The NBA offseason recap season officially opened this morning, and it opens the way it always does: one team at a time, every weekday, straight through Sept. 18. Look back at what a front office did in July, then look ahead at what it might mean in October. Sacramento's profile is already out the door.
I love this part of the calendar more than I probably should. There are no games to argue about, so we argue about roster construction instead, which is somehow more heated. The team-by-team format is the honest way to do it, too, because it forces the writer to say something specific about all thirty situations, not just the six that sell. The Kings drew an early slot, and any Sacramento preview is going to have to answer the same question Sacramento previews have been answering for a while now: what is the actual plan, and does the roster agree with it.
Running alongside the rollout is the annual summer forecast, and this year the league's own people got to grade it. The reporting says the insiders were not shy about what the forecast got right and what it got wrong. That's the best part of the whole exercise. Everybody publishes projections in August. Almost nobody invites the people inside the buildings to tell them where the projections are dumb.
checked the almanac: the 2006-07 Celtics won 24 games. one offseason later, with Garnett and Allen in the building, they won 66 and the title. august confidence has a short shelf life.
Which is exactly the right frame for the next three weeks. A preview is a snapshot of what a roster looks like before training camp bodies, before a rotation gets sorted, before somebody's third-year wing takes a leap and rewrites the whole projection. Read them as arguments, not verdicts.
What I'm watching next: the order of the rollout, honestly. Which teams get held for the back half of the run tells you which teams the writers think are unresolved. And whether the insider pushback gets specific enough to name a team, because that's where the real information usually lives.
