The 2019-2020 NBA regular
season lifts off this Tuesday! It’s going to be quite an intriguing season, but first, let’s zoom
back to the NBA Finals because some NBA-landscape-altering shit went down in
that series. Then-Warrior Kevin Durant, one of the greatest scorers of
all-time, a player who briefly seized the title of Greatest Basketball Player
Alive before his injury in the Warriors vs. Rockets series, tore his Achilles
tendon in Game 5 of the Finals, which will keep him out until the 2020-2021 NBA
season. And then, Klay Thompson, the Iron Man of the Warriors dynasty, tore his
ACL in Toronto’s close-out game, which will presumably keep him out of action
until the All-Star Break in mid-February 2020. For the first time in four
seasons, the Warriors aren’t the prohibitive favorites to hoist the Larry
O’Brien Championship trophy. After an offseason in which nearly half of the
NBA’s players were free agents, a total of 9 teams—by my count—have legitimate
championship aspirations if the ball bounces their way (see what I did there?):
the Clippers, Lakers, Nuggets, Rockets, Jazz, Warriors out West, and the
Sixers, Bucks, and Celtics in the East.
Rather than
project the 1-8 playoff seeds for each conference like I have in
years past, I’m gonna change shit up and break down my predictions for
conference playoff teams into three tiers: the Cream of the Crop (in Macho Man parlance, or the top-3
seeds), Middlers (not to be confused with the Urban Dictionary term), and Low-Hanging
Seeds (bottom-two seeds).
Here
we go.
