Camden wrote:FNG, I'm not sure if you realize this, but the Wolves don't play the Nuggets 82 times this year. Crazy, I know. Minnesota could very well lose all four matchups against Denver, though I wouldn't actually count on that, and they could still manage to win the XX amount of games that some of us have projected with reasonable health of the roster.
I guess my point is that it sounds like you're placing significant value in how the Wolves starters played against the Nuggets starters (in one game, mind you) while ignoring/discounting the positive aspects of the preseason to express your pessimism. That just doesn't add up to me.
Wait, are you sure about that? Let me check the schedule!
My only point is I didn't learn enough about this team in the preseason to make me think they will win any more than 10-15 more games than last year. I sense that we are a very enthusiastic and cohesive team, and that PatBev seems to have brought some necessary toughness. I like the enthusiasm DLo showed both on and off the court is the first game. I know that we seem quite small with only 2 real bigs on the roster, and I'm concerned about rebounding if we don't find a way to add another big. I know we only made 30% of our threes in the four games, and while I know this will get much better, I don't sense that we are going to be a very good 3-point shooting team. Here's what else I learned from the 4 preseason games:
Pelicans and Clippers: Our rotation was good enough to beat teams resting their best players.
Nuggets: Our starters were not competitive with their starters, but our bench looked superior to theirs.
Nets: This is the tough one to analyze for me. We were very competitive on the road against a team playing its best players, even though we were missing DLo. Some may conclude that DLo makes us better, and we can stay with a team like Brooklyn. But my concern is that PatBev starting in place of DLo improves our defense so much that we actually had a more effective roster last night. I thought our defense looked quite good against a talented team...will it still look good when DLo is in for PatBev? I don't know.
So a lot of uncertainty that didn't become clearer for me in the preseason. And based on my research of this forums' win projections the past 5 seasons, we tend to be quite optimistic...6-12 wins too optimistic per year if I recall. I'm a fan so I understand hope always springs eternal...I'm generally too optimistic about my home teams before the season starts too. But it seems to me that we're doing it again, and that by the end of the season, we will again win 6-12 games fewer than our mean projection. It's human nature, not just this board. Based on what I've seen, 34 wins looks like a pretty good estimate.
