Preseason predictions come home to roost

In the days before last season tipped off, I spent a considerable amount of time and brainpower coming up with Five Insanely Prescient Predictions that I became convinced would come to pass. Since one of those predictions was about free agency, I haven’t been able to evaluate my five gems of foresight until now.

Does anybody remember my post from October? Probably not. Still, I have checked in on these predictions once a week at a minimum for almost a full year now. Internally, the stakes were high. So how did I do?

Well. I went 0-fer. But! I think the spirit of all five predictions became true. What, me grasping at straws? No way man.

1. Dewayne Dedmon will earn at least $25 million in free agency.

The deal just came through this week and the Hawks signed Dedmon for two years and $14 million total. So, in one respect, I was way off as Dedmon ended up earning just over half of the payday predicted for him.

But now for the first self-rationalization of many to follow. I think I nailed the spirit of this prediction, which is Dedmon’s career would continue to trend significantly upwards after a year of solid role play with the Spurs.

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Dedmon was a mainstay in the San Antonio rotation, playing an average of 17.5 minutes over 76 games. Plus, his rim defense was so impeccable that he finished 47th in the league in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus despite contributing negative offensive value. Now, Miles Plumlee, one of Dedmon’s new Hawks teammates, is older than Dedmon, played about a third of Dedmon’s total minutes last season and finished 333rd among all players in the same stat. Plumlee is on the second year of a four-year, $50 million deal.

I’ll maintain my prediction makes more sense than the NBA reality.

2. DeAndre Jordan will increase his scoring average from the previous season, just like every other year in his career.

The back of your basketball card will show you Jordan finished both the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons with exactly 12.7 points per game. For the sake of scientific completeness, I broke out the ol’ calculator and went a few decimal points further:

• 2015-16: 12.727
• 2016-17: 12.703

You’re kidding.

There are two real culprits here. Culprit One is the other 29 NBA teams, collectively. Teams really dialed back their Jordan-hacking as he took 2.8 fewer free throws per game in 2016-17 than he did in 2015-16. That’s at least one extra point per game right there that would have been so valuable to me and my prediction.

Culprit Two is Marreese Speights, who had one of the most explosive role-playing seasons in league history, scoring 8.7 points in just 15.7 minutes per game. The electric Speights meant Jordan’s playing time was cut by two minutes a game. Seeing as I just went down to the hundredth of a point a game, those extra two minutes would have meant a lot to me.

My bitter consolation prize — Jordan easily set a new career high in points per minute.

3. Every team will win at least 21 games.

Predictions 3 and 4 came down to the very last day of the regular season — when they were both demolished by the same, stupid game. That game? The Bulls’ 112-73 victory over the Nets.

With the next-worst team, the Suns, ending their season at 24-58, this defeat meant the Nets wrapped up at 20-62, falling just a single victory short of fulfilling my prediction.

Of course this game looks like par for the course, with the worst team in the league getting wiped away by 40. Actually, it was hardly like that at all — the Nets decided to take this Game 82 opportunity to rest all of their veterans. None of the team’s four double-digit scorers — Brook Lopez, Sean Kilpatrick, Jeremy Lin or Trevor Booker — appeared in this game. And, just a few days earlier, the full-strength Nets clinched win no. 20 by beating these very same Bulls who desperately needed the win in order to get into the playoffs.

Seeing how close I was to getting this one right, I will again claim that the spirit of my prediction was visionary. That is, the worst teams in 2016-17 would be stronger than the worst NBA teams usually are. Last year was the first full season since 2006-07 that every team but one managed to crawl to at least 24 victories.

4. The Chicago Bulls miss the playoffs.

First, I felt foolish as the Bulls started 10-6. Later, I felt confident as a five-game losing streak in mid-March dropped the team to 31-35. Then, I felt supremely confident — see Nets victory above, which left the Bulls at 39-41.

And finally, I was angry at the cosmos when Chicago wrapped up their season with the ultimate duo of cupcake home games. First there was a 122-75 demolition of the Magic, and then the blowout over the resting version of the Nets. Both victories were required to catch and win the tiebreaker over the surging Heat.

It would have been really interesting to see where the Bulls would be at now if they didn’t chase big names in the summer of 2016. Last year’s team was actually outscored whenever Rajon Rondo or Dwyane Wade were on the court. With either player on the bench, though, the Bulls were the ones outscoring their opponents. The team also went a sterling 14-8 whenever rookie Paul Zipser played more than 20 minutes.

After this underwhelming season that rarely used the most efficient lineups, it’s hard to not see a straight line of dominoes falling from Chicago’s free agency last summer to the crushing Jimmy Butler trade this summer.

5. Joel Embiid wins Rookie of the Year.

It would have been just a little more fun if the voting members of the media let down their hair, loosened their ties, whatever, and just went all-in on what was easily the most thrilling rookie season of my lifetime. Eventual winner Malcolm Brogdon is a perfectly sane, sober selection that is impossible to argue with. Even Embiid had to give a nod to Brogdon in one of his few tweets that is not an ethering roast. Shoot, though, Embiid’s only comparisons were Hall of Famers. I know, I know it was just 31 games. But live a little, voters!

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Even though these predictions ended up being the blog equivalent of somebody stepping on a rake and then falling down onto a Whoopee Cushion, my spirit is not broken. Late in June, I dropped five predictions about free agency. Although we’re still a few weeks away from being able to evaluate them, those predictions are actually going pretty good. So far. Fingers crossed. Knock on wood.