Training Camp Power Rankings: Old School Logo Edition

RANK (LW)	TEAM	W-L	COMMENT
1		65-17	The reigning champs retain the top spot even with the Artest-Ariza swap. Artest and their point guard situation are their two biggest concerns.
2		54-28	This might be the best group of talent that Tim Duncan has had surrounding him during his run in San Antonio. They will be dangerous if Manu and Parker can stay healthy.
3		59-23	Nice pickups in Matt Barnes and Brandon Bass. VC will be fine, but I think they might miss Courtney Lee’s defense.
4		66-16	Improved supporting cast for LeBron, but will it be enough?
5		62-20	Ranking is contingent on KG showing that his knee is ok. Why has this not been made into a bigger deal?!?!
6		54-28	Great collection of talent and potential for the Blazers. This is the year they need to put it all together in Portland.
7		50-32	Great regular season team, busted come playoff time. Drew Gooden? Tim Thomas? Erick Dampier? Good luck fellas.
8		47-35	The Hawks finally have some depth. Adding Teague, Crawford, Jason Collins and Joe Smith was big for them, Smith especially.
9		54-28	Permission to use Bill James “Plexiglass Principle”. Everything broke the Nuggets way last year and the chances of that happening again are not that great. Losing Linus Kleiza will hurt them more than they think.
10		41-41	Derrick Rose is ready to make a mini-leap this year and the Bulls have solid all-around depth. Sure they'll miss Ben Gordon, but it was smart to not resign him.
11		48-34	Too many question marks with this team. Also the their playoff exits have come a round earlier each year since reaching the Conference Finals in 2006-07.
12		49-33	They have the potential to be a top team if they can get healthy years from Peja, Mo Pete and Okafor. Julian Wright and Marcus Thornton (20.7 ppg in Summer League) need to be impact players.
13		33-49	Toronto has a chance to be as good as a top five team in the East or miss the playoffs completely. Just depends on how the pieces fit together.
14		19-63	If Mike Dunleavy doesn’t bog Baron Davis down with running isolation plays constantly they could be a sleeper team. Added lots of nice depth on the cheap this summer.
15		46-36	Nash and Amare will resume their running ways under Alvin Gentry, but their lack of depth is discouraging. I totally have a man crush on Louis Amundson, not even kidding.
16		19-63	Even at their peak, the core of Arenas-Jameson-Butler was never much of real playoff threat for the Wizards, so why would they be now?
17		43-39	I might be crazy, but I like the Warriors. Despite of the turmoil, they have enough talent and depth to be a dangerous team.
18		53-29	T-Mac is supposed to be back for the start of training camp. If he’s really as healthy and spry as he says he is then look out!
19		23-59	Keys are the health of D-Wade and Jermaine O’Neal and whether or not Michael Beasley is ready to be a major contributor.
20		41-41	Good talent, but I don’t trust Lou Williams as a starting point guard and Jrue Holliday is not ready yet for that role. Lack of three-point shooting will also be a killer.
21		29-53	No playoffs this year, but the future is bright. It’s only a matter of time before Kevin Durant is the most dominating offensive player in the league.
22		39-43	Joe Dumars has to ask himself one question: Where is my mind? Charlie V and Ben Gordon? Really Joe?
23		36-46	Roy Hibbert looks like he has made big strides in the offseason. Can Troy Murphy have as big of a season as he had last year?
24		35-47	Forget that they haven’t ever had a franchise player in their six-year existence, just having a #1 option on offense would be nice.
25		24-58	They started January off by going 10-2 before Al Jefferson was lost for the season shortly after. Kevin Love is going to make a leap this year: 15-10
26		34-48	Brook Lopez will make the East All-Star team this year.
27		32-50	Like lots of teams on this list, the Knicks have the talent to sneak into the playoffs, but it’s just not very likely. Knicks were 14-14 in games that Danilo Gallinari played in. They lost 14 games by five points or less last year.
28		24-58	They traded Pau Gasol to dump salary and then brought in Zach Randolph for the same money. Something doesn’t make sense here. Also where is the logic in running out Randolph, Iverson, Rudy Gay and OJ Mayo together? Four guys all gunning for their own stats and unwilling to pass the ball = Great plan guys.
29		17-65	Kings are really high on rookie Tyreke Evans, but they’re still miles away from fielding a competitive team.
30		34-48	They were already a miserable team last year; losing Charlie V, Sessions, and R-Jeff won’t help. Also, what’s the over/under on games before we get our first Brandon Jennings/Scott Skiles clash?

