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The predictions, projections and prognostications keep coming...

By Net Income Oct 17, 2015, 1:52pm EDT

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The past couple of weeks, our pages have been filled with predictions, projections and prognostications as the Nets and other NBA teams gathered for training camp and pundits have put together their lists of successes and failures for a season still 12 days away.

For the most part, they've been negative ... and for the most part, they've been ESPN which isn't singling out the Nets. It just has various entities -- ESPN, ESPN New York, ESPN the Magazine and Grantland-- each taking a whack at who will finish where, who has the best management, who has the best future, etc..

The latest is Grantland's season preview by Danny Chau, who predicts "it's going to be a long season," but offers caveats, most built around Brook Lopez's possibilities. First, he gives us the positive...

The Nets do have one key that could potentially circumvent the limbo they’ve built for themselves. His name is Brook Lopez, and — wait, stop laughing. Yes, he’s been thrust into this beacon-of-hope position for the bulk of his seven years in the league. Yes, it’s probably foolish to expect a major breakthrough heading into his eighth season, but there is still latent potential in that massive frame. He is the only player on the team with enough indisputable skill to convince an impending free agent to see the forest for the decaying trees. He might be the only thing keeping this Nets season from being hopeless. If only his talent didn’t go so aggressively against the tide.

After raising the seven-foot straw man, he cuts him down to size.

He is a plodding, outmoded giant largely being put out of business by even rarer anomalies like Anthony Davis, Serge Ibaka, and Karl-Anthony Towns.

Then returns to working with the straw man's possibilities...

[T]here’s a place for Lopez. There will always be outliers in the league as long as there’s enough talent to push against trends. And while he is a dead ringer for the Mesozoic centers of the past, in the last year, he’s subtly altered his offensive game — more efficient, more diverse — to better suit the times.

Putting the big man aside, Chau sees little to hope for Brooklyn, echoing David Thorpe on the Nets 1,2 and 3 positions being awful, predicting a "nightly slaughter" on defense. He, like so many, laments that Mikhail Prokhorov's dream didn't work out better than three trips of the playoffs, just one to the second round. (Memo to Danny: they had finished out of the playoffs for five straight years before the move.)

Then again Chau sees the team's positive outlook, as exemplified by Prokhorov's Martial Arts lesson. He likes the optimism from players and owners alike.

If Prokhorov can still be excited about the Nets after they’ve cost him hundreds of millions, the team can get excited about each other and move past all the talk of this being a lost season. If the Nets could go 0-for-82 and Jay Z can still look at you like shit’s gravy, why can’t the team adopt a similar Panglossian mind-set? The scale of expectations has changed dramatically, but Prokhorov (and his money) still provides what he did before: optimism.

Okay then.

Meanwhile, Mike Mazzeo, who deals with the team every day, probably will have ESPN's last word on the team until the first of Marc Stein's Power Rankings come out. That should be fun.