Why the Nets should be considered a Playoff Contender, based on comparison with last season.

This post is prompted by the pessimism which supports NI's view of how Nets fans view things differently from Knicks fans (who are overly optimistic without any evidence from the past 10 years).

Nets of course won 12 games last year, but they also had major injury problems, especially early in the season.  They also had the worst coaching in the NBA for most of the season.

Now if the Nets instead had an average number of injuries (even the 1st game and thus the 1st losing streak can be attributed to an injury to Hayes) and if they instead had the best coach for them (Avery Johnson), I think it would be fair to give the Nets an extra 10 victories for last season.

I will use 12+10 = 22 victories as the base from last year's lineup (assuming average injuries and Avery as coach).

Now let's see how the players from this season compare with last year, to see if they can add to the 22 wins.

The 14 core players from last year were:

Lopez, Harris, TWill, Yi, CLee, CDR, Simmons, Hassell, Hayes, Dooling, Battie, Najera, Alston and Boone.

(You get the picture already, when looking at that sad core of a team.)

This year's core of 13 players (if SMay is healthy) should be:

Lopez, Harris, TWill, Outlaw, Murphy, Morrow, Favors, Hump, DJames, Petro, Farmar, Ross and May.

In every position, essentially player for player, the Nets should be better this year.

1. Lopez will have better coaching, a year of experience and a far better team so he isn't  always double teamed.

2. Harris should have the biggest improvement from last year as he basically took the year off due to lack of coaching, lack of team support and knowing that Management didn't mind if Nets were bad enough to get the #1 draft pick.

3. TWill will no longer be a rookie and will be given goals by Avery.  If TWill shows promise, he should become Avery's #1 personal student, just as Harris once was.  Still, how TWill does at SG is perhaps the biggest uncertainty.

4. Murphy will blow away Yi's performance from last year, including on defense (Murphy's weakness).  If Murphy was responsible for 13.7 wins last season, for Indiana (Dwyer article), imagine what he would do for the Nets! 

5-7. Next compare Boone, Najera and Simmons with Favors, Hump (overlap) and May at PF.  Overall, it is such a blowout at PF. 

I would conservatively add 14 victories from upgrades at the PF position.

8-9. Outlaw + DJames blow away Hayes + Hassell from last season.  At least 4 more victories.  We are up to 40 wins already.

10. Farmar should beat out Alston and equal Dooling at the backup PG. 

11-12  SG is the tricky position.  CLee was pretty bad on offense for more that 1/2 of last year, so I would give the edge to Morrow+Ross.  TWill will compete for the balance of minutes and may have an advantage of Dooling from last season. 

Overall, I would give the several extra wins at the Guard position, due mostly to Harris' expected improvement now that he has a real team to surround himself and motivation to win.  We are up to about 43 wins conservatively.

13. Petro is clearly better than Battie and Murphy can also play backup Center (besides Favors).  Nets should have a presence at Center for most of 48 minutes/game this year.  They lost many games last year where there was little production at Center in the 2nd half, especially the last 6 minutes. 

Nets should have another 4 wins due to improvement at the Center position, for a total of 47 victories.

Of course injuries could reduce that total, but pleasant surprises (DJames, TWill) could counter.

I don't think it would be easy to find an example where one team pretty much improved from positions 1-13 as the Nets have compared with last season.  You certainly don't end up with less than 37 wins with that kind of improvement.