One moment the Knicks are riding high off their first championship in 53 years, the next they're off to a sluggish start and scrambling to recover from losing their first three games. The Thunder went into the season rightly hailed as one of the deepest teams in the NBA — then had that assumption tested in harsh fashion after sustaining injuries to three of their five starters, with Jalen Williams (ankle and fibula) and Cason Wallace (shoulder) expected to miss most, if not all, of the season, and Chet Holmgren (knee) out at least two months. While OKC suffered the most brutal blows on the injury front, the Thunder are hardly alone there.
Several big name stars have already gone down and missed multiple games, among them Anthony Edwards (knee), Kawhi Leonard (knee), Tyrese Haliburton (hamstring), Jalen Duren (hamstring), Paolo Banchero (ankle), Jaren Jackson Jr (knee) and Ja Morant (hamstring). The net effect is that an NBA season that was already expected to be competitive and wide open — particularly in the East, where the conference is as deep as it's been in recent memory — has been thrown into flux. While the Spurs and Thunder remain the betting favorites to win it all, the Sixers, Knicks, Celtics, Rockets, Raptors and Timberwolves are bunched up right behind them, with the Nuggets, Pistons, Cavaliers, Lakers and Blazers not far behind.
In the actual standings, the new-look Sixers have won seven of their first eight and are perched atop the Eastern Conference, while the surprising Memphis Grizzlies got out to a hot start in the West and were the last team in the league to lose their first game after getting upended by the Pelicans in overtime at home on Monday night. Meanwhile, Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Heat are under .500 and still trying to figure it out, while the Wolves and Warriors are just two teams out of several trying to stay afloat until key members of their respective teams return to the floor. Various prediction models have differing opinions on what all this means in the long run.
Those forecasts vary wildly, with one favoring the Raptors to come out of the East and another giving four other teams a better shot to win the conference than Toronto. Predicting how all this will shake out in the end is difficult at best and folly at worst — so naturally that's exactly what we'll try to do over the course of the season. This is our first installment of semi-regular NBA seeding predictions -- the NBA version of Bracketology -- where we'll give our best guess on where teams will be slotted once the playoffs roll around.
The methodology is super scientific: watch a lot of basketball, consult with the mountain of stats and data available, and then eyeball it. Projected 2027 NBA playoff field: Nov. 3 Despite Duren playing all of 38 minutes this season, the Pistons have reminded everyone why they were the top seed in the East last season and have designs on something similar again this year. Detroit has proven to be a quality regular-season team, but the Pistons are still in desperate need of more shot creators and scoring to help ease the burden on Cade Cunningham.
Their front office has work to do to level up the roster and avoid another disappointing postseason. After what could charitably be called a tumultuous offseason, the Celtics once again look like a competitive, competent organization (apart from their struggles in Houston on Monday in the second night of a back-to-back) that figures to be a tough out in the East. Jayson Tatum is playing well enough to openly wonder "why not me?" when it comes to the MVP conversation, while Paul George's numbers to start the season look a lot more like the PG we saw in his final campaign with the Clippers rather than (mercifully for him and Boston) the lackluster version who was only intermittently available during his time in Philadelphia.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
