It’s up to my discretion how the rankings shake out each week.On the brink of contention – A piece away from believing they can win the titleĪs always, I am sure we will all agree on the placement of all 30 teams, especially your favorite team.Playoff hopeful – Too good to be firmly considered a Play-In Tournament team, but not good enough to really make noise in the postseason.Play-In Tournament gives them life – Normally, this team would be headed toward Tank-a-palooza, but the Play-In Tournament is keeping them alive.Tired of rebuilding franchise – They’re not trying to keep rebuilding but they’re just not good enough to avoid it.Rebuilding franchise – Self-explanatory.
We’re dividing these teams into tiers, which any of the teams can move in and out of all season long. Just a reminder, the Power Rankings this season don’t just rank the 30 teams. Do you buy a certain team’s offensive production as something we can believe in long-term? Do you feel a poorly performing defense is doomed for the entire 82 games? Will a lack of late-game execution ruin a team’s playoff possibilities from now through April? I thought it would be fun to look at an early-season trend for each team and rule on whether or not we should be buying this as a glimpse into the future. While we’re stuck in that early-season limbo period for having an acceptable amount of data to dissect, it’s fair to start wondering what you buy and don’t buy through the first three weeks of the action. Double that is typically the standard for when you can start projecting a lot of this stuff as things we know, unless a major trade or injury or vaccine mandate ends up changing the landscape of the league.
But a sample size around 10 games isn’t usually enough.
We can have biases to help shape what we want to see happen from the early ongoings. We are not quite at the point in the season in which we can feel truly comfortable in guessing how some of the early evidence of the 2021-22 campaign will play out.