The NBA Crystal Ball

About a month ago, I had seen enough to know who I thought was going to be in the NBA Finals: the San Antonio Spurs and the Miami Heat.

I have always thought San Antonio would dominate these playoffs in the west--everybody else has new people playing key roles. The only possible problems were the high scoring teams, Phoenix and Seattle. Teams with shooters can luck into victories by having their eager shooters suddenly get hot. (Ask Sacramento about Ray Allen, for instance.) That's the thing about gambling--sometimes you win.

The night this all occured to men, I had seen Miami tear apart the Suns. It was hard to picture them losing.

So I was ready to make predictions, which is something people love you to do when you're a sportswriter.

But a lot has happened since then. Tim Duncan's health matters more than anything else for San Antonio, and he freaked out his ankle in the closing weeks of the season. He either sat out or played poorly for several weeks, and really has only had one great game since the injury.

In Miami, Shaquille O'Neal has been playing at half-mast due to injury too.

And those factors caused me to start looking around a little. Who's ready to pounce if one of those teams falters?

The answer, my friends, is the defending champion Detroit Pistons.

The first part of their season was all messed up because of the big brawl with Indiana in November. The Pistons finally shook that off by winning the re-match against Indiana on Christmas Day. At that point, the Pistons were a middle-of-the-pack team.

Since Christmas they have won an incredible 72% of their games. Throw out the games Coach Larry Brown missed due to complications from hip surgery, and their record is well over 80% . They earned 11 straight wins to clinch their division. They even beat Miami, although Shaq was out with the afrementioned injury. It seems like they have turned it on.

Detroit has an incredibly perfect defensive front line of Tayshaun Prince (according to one sophisticated analysis, he's the eighth best player in the NBA, which is not bad for someone who was drafted 23rd overall in 2002 and has never even been a consideration for one of the league's 24 all-star slots), Rasheed Wallace, and the defensive player of the year Ben Wallace. That lets the guards get out and piss off other team's guards, which Miami doesn't like much. Here's what former NBA coach Don Casey has to say about that:

Detroit could really benefit from something I saw at the end of Game 2 in the New Jersey-Miami series. The Nets went to a zone press, a little two-two zone press, and it bothered Miami because they don’t have a pure penetrating, playmaking-type guard.

So Detroit is a player in this. And don't even get me started on Phoenix, who has to be considered the top threat to the Spurs.

My new prediction? A battle royale in the Eastern Conference Finals, with whoever wins between Miami and Detroit going on to beat San Antonio in the Finals.