If you've been reading In the Rotation all season, you know that there's a real simple formula that we use around here: if someone around the NBA does something good, they're in the rotation. If they screw up, they're out of the rotation. If they do something really stupid, they spend the week on the inactive list.
Over the past 21 weeks, there have been countless players, coaches, owners, announcers, and league executives that have found themselves either in or out of the rotation for various reasons. More often than not, the criticism has garnered more attention than the praise.
And while it's easy to sit back and call out a coach or a GM for a bonehead personnel decision, or rake a player over the coals for a stupid play or poor display of judgment off the court, it's not always as easy to hold yourself to the same standards.
If you've been reading all season, you also know that before I started In the Rotation, there were 82 Things to Watch For This NBA Season, a five-part season preview that started when training camps opened back in October. Surely, when you highlight 82 different things to look for in an NBA season, there are bound to be some hits and misses.
Today, over six months after making some bold NBA predictions in the preseason, I'll hold myself to the same standard I've been holding NBA personalities to all season long and look back of some of the preseason predictions that were worthy of making the rotation, and some that were just plain wrong.
We'll just consider it step 10 of my NBA Anonymous class as I try to prepare for the inevitable League Pass withdrawals I'm sure to suffer once the playoffs start and every game is on national television.
Without further ado, it's the good, the bad, and the ugly of my NBA preseason predictions.
In the Rotation: Kevin Durant
In part two, I compared Durant's rookie season to the rookie season of some of the most prolific scorers in the game today and came to the following conclusions:
"Durant's rookie season, played at roughly the same age as the five players previously listed, is on par or better statistically than each of those players rookie campaigns. If he can continue his natural progression, which all indications say that he will, he could find himself in the conversation of elite NBA scorers sooner rather than later.
"I fully expect Durant to continue to improve and be an elite scorer this year, finishing in the top 10 in points per game. He's that talented."
With six games left in the season, Kevin Durant is currently fourth in the league averaging 25.6 points per game. He certainly continued the natural progression I alluded to, raising his field goal percentage from 43% in his rookie season of a year ago to 48% this season, and even more impressively increased his three-point percentage from an almost embarrassing 28% a season ago to 42% right now, good enough to land Durant in the top 20 in the league in three-point percentage.
And while conventional NBA wisdom says, "Anyone can score on a bad team", anyone who saw the clinic that Durant put on in the Rookie Game knows that he's not just scoring because he's the only option in OKC, he's scoring because no one can stop him. He's well on his way to becoming the next 30 ppg scorer in the NBA.
Out of the Rotation: Detroit Pistons
I picked Detroit to finish second in the East. I predicted this team to win 61 games. I predicted Rodney Stuckey to be one of the breakout stars on the 2008-09 season. I had this to say about the possibility of the Pistons making a big trade during the season:
"If the opportunity to make a deal strikes in the middle of the season, [Joe] Dumars won't hesitate to bring in a big-name player midseason to set this team back towards championship contention, as he did in '04 with Rasheed Wallace. If not, the Pistons are stacked enough as is to still be a real test for any team trying to come out of the East."
Wow. Those are all so wrong I don't know where to begin.
Dumars didn't hesitate long, that's for sure. Instead, he pulled the trigger on the Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson deal a week into the season, and the rest is history. Iverson's shoot-first ask questions later style made him fit into the Pistons team-orientated style about as well as Craig Sager fits in at a fashion show, and the experiment lasted less than the entire season.
Ironically enough, it's the fact that Dumars hesitated at all that could land Detroit in the playoffs. The Pistons started 2-0 before trading Billups away. Those two wins could very well be the difference between the Pistons and whoever finishes ninth in the East.
Maybe Joe Dumars and the Detroit Pistons know what they're doing after all.
In the Rotation: Chicago Bulls
"I project the Bulls to be a lottery team, at least for now. That could all change, however, if they can somehow manage to move one of the 45 guards that they seem to have on their roster. Derrick Rose looks like he might be the real deal, but the only way to find out is to play him.
With guys like Ben Gordon, Kirk Hinrich, Larry Hughes, Thabo Sefolosha, and even Loul Deng commanding backcourt minutes, the Bulls are faced the difficult task of trying trade at least one, ideally more like two or three, of these guys for some toughness and size inside."
