The East feels like half of a conference. Cleveland is the best team, and we don’t really trust the Cavaliers. The Knicks made the Eastern Conference Finals and changed coaches. That’s it? That’s where our list of anticipated championship contenders ends? Maybe Orlando sneaks into that conversation? This is a conference that badly misses Boston and Indiana and Philadelphia, all of whom are either already injury-related write offs or feel like they soon could be.
The talent disparity between the two conferences is a tad overblown. It’s just that half of the good teams in the East either aren’t healthy or can’t be expected to remain healthy. Therefore, we have an environment with a pretty clear and predictable hierarchy. The Knicks and Cavaliers are probably going to be great. Orlando likely will be too. There will be a big clump in the middle. Then, the bottom will be an all-out tank war.
Of course, if this stuff was easy, Vegas would be a whole lot smaller. So let’s take a look at these Eastern Conference win total lines and try to figure out where each team lands heading into the season. We will be using lines from DraftKings Sportsbook.
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Cleveland Cavaliers: Over 56.5 wins
A critical component of regular-season success is redundancy. While playoff success often boils down to diversity of skillsets, in the regular season, teams need to have as much of a few key skills as possible to weather the inevitable injuries and slumps that come over 82 games. Arguably the three most important traits that fall into this category are shot-creation, shooting and rim-protection. Well, the Cavaliers can survive a Darius Garland injury because they have Donovan Mitchell. If Evan Mobley sprains an ankle, Jarrett Allen is still on the floor for most of the game. They just ranked second in 3-point percentage and fourth in 3-point attempts. Shooting is plentiful here. Oh, and they’re in the East, so hand them a bunch of easy wins against underwhelming competition. If you have postseason doubts, that’s reasonable. But if you don’t think they’ll win 57 games, remember, they won their 57th game on March 23 last season. This isn’t an especially bar for the team we saw last season.
New York Knicks: Over 53.5 wins
Of the top three Eastern Conference teams, I think the Knicks have the easiest path to an under. They’re going to use their starters less than they did last season in an effort to experiment more with their bench. Well, benches tend to be bad. Josh Hart is already dealing with injuries. Mitchell Robinson always does. But there’s just so much low-hanging fruit from last season available to Mike Brown that an over still feels like the responsible choice. For most teams, relying less on starters means losing more minutes. But New York’s starters, who played more minutes than any other unit last season by a country mile, already got outscored from January through April. Better lineup optimization is worth a few wins. The elite offensive rebounding Robinson theoretically brings should be as well, especially since they didn’t really reap the benefits of playing Karl-Anthony Towns at center last season because nobody guarded Hart. Mike Brown teams almost always overperform defensively. He had a Kings team with no notable defenders above average in his 2023 Coach of the Year campaign. Cleveland is the likelier No. 1 seed, but the Knicks shouldn’t have too much trouble getting to the mid-50s as long as they stay reasonably healthy.
Like New York, Orlando has a reasonable path to an under. Jalen Suggs is still dealing with the knee injury that ruined last season for him. They haven’t had an offense finish above the bottom-10 in 13 years. Just remember this: the Magic won 41 games and had the No. 2 defense last season getting only 60 games out of Franz Wagner, 46 out of Paolo Banchero, 35 out of Suggs and none from Desmond Bane, who was obviously on the Grizzlies. That’s 141 games out of their four best players. Even if all three miss 25 games apiece, they’d still be getting 87 more total games out of that quartet than they did a year ago. Adding Tyus Jones gives the offense a badly-needed traditional point guard, but the raw concept of a bunch of giant wings hounding opponents defensively still is still very much in place. If you trust Orlando to have a top-five defense on structure alone, which last year suggested they could, you’re really only hoping for reasonable health and an average offense to get to 51 wins.
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Well, when you pick overs for the top three teams, you have to start picking unders in the middle. That’s what we’re doing. My expectation in the East is a very clear top three followed by a substantial drop to a disappointing middle, so five of our next six picks are going to be unders. Why Atlanta? Persistent injury woes to Kristaps Porziņģis and Jalen Johnson, for one. The lingering thread of Trae Young’s impending free agency and extension negotiations. The offseason additions were beneficial, but there’s still a dangerous lack of players who can both defend reliably and shoot 3s at a consistently high level. This isn’t an aggressive under. There’s a world in which the Hawks are a clear No. 4 in the Eastern Conference. It’s a combination of health hesitance, overall organizational questions and some playing-style questions. There’s a lot of ball-handling and iffy shooting, and a few big defensive question marks to account for.
