The NBA Championship has started

The NBA championship that has just started is intriguing because of the presence of a whole group of teams whose potential seems to have grown significantly over the summer thanks to some good acquisitions. This group, which includes the Boston Celtics, Milwaukee Bucks, and Golden State Warriors, should, in theory, compete for the title with the defending champion Denver Nuggets. He just chose not to change anything in a perfectly working mechanism.

The degree of confusion of the “paper” situation in the NBA before the start of its next season is perfectly illustrated by a survey conducted by ESPN among its leading basketball experts. There were a dozen of them. And these 12 people bet on a total of six different champions. Whether there is a large range of opinions or not, the question is debatable: which side to look at. In the NHL, for example, the list would probably be longer. But for the basketball league, which is a little more predictable, this is a rather precarious situation. At the same time, people who have been analyzing everything that happens in it for years have clearly divided the NBA favorites, as it happens, into two groups – obvious and not too obvious. The Miami Heat, Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors each received a vote, while the Denver Nuggets, Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics each received three.

But the reasons that make you believe in this or that team are approximately clear. In the case of Denver, the reason is very obvious. Last season, he, led by Serbian phenom center Nikola Jokic, literally raced to the title through the playoffs, sweeping away everyone and suffering a total of only four defeats. He defeated the other finalist, Miami, with a score of 4:1. There were no fundamental changes in the club over the summer. Key figures remained in place. Jokic, having missed the World Cup, had a good rest. Jamal Murray, his main assistant, this time approached the championship, contrary to tradition, absolutely healthy. And why shouldn’t Denver repeat its success?

In the case of most clubs that see him as competitors, it is, on the contrary, change that inspires. Let’s say Golden State acquired veteran Chris Paul from the Washington Wizards, who remains a great point guard at the age of 40. Apparently, he won’t make it into the starting five of the Californians. But their problem was precisely that the outstanding playmaker Stephen Curry had essentially no insurance: when he sat on the bench, everything collapsed. Now, in theory, it has been resolved.

Boston, which nearly reached the finals in the previous championship with a brutally dramatic semi-final battle with Miami, also profited from Washington by taking Kristaps Porzingis, an excellent center with a wide range of play. Boston, it seems, did not have enough of a basketball player of this role to ensure that their dense application with such top characters as Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown looked almost flawless, without a single fine link.

Things are even more interesting with Milwaukee. During the last regular season, it seemed like a club with great chances for the title. Milwaukee finished at the top of the league table, but the playoffs turned out to be a disaster: they were eliminated in the first round by Miami. And in order to avoid a repetition of the terrible scenario, the club management, firstly, appointed a new coach, Adrian Griffin, instead of Mike Budenholzer, and secondly, pulled off a promising trade.

Guard Damian Lillard spent ten years and his entire professional career with the Portland Trail Blazers, in which he looked like an alien element. In the sense that the team itself seemed to have no ambitions and was quite satisfied with a modest status without pretensions, but Lillard constantly showed magnificent performance and was rewarded with calls to the All-Star Game for his sniper merits. And everyone was waiting for him to finally leave for some team that would need his talents not just to flounder somewhere in the basement of the hierarchy, making isolated splashes that did not decorate the overall dull picture.

He eventually left for Milwaukee, which until now, with, of course, a more high-quality selection of players, in fact, also greatly depended on the mood of its unconditional frontman, Greek forward Giannis Antetokounmpo. And an intrigue arose. At first glance, the deal that Milwaukee pulled off looks literally like a win-win. Well, what’s wrong with the fact that now he has not one, but two geniuses? But the same experts who gave him votes in the poll about the future NBA champion still noticed a glaring reason for doubt. Both Antetokounmpo and Lillard have never had to share fame and leadership with a superstar of even close magnitude. But learning to divide them is not such an elementary task.

Alexey Dospehov