Brooklyn Bound

Training camp might have just started, but let’s jump ahead to the upcoming summer to look at what has been the most compelling storyline for the last few years. Will LeBron James leave Cleveland, why would he and where would he go?

If King James is a smart man, and he does appear to be a smart guy, he will get out of Cleveland while he can. Danny Ferry’s tenure as the Cavaliers GM has done nothing but produce short-cited moves and he continued that trend this summer. Ferry signed Anderson Varejao to what could potentially be a 5-year, $50 million contract. That is an enormous investment for a player whose best qualities are his hustle and energy, non-basketball skills that do not usually improve with age (see: Malik Rose). Varejao’s contract could take up as much as a fifth of the Cavaliers cap in 2014. This will prove to be a crippling move for the franchise and absolutely kill their ability to add better players to surround LeBron with in the future should he choose to stay.

Cleveland’s situation really has no chance of improving for the next few years because they have no attractive tradable assets that are not essential to the team’s success. Daniel Gibson and Jamario Moon are fine role players, but they are not going to bring back a major haul in a trade. Plus after this season both Zydrunas Illgauskas and Shaquille O’Neal become free agents, leaving the team without a starting center on the roster and no cap space to go sign a younger one.

The Cavaliers problem all along has been that James has had nobody to grow old with on the roster, no sidekick, no Pippen to his Jordan. Mo Williams is a nice player, but he is not a second banana on a championship team, he might not even be a third banana. Let’s not forget that Carlos Boozer could have been that player.

Despite all of the mismanagement on the part of the Cavaliers, James will turn 25 this December and has a chance to escape to a more attractive destination at a pretty ripe age.

The New York Knicks have long been the team rumored to be James’ eventual destination because of his aspirations of being marketed like a David Beckham, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, but from a basketball standpoint this makes little to no sense for him. The Knicks would be a playoff team for sure with James, but it might take a few years before they became true contenders.

Instead, Lebron should be looking across the Hudson River at the New Jersey Nets. The Nets will have the cap space to sign King James and already have an all-star point guard, Devin Harris, and an emerging franchise center, Brook Lopez.

In contrast to the Cavs, whose championship window would only seem to get smaller as the years go by, the Nets are a team that will only get better. Plus the Nets will have the financial flexibility to build upon what they already have. Harris is signed for a very reasonable $35 million over the next four years and Lopez and Courtney Lee are not up for extensions until 2012. In addition to that the Nets will have “The Chairman” Yi Jianlian and rookie Terrence Williams, plus a lottery pick if they do not qualify for the playoffs this season. That is a core that James can grow with and win with now and five years from now.

There are even non-basketball-related incentives for James to sign with the Nets. His buddy Jay-Z is a minority owner. He is a Yankees fan. The team will eventually move to Brooklyn. The Nets will get a new arena in Brooklyn (ground is expected to be broken before the end of the year). Penny-pinching owner Bruce Ratner recently sold the team to billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who is supposedly like a Russian Mark Cuban. He would get to play in the New York media market. Where is the downside for James in this equation?

Here’s to hoping that LeBron will lead the Nets out of the swamps of New Jersey and into a new era in Brooklyn.

Mediocre Mavericks

The Dallas Mavericks are not going to win an NBA championship with their current group of players, but don’t tell them that. The Mavericks have made moves for the right now and have improved the team in the short-term, but they still do not stand a chance to succeed in the grind of the playoffs.

Turning Jerry Stackhouse’s expiring contract into former all-star Shawn Marion was definitely an immediate upgrade, especially considering Stackhouse has most likely played his last NBA game. Keeping Jason Kidd will keep them among the West’s top teams – at least for this season.

