As the countdown for the NBA season approaches, the predictions and projections will start to follow. And ESPN started things off with a bang.<\/p>\n
They kicked off their week-long preview of the season with their prediction of each team\u2019s record. In what should hardly be a shock, not only did they predict the Lakers to drop in the standings, but they also predicted a pretty significant drop in wins as well.<\/p>\n
For those keeping track at home, that\u2019s an eight-win drop. There\u2019s a scenario where this would be understandable given the roster turnover. But the same logic doesn\u2019t seem to have been applied across the board.<\/p>\n
The Nuggets lost Peyton Watson, made no notable additions to a team that flamed out in the playoffs, but will win more than they did last season? The Wolves have massive questions about their roster after trading away their starting frontcourt and bringing in LaMelo Ball. They\u2019re projected to win more this season.<\/p>\n
The Blazers have more point guards on their roster than the Lakers have people vying for ownership of the franchise, but are projected to win seven more games this season. And none of this accounts for the fact that the Lakers saw both Luka Don\u010di\u0107 and Austin Reaves miss significant time.<\/p>\n
You can pick and choose your discrepancies up and down these standings, but it feels like the Lakers were one of the only teams in the West punished in the standings. Again, a drop in wins could be argued given their own roster turnover, but it just feels like they took a chunk of wins out of the Lakers to account for so many other teams improving without applying the same logic.<\/p>\n
ESPN\u2019s preview will continue next with predictions of the major awards. I\u2019m going to go on a limb, given the standings above, that Luka isn\u2019t going to be viewed too favorably in that either.<\/p>\n
At least they\u2019re not projecting the Clippers above them anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the countdown for the NBA season approaches, the predictions and projections will start to follow. And ESPN…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":826093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[43364,355,99],"class_list":["post-826092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-lakers-news","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}