Welcome to the Morning Shootaround, where every weekday you’ll get a fresh, topical column from one of SI.com’s NBA writers: Howard Beck on Mondays, Chris Mannix on Tuesdays, Michael Pina on Wednesdays, Chris Herring on Thursdays and Rohan Nadkarni on Fridays.
We make a lot of predictions in this business, for obvious reasons: Predictions are fun! Fans love debating them! And, well, you keep clicking on them! Predictions are wonderfully cheap content. Getting them “right” is almost immaterial—no one remembers, no one cares (least of all me).
But it’s been a rough year for the NBA’s prediction-industrial complex, with a compressed schedule, fanless games, player quarantines, injured superstars and general weirdness from the moment the season tipped off Dec.