I agree with most of this, except for...
Lance Stephenson, Jamal Crawford, Paul Pierce, Josh Smith, Cole Aldrich. The Clippers bench be looking like a eastern conference playoff team.
Umm...no lo
Paul Pierce and Josh Smith sure, and I can accept Jamal Crawford. But Lance Stephenson is going the Steve Francis / Gilbert Arenas route (he'll probably be out of the league soon) and Aldrich is nobody.
We actually have a better bench than the Clippers IMO, and by a significant margin.
Also, I don't think Pierce will be coming off the bench - I think he'll be their starting SF.
1. Cleveland. Assuming Tristan Thompson will finally resign. The Cavs are on this list mostly because of the players they were able to keep. They were able to avoid a disaster in KLove leaving after giving up a future supertar for the guy. Then they add Mo Williams back, who many thought was over the hump then acored 50 points last year! Varejao coming back is also going to make a big difference. Ill end by saying i hate this team and it annoys me greatly that this will be the 6th consecutive year we have to see Lebron in the finals.
Honesty, I put Cleveland in the losers column.
If the reports are true about the ridiculous contract Tristan Thompson is going to be signed to, then the Cavs have gone all-in on a lot of really mediocre players. The amount of money spend on Tristan Thompson and Iman Shumpert is ridiculous.
Also I get the feeling that the Kevin Love re-signing is going to come back to bite them on the back side. That's over $100M committed to a guy who has a history of being a loser, who has one of the worst injury histories perhaps in the entire NBA, and who is just coming off a dislocated shoulder - a major concern for a guy who's entire offensive game is based around jump shots.
Do people remember what happened to Bradley's show after he got his double shoulder surgery? His three point percentage dropped from 40% to around 31% the following year....then the year after it went back up to around 40% again.
Unlike Bradley Love doesn't provide defense, so if Love loses his jump shot for all of next season, combined with his infamously poor defense, then you might find he's actually a liability rather than an asset.
Adding Mo Williams certainly helps offensively, but he is yet another guy on this roster who is infamous for his completely non-existent defense.
This Cleveland team basically has three guys (Shumpert, Mozgov) who play high calibre defense on a consistent basis. Plus there is Lebron, who plays defense at an elite level, but only when he feels like it.
This team is built entirely on offensive dominance, (much like the Thunder from a couple of years ago) and off the top of my head I can't think of many bad defensive teams teams who have won NBA Championships in the past two decades. They'll be a great regular season team for sure, but I just don't know if they have what it takes to beat a team like San Antonio, Golden State, Houston, LAC or even OKC (now that Durant is back) in a 7 game series. Even Memphis would be a tough fight for them.
They honestly won't have much competition in the East (I expect them to have the top seed easily) but I don't think there are many Western Conference teams that I can see Cleveland beating in a 7 game series. The fact that they have locked up so many long term contracts only limits their ability to make add and/or move talent later - guys like Shumpert and Tristan Thompson (unless they have break out years) are going to be very hard to move on those contacts. They are all-in, and they need to hope and pray that what they have is enough.