King Kaufman's Sports Daily

NBA preview: Who can beat the Spurs? The Pacers, if they can avoid season-destroying brawls.

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Nov. 1, 2005 | OK, enough about the new dress code. It's opening night in the NBA, and that means the wait is over for the return of the best show on television.

Not the NBA preseason -- or, as the league quaintly calls it, "regular season" -- which is an OK TV show, not nearly as good as the playoffs but better than, say, "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart." What I mean is TNT's studio show, "Inside the NBA," during and after the network's Thursday night double-headers.

But yes, it's also time for the NBA to begin its five-month project of deciding which middle-of-the-pack teams will miss the playoffs and which will lose in the first round. The whole thing gets going at 7 p.m. EST with two such teams, the Milwaukee Bucks visiting the Philadelphia 76ers.

TNT has an opening-night double-header of the Denver Nuggets at the champion San Antonio Spurs followed by the Dallas Mavericks at the Phoenix Suns. The other game Tuesday night is the Sacramento Kings visiting the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets in their temporary home.

Everybody else debuts Wednesday night, and all of Tuesday night's teams except the Suns and Spurs play again, which conjures the question: If you're going to have a busy night like that, why not just have all 30 teams play on a big-splash opening night?

Of course, that would mean taking a lesson from the NHL, which one does at one's peril.

Last year the NBA got the stage to itself as the NHL sat the year out. The result of the unprecedented lack of competition: An NBA Finals that got public-access cable ratings. NBA commissioner David Stern acted decisively in response, mandating that players dress in "business casual" attire when in public on league business.

On the court the San Antonio Spurs -- you might have missed it, but they beat the Detroit Pistons for the championship last year -- are the odds-on favorite to repeat, which would give them three of the last four titles and four of the last seven.

But one thing that seems to be changing is that the Western Conference finals are no longer the de facto NBA Finals. The Eastern Conference, a poor stepchild of the West in the years since Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls -- the second of his three retirements, if you're keeping score that way -- has been improving.

There are four solid, widely recognized contenders for the conference championship this year, the Pistons, Indiana Pacers, Miami Heat and New Jersey Nets. That's an upgrade from the traditional one or two contenders of recent times, and that's not counting dark-horse candidates like the Cleveland Cavaliers and, if you believe in the magic of Larry Brown, the New York Knicks.

And the Eastern Conference is home to the toughest division in the league, the Central. It's not on par with the West yet, but it's gaining.

Here's a team-by-team look at the NBA, in order of predicted finish, which is to say, in random order.

Next page: The Western Conference: San Antonio again?