Preview of the NBA in the East
Boston, Chicago, and Miami — these are the three teams that all eyes will be on in the NBA Eastern Conference this year. But that doesn’t mean that all three of those teams shouldn’t also have their eye on Indiana.
The Boston Celtics have gone from being one of the best teams in the league for the past few years to being one of those teams that has the most questions surrounding it. Sure, they’re still some of the best, but will they be for long if they trade Rajon Rondo, the point guard who is one of the reasons the Celtics have been as good as they have been, and who helped lead them to the championship in 2008. The trade initially looked as though it might happen with Chris Paul, former point guard of the Hornets. But since Paul was traded to the L.A. Clippers this week, it looks as though that’s no longer the opportunity the Celtics were looking for. Still, there’s a lot of talk and Rajon Rondo will be the first to admit that his name is being thrown around. But, can Boston, with an aging team and only a handful of big talent, really afford to lose him in a division that’s getting younger and faster by the day?
In Chicago, they have their own young talent problems; the biggest one being, they don’t have a lot of it. Yes, Derrick Rose will be there, but that’s about it and he’s going to have to figure out a way to be everywhere on the court at once if he wants to take his team to the NBA Finals in 2012. Last year, Rose made the Chicago Bulls an unstoppable team; and it really did seem as though he was enough to do that. But Atlanta finally figured out a way to beat them (or at least come close to it) in the post-season last year and once they did, it didn’t take long for Miami to finish the job. If Chicago wants to make it farther than winning the conference finals for the second year in a row, they’ll have to motivate Carlos Boozer to step up to the big bucks he’s playing for, and Rip Hamilton will need to make many more baskets than not.
The Miami Heat took nearly the entire first half of the season last year to get it together but once they did, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh proved why they are the most talented trio in the game. While it was too little too late last year when they lost in the finals to the Dallas Mavericks, now that they’ve got it all figured out and unless they fall apart or succumb to injuries, they should take whoever they face in the finals this year.
Categorized in: NBA