The time has come. The NBA Season is back. Portland fans should be excited for their team this year. Going into last year, the Portland Trail Blazers lost four of their five starters and people feared that their team was doomed for a slow rebuilding process.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Blazers finished their 2015-16 campaign with a record of 44-38, 13 wins more than where ESPN projected them to land. They crushed the odds and even completed an upset of the Los Angeles Clippers to advance to the second round of the playoffs before losing to the Golden State Warriors. Blazers head coach Terry Stotts finished the season as a top candidate for coach of the year last year.
This year, the team looks to improve even more. They kept their core but added Evan Turner and former NBA champion center Festus Ezeli. C.J. McCollum has proven to be a premier scorer in the league. His scoring touch, teamed with one of the best point guards in the league creates ones of the scariest backcourts in the NBA.
The Blazers look to continue to beat the odds in the NBA’s superior Western Conference. My prediction: they will win their division, outplaying Russell Westbrook’s Oklahoma City Thunder and the youthful Utah Jazz, and grab the fifth seed in the playoffs for the second year in a row.
Recent success in Portland should be promising to the fans, but we all know what the 2017 NBA Finals will look like. Sorry Blazers fans, but there is an inevitable Finals trilogy between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers waiting for us at the end of the 2016-17 season.
Although the Finals will likely include the same teams as last year, there will be some new players in the mix. A lot has happened since LeBron James and the Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals.
The Warriors got even more star power after setting the best record in NBA history with a record of 73-9. With the addition of Kevin Durant, the Warriors are now the villains of the league with all eyes on them. They’ve assembled quite possibly the best starting lineup in NBA history. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green and Zaza Pachulia create a lineup that the rest of the league has to fear.
Questions will arise to see if the team will have good chemistry. With a lineup that good, and with a team that already has amazing chemistry, Warriors fans should have nothing to worry about. The league’s last two MVPs over the last three years (Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant) will look to get revenge on a team with one of the best players ever to play the game.
A lot of pressure is off LeBron James, a four time MVP himself, who will look to add another ring to his collection, bring another trophy back home to the city of Cleveland and defeat the villains out West. Kyrie Irving, who is becoming one of the premier ball handlers in the league, is looking to put a knife in Warrior fans’ back again with his clutch shooting.
A lot can happen this season, but for now we have a heavyweight battle waiting for us in the 2017 Finals and it is going to be fun to watch. My prediction: come October of 2017, the Warriors will see another banner rise in the rafters of Oracle Arena as they defeat the Cavaliers in six games.
Here's how The Beacon sports staff thinks the season will turn out.