How many instances have we seen in the past five years where a GM of a bad team took the most obvious approach to fixing his team during the season? My guess would be that you could count the number of times on one hand.
Yet when the Bulls started the season with six guards that could all be serviceable NBA players on their roster GM Jon Paxson did the most obvious thing you could think of to fix his team: trade some guards.
And just when you thought Paxson was blinded by the obviousness of having too many guards by actually signing guard Lindsay Hunter early in the season, he comes through at the deadline and unloads a few of them.
Larry Hughes and Thabo Sefolosha were both traded before the trade deadline, and the Bulls almost immediately started to play better basketball. They've gone from lottery team, to last team in, to fighting for playoff seeding in a little over a month, and it's thanks mostly to the trades that the Bulls made to get rid of some guards to acquire Brad Miller and John Salmons.
The trades may not have put the Bulls over the top, they still have a long way to go, but at least it has them headed in the right direction.
Out of the Rotation: The Clippers finish .500
How I talked myself into believing that the Clips would win 41 games is a mystery. I even used the sentence, "Alas, they are still the Clippers" and still predicted they would go .500. What was I thinking?
Not figuring out a way to pay Elton Brand what he was asking and losing him to Philly was a bad enough start to the offseason. Counting on Baron Davis and Marcus Camby to stay healthy in order to make the playoffs made things even worse. Making Mike Dunleavy the only head coach/GM in the league takes the cake.
And yet somehow I was convinced at the time that the Clippers would be the kind of team, as the 41-41 record I predicted they'd finish with implies, that would come out on a nightly basis and compete to win games.
When it comes to handicapping the Clippers next season I'm going to dust off the Rockband drums and get my Keith Moon on. I won't be fooled again.
In the Rotation: Houston Rockets injury concern
To be exact, I said there's a "1000: 1" chance that their big three (Yao Ming, Tracy McGrady, Ron Artest) are all healthy come playoff time. Not that it was much of a limb to go out on given the history of the three players in question, but still a prediction nonetheless.
The funny part is I still picked Houston to finish third in the West. Their season might have been the easiest to forecast out of all 30 teams. They have enough talent on the team that any combination of two of the big three healthy is good enough to compete and win on most nights in the regular season.
But in order for the Rockets to be an elite-level team, they need all three players to be healthy and clicking and the same time during the entire playoffs. Right now, the Houston Rockets are really good, but they're not a legit NBA title contender.
Out of the Rotation: New Jersey Nets will finish with worst record in the NBA
Not that the Nets' 34-win pace is making a fool out of me or anything, but maybe it was a little harsh to say that they have, "only two players on this team that could even remotely contribute on a quality NBA team: Vince Carter and Devin Harris, and neither is even in their prime (Vince's ended a few years ago, Harris' is yet to come)".
One of the most overlooked stories of the season has been that Nets center Brook Lopez looks like he has potential to end up being the best rookie in the surprisingly deep 2008 draft class. There are always one or two rookies that come in as average players, but continue to get better game after game for their first few seasons, eventually evolving into a solid NBA player. Lopez seems like the player in the 2008 draft most likely to fulfill that role.
He's added a few different moves into his offensive arsenal already this season, and has been a key offensive weapon for the Nets in the second half. He's averaging 14.5 points and 7.6 rebounds per game since the All-Star Break, and he's shooting 58% from the field in the process.
His rebounding numbers will inevitably increase as he gets stronger and more savvy under the boards, and if his offensive game continues to develop at this pace, the Nets may have one of the top young stars in the league on their hands.
There are a few other predictions that could end up on either extreme like these examples once the postseason awards are handed out, but I think you get the idea.
Predictions are fun in the preseason, but the reality is anything we predict to happen now has just about as much relevance as anything we predicted to happen back in October. The NBA playoffs are a whole different game than the regular season. We're about 10 days away from having to stop making predictions. The playoffs are almost here to settle things once and for all.
Where will amazing happen this year? (Sorry, I still haven't quite kicked the League Pass addiction yet).
Be sure to check back at Sports Central every Monday to see who cracks Scott Shepherd's Rotation as he breaks down what is going on around the NBA.
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