Marion should enjoy playing for the Mavericks and returning to the hybrid-forward role that he played so well for the Suns. He will fit right into the Mavericks up-tempo game and provide solid defense.

The Mavericks will be a great regular season team and will surely carve up lesser opponents with regularity, but none of their offseason additions sure up any of their deficiencies that led to their exit in the second round of last season’s playoffs. Adding Marion, Tim Thomas and Drew Gooden only helps the Mavs get better at what they were already good at. They are running inside of a hamster wheel instead of sprinting ahead to title contention.

Marion helps the Mavericks play at a faster-pace and allows them lineup flexibility, but how in the world does he help the Mavericks contain the elite frontcourt players of the west? Nene made the Mavs frontcourt players look silly in the second round of the playoffs and they could not contend with the energy and length of Chris Andersen. If you’re looking for energy, Thomas and Gooden are most definitely not going to be the guys who are going to bring it. If the Mavs could not contend with Nene, Andersen and Kenyon Martin, then what are they going to do against Tim Duncan and Antonio McDyess or Pau Gasol, Andrew Bynum and Lamar Odom?

The Mavericks plan is a flawed one. They have depth issues, their core is aging and they have no young promising prospects on the roster. Their only real hope is that Chris Bosh falls into their laps like Gasol did for the Lakers two years ago. The Mavericks will be a 50-win regular season team and at times will look like a very explosive club, but they are sure to fall flat on their faces in the playoffs without a real presence in the paint.

Rockets Red Glare is Bright

The Houston Rockets might find themselves dedicating more time to scouting lottery prospects than packing the Toyota Center for playoff games, but not all is lost. While their fortunes may seem to have gone sour to some, the team has a plan and is actually in one of the more enviable positions in the league.

The Rockets are in a position of extreme flexibility in the seasons ahead. All of their players on their roster – save for Tracy McGrady, whose $23-million contract comes off the books after the upcoming season – are signed to incredibly reasonable contracts and only one, Trevor Ariza, is guaranteed past the 2010-11 season. If Tracy McGrady stinks this year that’s fine, the Rockets can let him walk. Yao doesn’t fully recover next season; he does not have to be your problem after 2011.

Rockets GM Daryl Morey has assembled an all-star cast of role players capable of winning a championship with the right pair of stars leading them. That is the beauty of the Rockets situation. They have all of the pieces in place except for the star players and there will be plenty of those available on the free agent market after this season.

The ideology behind the construction of the Rockets roster is the opposite of that of the Cleveland Cavaliers. In previous year, the Cavs have overspent to put pieces around LeBron James to keep him happy and try to win a title and those have for the most part failed (Damon Jones, Donyell Marshall, Larry Hughes, etc.). The Rockets have all of the supporting pieces in place and will soon have the cap flexibility to sign all-star type players to lead them.

The Rockets supporting cast already showed in last season’s playoffs that they had the heart and grit to challenge a very talented Lakers team sans Yao and with Ron Artest jacking up errant jumpers at his earliest convenience. This current Rockets squad will not be a group of pushovers by any means even without their franchise center. They upgraded for the current season and future by swapping out Artest with Ariza for essentially the same money. Ariza is younger, quicker, and has a much higher ceiling than the perplexing Artest. The Rockets also added Australian big man David Andersen. Andersen should be a very good addition as his offensive game will space the floor (40.4 % 3PT) and be a nice complement to the Rockets current collection of bangers.

The Heat would be miserable without Dwyane Wade, as would the Cavs without King James, but the Rockets without Yao still have a chance to make the playoffs. Rather than put all of his eggs in one basket like many teams do, Morey has collected a group of talented players who give the team the flexibility to play whatever style suits them best. There is no reason to believe that an uptempo team led by Luis Scola, Shane Battier, Aaron Brooks and Ariza can’t win 40 games this season and come back even stronger the following year. The Rockets might not be coming into this season with the same expectations as they did for last season, but they will still compete and their future looks incredibly bright.