“T.J. Ford is a lock to lead the league in assists once he gets his minutes in Indiana!”

“Mike Dunleavy’s first good season totally wasn’t a fluke!”

Hell, the Pacers don’t even have enough talent to take that joke into the fourth round of a made up draft of a made up fantasy league.  Brandon Rush is going to be a good rotation player.  Some people think Roy Hibbert is hot stuff, but I haven’t seen enough him (didn’t get much run in the games I saw,) to have an opinion.  Almost everyone else on the team hurts them either by sucking or by being overpaid.

Chicago: NBA stars consistently take the ball into the paint and finish or they shoot the lights out.  There are the rare exceptions, but for the most part, if a guy can’t do one of those two things, he’s not going to be a star.  Can you see Tyrus Thomas developing a highly effective post game?  Or a good-enough handle to penetrate from the perimeter?  Can you see him becoming a great shooter?  Neither can I.  He’s not going to be a star, no matter how young he is or how high he jumps.  His upside is as a third option on a good team.  Fortunately for the Bulls, Derrick Rose is a star, and Luol Deng is a fairly good second option, and John Salmons is a high-quality third option.

I didn’t like the Bulls last year; I like them this year.  Last year they had only three players who could regularly create their own scoring opportunities: Rose, Ben Gordon, and Salmons.  And of those three, only Rose even tried to pass the ball.  Ben Gordon is a good player, sort of, kind of, but he was a bad fit.  Spreading his 16 shots around the roster will help Deng get his mojo back and might help Thomas find his bearings.

Milwaukee: Signing Michael Redd in 2005 was sentimental.  They should have let Cleveland sign him to play with LeBron.  Instead, they took a course that made it virtually impossible to build a contender during the length of his contract.  I wrote “virtually impossible” because a miracle (hitting the lotto jackpot) gave them a shot to making it work and they screwed that up, too.  Almost every move they’ve made since signing Redd has been awful.  Not bad, awful.

Oh yes, but they did draft that Brandon Jennings character.  I saw him tonight for the first time, facing Dallas.  My take?  He was totally out of control half the time and clearly barely knows what he’s doing out there; and he was still one of the best players on the floor.  I wouldn’t bet against him.

Unfortunately, Jennings was an obvious choice in the 10^th spot for a team with garbage pointguards.  So it’s not like choosing Jennings was a coup, or an indication that the Bucks are going to do smart things, going forward.  However, I did like Ilyasova, tonight.  And I love signing young players to small multi-year contracts ($7M over 3 years.)  Who knows?  History says it’s a fluke smart move.  We’ll see.

Cleveland: They will win the Central Division and in the playoffs they will beat anyone but Boston or Orlando in 5 games or less.  Is this news to anyone?  Maybe it is.  It was pretty absurd hearing all of the commentary on problems in Cleveland in the first week of the season.  I liked and still like the Shaq move.  He makes around 60% of his shots.  Isn’t that a nice addition to a team that has the best scorer in the game and no one else who can be counted on, game in and game out, to put points on the board?  What Shaq can’t do is practically irrelevant; nearing his 38^th birthday, he’s still one of the most dominant post scorer’s in the game.  Fouls are the one concern with Shaq, but mostly it’s just a question of whether he’ll be a force for 30 minutes a game, or only 20 minutes a game.

Detroit: I don’t think Joe Dumars is somehow less smart than he used to be; I think he’s having a midlife crisis.  I didn’t immediately hate the Billups/Iverson trade like so many others did; I thought it was weird and risky, but not insane.  It didn’t pan out, but he got a ton of salary cap space to reinvent the Pistons.  And he did, spending almost 30% of Detroit’s cap space on two players (Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva) who don’t rebound, defend much, or pass.  That they can’t/won’t pass the ball is particularly problematic, since Rodney Stuckey doesn’t do it either, and Richard Hamilton’s effectiveness is almost entirely dependent on ball movement.  I see this team looking a lot like Denver did with  Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, and Linas Kleiza—but less talented.  And when it didn’t pan out for Denver, they still had Anthony to build around.  When this Detroit squad doesn’t work, what are they going to do?