Last year my win delta was 7.7 and Vegas’ was 8.4, which sounds impressive and seems like a pretty big win for the best publicly available wins™… except that I was off by 10+ wins on 9 teams.

So yea, it was a wild year, with lots of teams trying to capture the Flagg.

This year is a disaster, and though I’ll still technically call these the best publicly available win projections™, I'd rather not bet on it. The structure of so many of these rosters is so haphazard that I’m less confident than I’ve been in years past. The Pacers, Celtics, and Hornets have decent rosters, but they've decided to employ exclusively third string centers. Might it work? Sure! There’s no evidence any of them are bad, but there’s just so little sample size of any of them playing against good players that I have no idea. When making full season minute projections, how do I even account for lots of talent on the perimeter and not so much talent on the interior? Should I just assume Derrick White will play some center? Will those lineups be able to make up for 50% defensive rebounding by scoring a zillion points on offense? Who knows!

I suppose there are at least a few things I have some confidence in.

The Pelicans are bad. The front office is bad. They don't have their pick. Their bench is especially bad. I don't expect the reality of any of this to change just because Zion is on Ozempic.

The Bucks are mediocre. Yes I know they have a top 5 player, but the third best player on the Bucks in my projections is Ryan Rollins. And yes I have heard of him, and I do think he’s a little underrated, but he’s the third best player on a .500 NBA team?! It’s a bad roster, and whatever spacing they gain on O, I’m pretty sure that Giannis and Myles Turner no longer have the defensive chops to make up for on D. This is an under .500 team.

The Timberwolves, Nuggets, Rockets, and Clippers are all good, but high Vegas projections and various questions about guys being too young, positional balance, or guys being too old have me a little lower than market (the West is awesome, but I never mind taking an under on a 50+ win total, as the base rate is chaos).

I'm not a pessimist! There are some teams I'm high on!

The Warriors are good. Admittedly, they're relying on their geriatric players more than I’d like to admit, and most likely one of those four will wind up falling off a cliff... but in the meantime they should have enough young guys to stem the tide. As long as Steph and Jimmy are still All-NBA level players (asking a lot, but they’re HOFers with skillsets that should age, and they take care of their bodies) that can play 60+ games, this is a 50 win team. 

This was going to be an entire paragraph about how the Grizzlies are mediocre, but they're impressively mediocre, making their mediocrity a bit of a super power! But that paragraph has been nuked by the news that Scotty Pippen Jr. (actually pretty good) will miss 3 months and Ty Jerome has a calf injury that'll cause him to miss a month (also pretty good). The good news is Ja Morant will play in the season opener (pretty good, but not as good as you think he is!), but that depth is looking much shakier now when you consider all the front court injuries to start the season. Could be a bit of a gap year in Memphis. Luckily they've fattened up the coffers a bit with the Bane trade, which was great value, even if you love the player.

With less tankers than in previous years and a compelling upcoming draft class, more teams should be considering a gap year if they aren’t already [2]. The Blazers and Pelicans have extremely difficult schedules in 2025 and are teams that might be candidates to use those slow starts to trade some guys– though the Pelicans, in management malpractice, famously don’t control their own pick! And when I sort schedule by month, the Kings play 16 games against teams projected to win an average of 46 games in November. Might something like a 6-15 start cause them to get religion? [3]

Anecdotally, the number of offseason surgeries and preseason injuries seems high. There are very few tanking teams, creating a vacuum that might suck a few organizations into a gap year. Game to game variance is at an all time high with 3 point shooting and pace trending upward. And a bunch of teams have rosters that don’t make sense [4].

The upshot is that this uncertainty has me unusually excited to see the product on the floor for a number of teams (Spurs, Raptors, Blazers, Magic, Hawks, Hornets?!), which means I’m very ready to NBA.

Bonus content, if you made it this far. I'm not a data viz guy, so this is pretty basic, but I made a chart in excel of the average age, weighted by minutes, for every team in the NBA this year. Quick commentary: Holy shit the Clippers are old! Rough look for the Kings, who are sneaky old with no real prospects. And the Pelicans stink, but they're so young! Zion is somehow only 25 and Kevon Looney is (go ahead and guess, I'll bury the answer at the end of the notes). [5]

[1] I'm doing my best to take an accurate snapshot a week or two before the season from the lowest vig numbers, but ultimately these lines are not incredible accurate, the limits are low, and I'm expecting to beat them.

[2] Pacers and Celtics are the obvious candidates here with major injuries to their All-NBA players.

[3] No fucking way!

[4] Shoutout Phoenix Suns: compiling a roster of exclusively shooting guards and centers is a good idea, I mean it’s not like they’re the two most overrated positions in the league!

[5] 29. There's no fucking way you guessed anything that didn't start with a 3, don't lie to me.