The NBA season is upon us; preseason games have tipped off and the season is three weeks away. I’m going to start by writing up my thoughts, main questions, and general feel for every team over the next three weeks. Today, I’ll start with the Central Division.

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Cleveland Cavaliers:

This is a great team to start with, as they are the team I am the most off versus market expectations. My biggest preseason bet is the Cavaliers to win the East at around +250 average price, but I would happily take the current prices out there.

I think the reason I’m so off from the market here is due to how last season ended, and having a very different interpretation of what happened than the general market. The Cavs have had a lot of postseason disappointments with this iteration of the roster, and the market seemed to have understood the Pacers loss last season as confirmation that this team downgrades substantially in the playoffs. I just don’t really view the Pacers series that way—Garland missed a bunch of games, and when he played, he was a near total zero. Mobley also missed a game and was somewhat limited with an ankle. We also learned that the Pacers were far better than thought in that series after they beat the Knicks and took the Thunder to seven. That series simply didn’t move my prior much. The Cavs would have been something like -350 against the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals, and nothing in the offseason has gotten me anywhere close to the near identical price they have in the market.

This section mostly talked about what the Cavs were last year, but that’s because not much has changed. Mobley has a chance to improve some. I think Lonzo-for-Jerome is a slight downgrade, especially when factoring in the injury stuff, but I think Lonzo fits better in playoff lineups and could find himself closing some important games. Strus and Garland are hurt, but should be back when it matters. The Cavaliers were awesome last year, and will be awesome again in a much weaker East—they should steamroll to the NBA Finals.

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Detroit Pistons:

I don’t have a great feel for this team. On the one hand, they were a young team that jumped from 18 Pythag wins to 45. But other than Cade, there’s not a young player on the roster who took a huge leap last year. I don’t think it was an accident that the team took off after Ivey’s injury, and it sounds like Ivey is going to factor in a ton this season. Ivey has been mostly bad in his three year career, and if his shoot jump last year was an aberration, I don’t see him being a winning player in the NBA. It also sounds like Ron Holland is going to see a large jump in minutes. I believe he has some upside, but it’s more likely than not that he’s a negative this season. Typically, when a team takes this big of a leap, there aren’t this many young guys with such big question marks. Malik Beasley had a spectacular season, LeVert and Duncan are okay, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to replicate what Beasley did last year.

The good news is I think Ausar is awesome and has a lot of room to grow. Last offseason was rough—he missed the start of the season and was heavily limited pretty much the entire year. And he was still very solid. It sounds like the plan is to give him the ball a lot more, especially when Cade’s off the court, and I’m excited to see how that goes. Ausars shooting remains a massive question mark, he doesn’t need to be a great shooter, but he has to be better then what he is currently, which may be the worst shooting non big in the league. Cade should also still see some growth. The other good news is that the East sucks and this is at least a viable roster without any obvious glaring holes. That cannot be said for most other teams in this conference.

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Milwaukee Bucks:

This team was a middling +2.1 net rating with 58 games from Dame, 67 games from Giannis, and 80 Brook Lopez games last year. I project Myles Turner for 65 games—I’m not sure 65 games of Myles Turner is even much superior to the 80 games of Brook Lopez last year. Dame is being replaced by Kevin Porter Jr., who Doc really likes. KPJ was actually pretty decent in the 500 minutes he played for the Bucks last year, but he has been quite bad the rest of his NBA career.

The rest of this roster is really bad. Kuzma had one of the worst seasons for a 30-mpg player I can remember last year. Bobby Portis is maybe the team’s third-best player. If Giannis is out for a significant amount of time, the roster is probably the fourth worst in the league. But all that being said, I did not bet this team’s under. Giannis is spectacular, and the East is really bad. If he can stay healthy, they probably get to mid-40s wins.

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Indiana Pacers:

This roster makes me sad after the incredible run they had to the Finals last season. I was far less critical of letting Turner walk than others, but jeez—this team’s center rotation is a black hole. I know it’s really cool to like Jay Huff, but the guy is 27 years old and has essentially never been in an NBA rotation. This is his fifth team in five years, and Memphis—who doesn’t have a healthy big on the roster—essentially let him walk for nothing. Isaiah Jackson has also been in the league for four years, has never been more than a bench big, and is coming off a torn Achilles. Teams with aspirations to be good simply do not have positional groups that are this bad.

The Pacers know this is a swing year for Ben Mathurin. So far in his NBA career he’s been amazing at drawing fouls, and pretty bad at most other facets of the game. If his game remains there, this team might be really bad.

The good news is Pascal remains awesome. Nesmith is rock solid. Nembhard is also a good player, but a lot of his value comes on the defensive end. The Pacers are relying a ton on Nembhard this season, and I worry that the offensive workload is both something he can’t handle and going to prevent him from being as effective on the defensive end.

This team’s high-tempo and high pickup-point style relies on super high intensity and lower minutes for starters. Without Hali and Turner, the depth really drops off after TJ and Obi on the bench. And TJ is now 34 years old and showing some signs of a drop-off.

This team has plenty of incentive to suck if it goes bad at all. All the moves since Haliburton went down imply they know that. A high lottery pick could be very valuable for this team. I haven’t placed a bet on this team, but if I were to, it would definitely be on the under.

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Chicago Bulls:

The number one question for this Bulls season is how real the last 25 games of Josh Giddey’s season were, when he averaged 20-9.5-8.1 with 2.2 stocks and solid efficiency. The most obvious regression from those 25 games was he shot 45% from three, and although that will almost certainly regress, I do think at his volume 36–37% is a reasonable expectation. I think Giddey is actually quite good, and slightly underrated amongst NBA nerds. He’s a legit awesome passer, an awesome offensive rebounder for a player who handles as much as he does, and has gotten his scoring to “good enough” that he can use it as a real threat. All that being said, I’m still not sure exactly what it’ll look like on a good team, but I’m not sure that’s going to matter for a while with this Bulls roster.

The second most important piece to this Bulls team is Matas Buzelis. He and Noa Essengue are really the only two prospects on this roster, and to get out of the dustbin of mediocrity, one of them is going to have to hit a 90th-percentile outcome. Buzelis was fine as a rookie—the shooting was promising and he had a decent late-season run when he was starting. He didn’t pass much as a rookie, or create for himself. If he’s going to take a leap, those are the two things he’s going to have to do a lot better. I’m skeptical, but certainly think it’s in the realm of possibilities.

If I was the Bulls GM, I would certainly be going all-in on the tank. This team has little room for growth, and is basically praying for a miracle that Giddey or Buzelis become All-NBA-type players. But I am not Artūras Karnišovas, and he seems to be all-in on competing for the play-in. I have bet this team’s over wins and to make the playoffs. They lost Lonzo and LaVine, but those two only played a combined 2,000 minutes for them last season. This team has shown very little interest in tanking, and the roster is easily good enough to make a push for the play-in in this East. The Bulls were favored in seven of the last ten games of the year after being favored in only 12 of the previous 72 games. Not because they had magically found some new team mojo, but because they were trying while other teams were either tanking or resting for the playoffs. I expect it to play out similarly this season.

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