The 2017-18 NBA season is going to be loaded with terrible teams

Lurking beneath the absolute insanity of the 2017 NBA offseason is the fact that the list of true championship contenders heading into next season may not be all that much longer than it was a year ago.

You’ve got the loaded-up Golden State Warriors, of course, and the Cleveland Cavaliers. (Whether Kyrie Irving is part of the team or not, LeBron’s squad is always a contender.) It’s not entirely clear just yet that there’s even a single team that’s actually capable of knocking off the top team in either conference, but the list of “inner-circle contenders” probably doesn’t go far beyond the San Antonio Spurs, Houston Rockets, and Boston Celtics — if we’re even willing to accept the possibility that somebody other than the three-time defending champions of each conference can crash the Finals this time around.

A list that seems sure to be longer, though, is the list of teams sinking toward the other end of the pool.

The 2016-17 season was relatively short on awful teams. There were maybe three or four organizations that started the year without at least having designs on a playoff spot. Those hopes were obviously unrealistic and ultimately futile for some, but the ostensible plan for pretty much every team but the Brooklyn Nets, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, and Los Angeles Lakers was to play into the postseason.

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By the end of the season, there were five that teams finished with 30 wins or fewer. (That seems like as good a shorthand as any for categorizing a truly bad team. A maximum of 30 wins means a minimum of 52 losses, and I think we can all agree that a 50-loss team is definitely really bad.) Five teams out of 30 works out to 16.7 percent of the league. Believe it or not that’s actually tied for the fifth-lowest percentage of sub-30-win teams — or the shortened-season equivalent — in modern NBA history. (Since the ABA/NBA merger in 1976.)

The 2016-17 season also marked the third straight year that one fewer team than the year before finished at or below the 30-win mark. The 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14 seasons all featured eight such teams, but the total dropped to seven in 2014-15 and six in 2015-16 before finally dropping down to five a year ago.

The Sixers were tanking their faces off for a lot of that time, but they’re out of that game now. Nevertheless, there are plenty of teams ready to take up that mantle. There seem to be a lot more generally hopeless teams this heading into the 2017-18 season than a year ago.

There are at least eight teams that can’t realistically be counting on making the playoffs: all but the staunchest and blindest of blindly loyal fans of the Nets, the presumably Carmelo Anthony-less New York Knicks, the still-stagnant Orlando Magic, the Paul Millsap-less Atlanta Hawks, the Jimmy Butler-less Chicago Bulls, the still bad even with Lonzo Ball Lakers, the young gun Suns, and the Kiddie Kings (plus Z-Bo, Vince, and George Hill) would admit their teams have little to no hope of breaking through. That group, plus the Paul George-less Indiana Pacers, all currently have their win-total over/under set at 34.5 or less, which means Las Vegas expects them all to be pretty damn bad, too.

Getting to nine sub-30-win teams this season would be quite the dubious feat. It would actually tie the 2017-18 season with the 1996-97 and 2009-10 seasons for the most such teams since the merger. It would, however, still fall short of 96-97 and 1982-83 by percentage of total teams in the league.

The Eastern Conference could actually break new ground if all six of the teams mentioned above (Nets, Knicks, Magic, Hawks, Bulls, Pacers) fall short of 30 victories. Only twice has a conference seen more than five of its teams finish south of the 30-win plateau, but surprisingly, it was the West both times. (It happened in 1997-98 and 2008-09.) And both times, only one East team joined them in finishing below 30 wins.

What does this all mean in the grand scheme of things?

Well, for one, it means that we’re probably due for a season full of 2016-17 postseason-style blowouts. Get ready for a whole lot of garbage time.

Also, it means the East is going to be an outright disaster all year. We already knew that would be the case based on the migration of several star players from East to West (Millsap, George, Butler, probably Anthony), but it becomes even more clear when you consider how many teams in each conference are expected to be truly awful. Maybe this is the year that finally convinces the league to throw travel-issues caution to the wind and move to a non-conferenced playoff system where the 16 best teams in the league are seeded accordingly regardless of location.

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For the 2017-18 season, though, we might all want to start living our lives on Pacific Standard Time. That’s when all the good games will be on.