There’s very little mystery about who will be the NBA’s best team in 2017-18. That honor will almost undoubtedly go to the Golden State Warriors, the reigning and defending NBA champions that managed to somehow get better this offseason.
However, what will be far more interesting than the race for the top seed in the West or even in the NBA in general will be the race for the best lottery odds and the bottom of the playoff seedings. The race for the Western Conference Playoffs will be as tight as any playoff battle we’ve seen in years after so many teams loaded up this offseason in the ever-growing arms race to deal with the Warriors.
We won’t know those answers until April when the season’s come to a close, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a number of preseason predictions pouring out over the next two months. The first significant projections to come out for season win totals comes courtesy of ESPN’s Kevin Pelton, whose RPM projections were released on Thursday with some interesting results.
RPM projected W-L records for next season.
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We’ll start at the bottom of each conference, where the Hawks and Kings rank 30th and 29th in the league with projected win totals of 27 and 27.4 games respectively. The Kings, who did manage to add a solid point guard in George Hill, still have a mess of a roster and lots of young players trying to develop, which usually means lots of losses. In a Western Conference that will be hellacious this year, the Kings may be as much a casualty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time as they are a bad team.
The Hawks, however, are a bad team and have made the sharpest downturn from 2016-17 to 2017-18. Atlanta saw top free agents Paul Millsap and Tim Hardaway Jr. walk this summer and made little effort to bring in win-now veterans. That is probably the right play for the perpetual playoff team that was rarely a real contender in the East, as they kickstart a rebuilding process. However, some will be surprised to see them plummet to the very bottom of the lowly East, but when considering their best players are Dennis Schröder, Ersan Ilyasova, and Kent Bazemore, it starts to make more sense
Joining the Hawks and Kings in the battle for Michael Porter Jr. in next year’s draft are a whole host of Eastern Conference teams jumbled up in the 33-or-below win category. Those would be the Bulls, Nets, Knicks, Pacers, Magic, and Sixers, with only the Suns and Lakers landing in that zone in the West. In summation, the race for last in the East is going to be a tremendous battle between some very bad teams. A few of those teams will likely come in well below their projections, while you can expect one or two others that will be trying their best to win all year — like Philly — to probably exceed expectations by a healthy margin.
As for the playoff races, the bottom of the Eastern Conference playoff bracket is going to be ugly. Those same 32 and 33-win projection teams manage to be in the 9-12 area of the East, just behind the 35-win projected Pistons which somehow manage to make the playoffs. Some well under .500 squad figures to be sacrificed to the Cavs or Celtics in the first round next spring, it’s just a matter of who.
In the West, the race is far more exciting, per RPM’s predictions. There are a whopping 10 teams projected to go over .500 in the West, with the Blazers and Pelicans the ones projected to just miss the cut behind the Jazz, Nuggets, and Clippers. The biggest leap that RPM projects comes from the Timberwolves, courtesy of their active offseason and acquiring Jeff Teague and Jimmy Butler. The 31-win Timberwolves of last year are gone and RPM expects over 50 wins in 2017-18 and the 4-seed in the West.
These projections obviously don’t account for the randomness of injuries and such that inevitably happen over the season, but it’s very interesting to see how the projection model sees which teams have made the most improvements — or have gotten significantly worse — this offseason.
