Obviously assuming everyone stays healthy, and no major roster changes from this point, I'm going to call for 54 wins and making it to the ECF if the draw is right.
We obviously are weaker at the 5 with the loss of Horford and Baynes, but I think Brad has enough versatility with Kanter / RW / Poirier / Theis (and who knows, maybe Tacko?) to at least make that a league-average spot in the lineup. Maybe better-than-average.
And Kemba may not be individually able to match the elite scoring that we got out of Kyrie and certainly not out of what we got out of Thomas before that, but he's going to be close enough. Overall, we should be way above average for net production out of the PG slot. And perhaps more importantly, I think his style of attack is going to be more complementary to his teammates than Kyrie's more iso-oriented style was.
From that point, the rest of our lineup is, imho, going to be dramatically better than the last couple of years. I expect Jaylen, Jayson and Smart to all be better versions of themselves from recent years and certainly better than the Avery+Crowder+Smart threesome before them. And I'm expecting Hayward to be very close to, if not all the way back and that's a player who is a game changer. None of the last few teams hear had a player of the level of quality that "Utah Gordon" was. I expect him to be fully back by the time we get to the playoffs.
The bench is young, but has a lot of solid, competent players who should be perfect in much better defined roles than last year. Smart, Grant, Robert, Carsen, Semi, Theis, Poirier, Wanamaker -- these guys all seem like they will be easy for Brad to make use of in well-defined roles.
The whole team just looks setup to be far more complementary with each other than last year.
And I believe Brad is going to show tremendous growth as a coach based on the painful lessons of this last year.
Finally, on intangibles, I don't think it will escape notice that everybody is counting the team out. Multiple "national" pundits are starting to come out with their early 'power rankings' and everybody is dismissing the Celtics as at best a 4th seed and some are projecting far lower. That's going to add a little fuel to the fire.
So I'm expecting we will win closer to the number of games we won in 2016-17 & 2017-18 than we did last year.
As to how far we will go in the playoffs, that may depend on seeding. Milwaukee is the only team that 'scares' me, so if we don't meet them until the ECF, I think we will get there.
Topic: Project Celtics Win Total/Playoff Advancement 2019-20 Season (Read 6698 times)