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Since we last experienced NBA basketball games that count, we have seen:
Six newly hired head coaches get to work, including JJ Redick taking stewardship of LeBron James’ Lakers and Mike Budenholzer trying to turn the Kevin Durant-Devin Booker-Bradley Beal Suns into a supernova;
31 trades involving 70 players — including All-Stars Klay Thompson, DeMar DeRozan, Karl-Anthony Towns, Julius Randle, Russell Westbrook and Dejounte Murray — and a flotilla of future draft picks;
An estimated $2.85 billion in contracts signed in free agency;
31 extensions of existing contracts totaling nearly $5.9 billion, headlined by Celtics star Jayson Tatum’s five-year, $314 million deal — which stands, for now, as the richest pact in the history of the sport.
That’s a ton of business to sift through as we start the 2024-25 NBA season, and try to do some back-of-the-envelope math on which teams expect to find themselves in championship contention come June. So, as we do at the outset of each season, with high hopes for the eventual outcomes of all those deals still unscuffed by reality: let’s bust out those envelopes.
(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
According to BetMGM, eight teams enter the season with championship odds of 15-to-1 (+1500) or better. Those teams feature seven of the 15 members of last season’s All-NBA teams … and they also feature major questions that must be answered between now and the postseason.
Let’s get reacclimated with the NBA’s expected upper echelon by considering the cases for and against those top eight teams. We begin where last season ended:
Boston Celtics (+325)
The case for: OK, good, starting off with an easy one: The Celtics just won the NBA championship, and might be even better this year.
Boston blitzed the league with a style of play that felt a lot like the solution to modern basketball — a means of wringing every ounce of value out of every possession without conceding a single damned thing. Head coach/contemporary philosopher Joe Mazzulla seems intent on pushing the team’s schematic embrace of creating math problems even further this time around. After taking a…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-survival-guide-heres-your-reintroduction-to-the-top-8-title-contenders-in-2024-25-154046519.html
Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2024-10-23 15:41:00
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