Cleveland: The back-court of Williams and West and Gibson is too small, physically, and does not defend well enough to win the NBA championship.

Boston: Without Garnett and Powe the Celtics are incapable of winning 16 games in the playoffs. They are missing 2 of their top 8 players and will not be able to overcome these losses.

Orlando: Rafer Alston, Anthony Johnson and Tyrone Lue are not good enough, collectively, to get past the Cavaliers or the Lakers.

Atlanta: A lack of high calibre depth will prevent the Hawks from beating any of the other top teams on the road. Mike Bibby is not the type of PG a team can play with if it hopes to be a serious contender for a championship. Btw, Al Horford is a LEGIT Center, in the NBA.

Los Angeles Lakers: Losing Radmanovic means that they are now short one long distance shooter coming off the bench.

Denver: This is now a serious team … which is only missing playoff experience, and emotional discipline beyond Chanucey Billups. 1 player does not win the NBA championship by himself.

Houston: The loss of Dikembe Mutombo may have cost the Rockets their shot at winning the championship this season, in conjunction with Von Wafer’s selfishness.

Dallas: The Mavericks are not physically strong and/or talented enough to go the distance.

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One of the beauties of the game is how it can be viewed differently by different people. :-)

When I say offensive turnover, I mean turnovers. I don’t use the term “defensive turnover,” but that would mean causing turnovers on defense (i.e. takeaways).

Houston’s and Cleveland’s flaws are obviously not major problems, as I alluded to in the post. For any of the teams that struggle to cause turnovers on defense, I’m not sure if it’s that significant of an issue. But not because taking away the ball isn’t important. I think it’s just a by-product of playing solid defense.

Your analysis of Orlando is probably correct. They may struggle to gather offensive rebounds simply through their offensive design. I bet if you asked him, Stan Van Gundy would say that he prefers a few extra three-pointers per game over a few more offensive boards.

I think it’s a similar situation with Dallas. Yeah, in an ideal world they’d get more easy attempts from the free throw line. But the only way to get that would be for Dirk and Terry to drive to the basket a lot more often and stop doing what they do best — shoot jumpers.

So basically, any of the problems that are by design are pretty insignificant. But problems such as the Lakers’ point guards, and the Celtics’ turnovers (the Nuggets’ may indirectly be by design), are certainly not intended.