Fansided

NBA Season Preview: Picks and projections

By Staff

Oct 6, 2016; San Jose, CA, USA; Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant (35) looks towards an official during a break in the action against the Sacramento Kings in the first quarter at the SAP Center. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports
Oct 6, 2016; San Jose, CA, USA; Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant (35) looks towards an official during a break in the action against the Sacramento Kings in the first quarter at the SAP Center. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports /
facebooktwitterreddit
Prev
1 of 9
Next

The NBA season is almost upon us which means it is time for that sacred ritual — basketball experts guess at what they think will happen this season. Predicting the future is hard and we’re usually wrong, but that’s half the fun! Here are picks and projections from some of FanSided’s best and brightest basketball minds.

Picking team win totals is one of the hardest exercises in prognostication. It can be fairly obvious who is good and who is bad heading into the season. The degree to which teams are good and bad is a little more murky.

It is assumed that the Golden State Warriors will again finish with the best regular season record but how hard will they push in the regular season? Does anything besides a championship matter to them and could they lose regular season games by resting their stars or playing their bench?

The San Antonio Spurs are not the same team without Tim Duncan, even at his advanced age. How far will they fall this year and will the Los Angeles Clippers be there to pick up their slack?

Here are the best guesses at Western Conference win totals from some of FanSided’s basketball experts.

screen-shot-2016-10-20-at-3-45-47-pm
screen-shot-2016-10-20-at-3-45-47-pm /

The Eastern Conference may not be as top heavy as the Western Conference, but that doesn’t make it any easier to project. The morass of teams in the middle of the playoff picture are tough to sort out. No one seemed to get dramatically better this year and plenty of teams seem to be skating on the edge of disaster.

screen-shot-2016-10-20-at-3-49-11-pm
Here’s our best guesses for the East. /

The MVP race this season is as wide-open as any in recent memory. It’s assumed that Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry will each steal some of the other’s shine. Ditto for Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and the Clippers. LeBron James may throttle back during the regular season. Kawhi Leonard may not be ready to take the leap. James Harden, Russell Westbrook, and Anthony Davis may not win enough to make themselves viable candidates.

The rest of the award picture isn’t much clearer but the public demands picks, so here we are.

screen-shot-2016-10-20-at-3-55-33-pm
screen-shot-2016-10-20-at-3-55-33-pm /

The standard wins and awards are just some of the fun one can have imagining the season that’s to come. We didn’t stop there and meandered through a few other big questions like, who will be the first coach to get fired and who might find themselves on a different team by the end of this season.

Have fun and, of course, let us know everything that we got wrong.