland, Lowe has us 8th. smh http://grantland.com/the-triangle/n...rs-oklahoma-city-thunder-cleveland-cavaliers/ Clearly, he doesn't know wtf he's talking about with this regression thing. And Memphis. Whoopdeefuckindoo. Quincy Poindexter and Vince Carter's corpse are gonna dominate.
I honestly can't wait till mid-season when all these guys will say something like "See I told you the Blazers are a contender"
This. I don't see how they could take the continuity hits they did, gain someone who's coming off a contract year, and still be categorized as having an offseason with the same net difference as ours.
