We’ll revisit this topic when the playoff brackets are set in mid-April, but surely, any NBA site has to make a championship prediction before tip-off on Opening Night of a new regular season.
Will the city of Cleveland finally win a professional sports championship, and will the Cavaliers finally win their first NBA crown?
Here’s what our writers think:
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SEAN WOODLEY
The Los Angeles Clippers.
They were so close last season. At one point, the Clippers were up 3-1 on the Rockets while the Warriors trailed the Grizzlies and the Cavaliers’ roster was crumbling around LeBron James. I’m choosing to look at the 2014-’15 team’s full body of work rather than its last three games.
The starting lineup is going to be a steamroller once again. L.A.’s biggest problem last season, the bench, has been bolstered by a collection of players that seems strange on paper, but will still prove to be a significant upgrade over last year’s second unit. With personalities such as Lance Stephenson and Josh Smith involved, there is always the potential for a cataclysmic locker room implosion, but the talent here is undeniable. The West is fraught with peril, but this Clippers team stands a real chance of becoming the new kings of LA.
JARED MINTZ
I get the logic that a healthy roster will help get the Cavs past whatever powerhouse emerges from the West, but I’m not sure why best-case scenario logic is allowed to be applied to every team in the NBA besides the Golden State Warriors.
I’m sick of hearing about luck. The entire NBA was lucky that reigning MVP Kevin Durant was out. We very rarely get teams that finish in the top two both offensively and defensively, and whatever you can say about whom they did or didn’t play, this team played a style that nobody could match, and consistently made adjustments to keep it that way.
I don’t want to make this column more about other teams’ flaws than about Golden State’s supremacy, but the Spurs lack backcourt depth and prowess; the Clippers’ bench is a complete unknown; we haven’t seen a healthy Thunder team in the playoffs for a couple of years now; and the same can essentially be said for Cleveland.
When a team is as dominant as the Warriors were last season, my mind can’t process that someone else will be better than them until I see it. We haven’t seen it.
BRYAN GIBBERMAN
Golden State Warriors.
MATT ZEMEK
First, let’s settle the West.
Though the San Antonio Spurs look like a complete team on paper, Tony Parker’s body also seems to be made of paper. If the Spurs and the Golden State Warriors play a best-of-seven Western Conference Finals series, Parker’s durability becomes an obvious point of concern, enough to push me away from a San Antonio pick. If Parker can be himself, I’d pick the Spurs, and we can revisit that topic in April. However, from this vantage point, I’d have to go with the Warriors in the West. Oklahoma City is too much of a defensive question mark. The Clippers have too many knuckleheads, though they do have a roster which — if it comes together and transcends the knucklehead factor — is capable of winning it all.
Therefore, it will be Golden State against Cleveland again, giving us back-to-back NBA Finals in consecutive two-year segments.
LeBron James beat the Spurs in 2013 and lost in 2014. He lost to the Warriors in 2015, so it would only make sense that he and the Cavaliers will break through in 2016.
I know Clevelanders — the most tortured American sports fans in one municipality over the past half-century, with zero debate — don’t want to hear about how much of a favorite they are. It sets up the big gut punch in June, which the residents of that fine city have come to expect.
I can’t blame them. Not one bit.
Yet, let’s face it — you are the favorite, Cleveland. The East is going to be your personal playground. You’re going to move through the East playoffs smoothly enough that you’ll be very fresh for the Finals. If you have Kevin Love on the floor and Iman Shumpert in good health and Mo Williams able to hit a reasonable percentage of jumpers, all the other ingredients (interior defense, rebounding, cohesion on a team which learned how to play together last season, motivation) exist for a championship breakthrough.
Clevelanders might expect the piano to fall from the sky and crush their dreams, but the Cavs are going to be a monster this season. While the East is better in terms of 1-through-8 depth, it doesn’t have a second heavy hitter to bother the Cavs. Once in the 2016 Finals, LeBron will have more help, and if LeBron has more help, he’s going to become the man who ended Cleveland’s sports title drought.
