Not giving up but also realistic about how much better the West is this year than last year's abnormally poor showing.
I've got us going 9-10 over that stretch, so that puts us at 24-31. I think we'll be lucky to snag one win on that East Coast road trip.
No, but there's a pretty good reason to believe that the extremely poor record the Blazers have achieved this year is a result of injuries and tough scheduling and is not indicative of what they'll do the rest of the way in an easier portion of their schedule. It was a bit of a throw-in line, I'll admit. Lillard upped his game the second half of last season. I'd bet that he can do it again. Certainly a reasonable opinion. Based on what I've seen in this thread, that makes you an optimist. Most will probably say that I'm just being a homer with my thought that the Blazers are about to turn the corner and start playing well. I think that, in addition to the points I made above, it's reflective of the fact that the Blazers are a very young team and that it sometimes takes a bit of time for young teams to click. I've seen signs that that's starting to happen for at least stretches of the past 4-5 games. I think that with Lillard's return, they can get some confidence against easier opponents and that they'll return to the form they showed at the end of last season. But that's just an educated guess. They have to do the work that will either prove my opinion right or wrong.
No one should ever be so certain of their opinions that they think poorly of others who believe something else will happen. I've certainly seen many things I thought for certain would happen go the other way and I've seen others, smart people, provide harshly-worded long posts about how obvious it was that something would happen a certain way and watch it not unfold like that. You're more optimistic than I am and you could certainly turn out to be right. A trap a lot of people fall into is not realizing that while there are some forms of logic that you can apply to prediction, humans are such poor predictors of the future that we're all just looking for patterns and some pattern-matching is intuitive rather than based in logical analysis. That didn't have much to do with your actual points, I just think we as a group would do better to argue with less certainty and I was reminded of it by your comment about how some would brand you.
But do we really want to rely on beating bad teams as our ticket to the POs, when it's clear we're not in the same class as the good teams? It would be one thing if we were the 8th seed and played competitively against all the teams in the league - you could then make an underdog argument. But getting waxed by good teams (and bad teams) on the regular make us a Playoff Training Camp for whoever we face...unless, of course, our opponent loses their two best players. For the record, I do believe we'll make the POs because the last 6 weeks of the season should be a cake walk...even for a fundamentally flawed system like ours.
I said that they could gain confidence against poorer teams and start playing the way they did at the end of last season. They were beating good teams at the end of last season.
Yeah, I agree that confidence can go a long way. That's how DAL won their championship. But at the end of the season we won't have too many chances to prove we can beat good teams - so winning lots of games against bad teams, and maybe beating a couple good teams, will set up unrealistic expectations.
Backing into the playoffs as an 8 seed (against the most super team of all-time) would be the most Blazers thing ever .... *sigh*
Yup. I put those three into my W column to come up with 13-6. The Blazers may not get them all, but they could pull off an upset somewhere else as well.
Is this where you guys realize our schedule is pretty easy the rest of the way? I told y'all, it's all about surviving till March. Were only 7 games behind the 4th seed and our schedule gets easier while everyone else's gets harder. Even Houston at 3 is possibly catchable with their schedule tightening up a shit ton. Right now, I would be happy with the 6th seed, and improved defense via trades at the trade deadline. We can beat Houston in a 7 game series, especially if we make the right trades.
Dame comes back and goes on a tear like last year we go 16-3 putting us at 31-24. If i'm going to guess I want to either go overly optimistic or overly pessimistic.
I'm not jinxing any more prediction threads....I'll be lucky to deal with my 54 win prediction as is...
