No one on Golden State needs to get hurt for Portland to end up ahead of them. The Blazers played at a .700 winning percentage with Nurkic, which gets them to 57 wins. If you assume that trading Allen Crabbe and not playing Meyers Leonard next season gets them another 10 wins, they're at 67 wins. The Warriors won 67 games last year and the Blazers will win the head-to-head tie-breaker (they can't guard Nurkic).
I'm going to have another shot: Tier 1: The Warriors Tier 3: Spurs, OKC, Houston Tier 4: Utah, Clippers, Denver, Minny, Portland Tier 5: Memphis, Dallas, New Orleans, Sacramento Tier 6: Phoenix, Lakers
This looks about right to me. Injuries will cause a few teams to fall a bit, as they always do, but as a reasonable estimate going into the season I would agree with this.
I was going to start a new thread, but that would be wasteful. But my question is narrower than the thread title. Rank these 4 teams: Portland Denver Utah Minnesota
I'm honestly torn. I think people will underestimate Utah because they lost both Hayward and Hill (whom I think will really help Sacramento). But they added Rubio and Udoh AND Sefolosha, all of whom are good-to-great defenders. Just about every player on their roster is better at defense than just about every player on ours. If this was the '90s they'd be kick ass. And they'll throttle all but the best offenses.
Yeah, that's the more difficult assignment. On paper, I'd go with Minnesota, Portland, Denver, Utah. In reality, I think that they're so close that it's going to be the old injury bug that decides the order of these teams.
See, that's perfectly plausible, but my guess is that Minny will be worst. They have the best talent, probably, but will the pieces fit? And they were horrible at D last year, and they had Rubio, who is a top 5 defensive PG.
In todays NBA you need a point guard to win games consistently, so I think this is pretty easy. Portland - Lillard, CJ Minn - Teague is either going to show he is starter quality, or he's going to show the West is too stacked for him to compete. Utah - Rubio is a downgrade from Hill. But he's still a quality NBA player. However Utah struggled to score before they lost Hayward. They'll struggle even more now. Denver - Who's their point guard? Nelson? Murray? Jokic? They don't play good enough defense to have their center to their main ball handler.
It's a toss up with these 4 teams. But if I were to rank them by watchability, Minnesota is clearly last for me.
That's weirdly specific. I guess my answer to your question about Denver is "the same guy it was the second half of last season, when their winning rate was exactly the same as us and OKC" - meanwhile they added Paul Millsap. Plus if CJ counts as a PG, then so does Jamal Murray. And Mudiay is still very young so his game is likely to improve.