In the East, my vote would be Brooklyn or Atlanta.
Brooklyn is deep at just about every position. Mikal Bridges is a very good scorer. Cam Johnson a very talented 2-way player. Dinwiddie a solid 2-guard. Claxton is one of the more impressive young centers in the league. A lot rides on Simmons and if he can be 75 percent of what he once was. At the very least, he looks to be in shape entering the season. Brooklyn looks to have a plethora of two-way players. The question is if Bridges can be the main scorer on a contending title team.
Atlanta has Trae Young, who is now flying under the radar as one of the best scoring guards in the NBA, and many solid defensive pieces surrounding him in Murray, Hunter, Capela. If Trae can get a hot in a playoff series, you never know.
In the West, I think it’s Minnesota. On paper, they are loaded with talent. Ant, KAT, McDaniels, Gobert, Reid, Conley and Anderson might be as good of a first 7 you will find in the league today. Of course, the main question is — can Chris Finch make Towns and Gobert work offensively? We saw how tough Minnesota can be in the Denver series last year. With most everyone on their roster now having multiple years of playoff experience in addition to having continuity among their depth chart and coaching staff, they are my sneaky pick to make the West finals this year.
Who is your sneaky pick in each conference to make a deep playoff run? Or do you believe there’s no logical selection?
I’m gonna lose my mind with the slobbering over Minnesota for getting gentlemen swept in the first round. I thought that the Lakers “close” sweep was out of hand but the “Minnesota put up a great fight against Denver” is on another level.
Who is hyping us? Seriously though every ranking has us as a 6th-9th seed. The Edwards hype has gone a little overboard tbh but the Wolves as a whole are definitely not getting the slobbering treatment your talking about. I regularly see people rank OKC over us.
It’s more about the floodgates that Bruce Brown opened with his podcast comments. The series really wasn’t close enough for the Wolves to keep getting praised so much for it. It really should have been a sweep had Jokic not missed a game-winning free throw. Winning one game and in overtime no less just isn’t enough to justify all the slobbering I’ve seen about how well Minnesota played in the playoffs.