If you put together all the years of basketball journalism experience among the six writers listed below (OK, we’ll exclude Danny Schayes, but he DID learn a thing or two during his six or seven decades as a backup stiff center), you’ve got almost a century of combined veteran savvy.
Yes, we are older than the Nets. And last year’s GeriatKnicks.
Those of you who have been following this site since its inception more than two years ago know that Sheridan Hoops has a vast staff of columnists and writers, many of whom used to work elsewhere and many of whom (the young ones) hope to work elsewhere.
As for the old guard, we have our opinions — and we stick to them like glue until we are exposed as clueless or clairvoyant.
And when we are clueless, our Twitter followers let us know about it.
But our followers also appreciate the broad base of historical knowledge our senior writers bring to this site, and we always appreciate the nice comments and tweets.
In this post, we are compiling the six Top 10 Predictions columns our elderly older columnists have filed over the past week. All are worth clicking through, and we truly appreciate the RTs and shares. Enjoy. (And for our team-by-team season previews, give a click right here.).
CHRIS SHERIDAN
It’s prediction time, and as I have always liked to say: Predictions are like armpits: Everyone has them, and all of them stink. Take it from a guy who picked Spurs in 7 last season.
Yes, that one missed. But find me a guy who predicted that Gregg Popovich would have an extreme bout of cranial flatulence with the championship within his grasp at the end of Game 6, and then I’ll drop the armpit line. I still can’t get over the size of those brain farts. Even Dwight Howard was impressed.
Everybody is making 1o predictions, and the idea is to be serious but also to have some fun. At the end of the season, we’ll take a look back and see who was especially sage-like.
For now, let’s get this thing kicked off properly with my top prediction of the 2013-14 season:
1. Pau Gasol will get traded
JAN HUBBARD
Although I wouldn’t consider myself to be a serious bettor, I do enjoy an occasional trip to Las Vegas, where the betting is legal and sometimes expensive. Vegas is the ultimate venue for those who believe they are blessed with the power of clairvoyance. Think you’re smart enough to predict the outcome of a game, or games? Sports books provide unlimited opportunity for you to prove it.
On an ideal day, I would wish for the ability to make three correct predictions. In Vegas, that is called a parlay and it pays 6-1. Hit a couple of those and you’ve got a lot of room for future error.
As our esteemed colleague Chris Sheridan has and will discover in Vegas, however, predictions – aka bets – come with a price. Hit them, and your bankroll increases. Miss them and, well, the bucks pass to the house. That makes them far more serious than predictions on this web site.
So, with that as a disclaimer, here are a few with some serious; others not so much. You can decide which is which.
1. The Heat will easily win a third consecutive championship.
MARK HEISLER
The preseason may be on, but I’m holding the excitement until something happens. By that I mean something bigger than media day, where all involved tell us what they’d like most, as if sitting in Santa Claus’ lap, asking for a pony.
The tipoff is they have media day in Charlotte, and everyone is just as optimistic there.
Personally, I try to measure my (yawn) excitement level, according to the advice of long-time NBA hand and once-again Lakers assistant Kurt Rambis, who said, “The preseason has nothing to do with the regular season. And the regular season has nothing to do with the playoffs.” It’s a time of predictions, mostly clueless, not because pundits are dumb – they’re not, although I don’t know any Einsteins among us, either – but because no one but no one can know what will happen.
Whatever we think will start to change the moment they tip the season off. It won’t seem that way because we will be rationalizing day by day, so by the end of last season, we all kind of thought we had the Spurs first or second in the West.
You don’t believe it?
Remember which team 40 of 50 ESPN experts picked in the West a year ago? The Lakers.
Remember where the Spurs came in? Third, with one vote (John Hollinger, now the Memphis GM), trailing the Thunder, who got nine.
CHRIS BERNUCCA
This is the time of year where everyone and their mothers offer up a series of fearless prognostications about the upcoming NBA season.
Here’s what I can tell you about my skills at predicting the future. If I was really any good at it, I wouldn’t be wasting it on the NBA season. And neither would anyone else.
I am not reading tea leaves, interpreting tarot cards, gazing into crystal balls, holding seances, poring over analytics or buying classified information on the black market. I am doing what virtually all of my colleagues do – making a somewhat educated guess.
While detractors may argue that even blind squirrels stumble upon the occasional acorn, I would like to point out that I didn’t do so badly last season. Make of it what you will.
Our staff here at Sheridan Hoops will be making its award and champion predictions later this month. For now, here are my 10 fearless predictions for the 2013-14 NBA season.
1. Before Christmas, Dwight Howard will grumble that the Houston Rockets are James Harden’s team.
Two significant things will happen this NBA season: David Stern will step down as commissioner, probably five years too late. And for the first time in 20 years, the 76ers, Celtics and Lakers all will be out of the playoffs.
We know the first to be true. The second is pure conjecture, but it’s more likely than not that three of the top NBA franchises in terms of tradition, history, titles and outsized personalities will be booking trips to ping-pong festivities in May. (At least they have moved them from the dynamited old NBA Entertainment headquarters in Secaucus, N.J. to Times Square, if that is any consolation).
Wait, there’s more. Here are my fearless predictions for the 2013-14 season.
1. Jason Kidd will be the Coach of the Year.
Is it an honor to go last? I hope that’s what Sheridan was thinking when he assigned my the final edition of our senior staff writers’ 10 Season Predictions.
The funny thing is that I am enough of a senior citizen to have had each of our esteemed prognosticating vets (Sheridan, Mark Heisler, Jan Hubbard, Chris Bernucca, Peter May) cover me with a notebook and tape recorder in their hands.
And now I am an ink-stained wretch just like them. Woo-hoo. Here are my 10 predictions for the upcoming NBA season.
1. Even without Jay-Z, Brooklyn will be the coolest place to play in the East
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