Detroit is my one mid-conference over, and the team I expect to finish fourth in the East. There’s justifiable fear about roster turnover. Malik Beasley had a historic shooting season. Dennis Schröder was the perfect veteran co-pilot for Cade Cunningham. But they did a reasonable job of replicating their skill sets in Duncan Robinson and Caris LeVert, and more than that, this was just an exceptionally young roster last season that has so much room to grow. It’s largely been forgotten by now, but when Jaden Ivey got hurt, he was averaging almost 18 points per game on almost 41% shooting from deep. Shooting was the only significant question about his game when he was the No. 5 pick in 2022, and he seemingly solved it. He’s a potentially great offensive player that’s been badly overlooked. Ausar Thompson missed camp and the beginning of last season dealing with a blood clot. How much better will he look with a normal summer, especially considering the jump his brother took last season? There is just so much room for internal growth here, and while JB Bickerstaff certainly has his playoff foibles, he’s been a consistently excellent regular-season coach. In two of his last four seasons he topped this win total, and in the other two he led combined improvements of 52 wins.
Look, cards on the table, I’m a Philadelphia optimist. Joel Embiid is in shape! So much of last season’s mess was self-imposed in a desperate and successful tanking effort. The backcourt depth is incredible. I just can’t in good conscience suggest that someone bet their hard-earned money on this team staying healthy. The margin for error, especially in the front court, is paper thin. Adem Bona was a solid backup center as a rookie, but he’s not ready to start if an Embiid injury demands it. They’d better hope Paul George and Kelly Oubre Jr. stay healthy because those are really the only notable forwards on the team. There’s really not enough upside on a win total bet to make it with Philadelphia. You’re better off taking bigger swings here. If you think it’s going to be another disaster, grab the “no” line on a playoff bet at +210. If you’re an optimist, take a home run swing on them to win the East at +1000. It’s never the middle ground for the Sixers. Think in extremes.
At full strength, the Bucks should probably hover roughly around the quality of a 43.5-win team. Giannis Antetokounmpo and a roster that fits reasonably well will do that. The offense will hum when he’s surrounded with shooters, which is seemingly the plan here. The defense probably struggles at full strength given the decline of both Giannis and Myles Turner along with the lack of point-of-attack defenders here, but you can win a bunch of games on offense if you’re not worried about playoff success. The real concern here is the lack of depth. On average, Antetokounmpo has missed 14.5 games per year over the past four. How exactly do the Bucks plan to get by for 15 games without him given the roster that they have? It’s just hard to imagine Cole Anthony, Kevin Porter Jr. and Ryan Rollins leading this team to wins in games like that. Their offense entirely relies on having one of the best players in the sport. Say they go 3-12 in those hypothetical 15 games. You’re then asking the Bucks to play at a 47-win pace when Antetokounmpo is healthy, and that’s just a bit rich for my blood. We covered the importance of redundancy with the Cavaliers. The Bucks are the other end of that spectrum. They have none. Everything hinges on one amazing but fallible player.
The Celtics fortunately have shooting redundancy. They have absolutely no rim-protecting redundancy considering their three best rim-protectors all left. Shot-creation is somewhere in between. Derrick White and Jaylen Brown are both All-Star-level players, but they’ve both only reached that level on loaded Celtics teams. How do they look running the show? Think about where the incentives lie here. The Celtics are $12 million away from ducking the luxury tax. If they do so this year and next, they reset the repeater tax clock completely. Pretty important in this new era, especially since this is a lost season anyway. They have no front court. Despite the noise Jayson Tatum has made about potentially returning midseason … what would really be the point? It’s a lot of risk for very minimal reward, and while the Celtics likely won’t actively tank at least until the end of the year, the idea of getting even a late lottery pick for a team this expensive has to hold quite a bit of appeal. When it’s close, favor the outcome the team would or at least should prefer. It’s in Boston’s best interests to be bad this season.
The Raptors had the NBA’s second-best defense after the All-Star break last season. As a bit of a spoiler to tomorrow’s Western Conference picks, I find Portland’s late-season defensive surge more believable. The Raptors mostly fed on a weak schedule, and they benefitted from extraordinary opponent’s shooting luck (35.5% on wide-open 3s after the break). That isn’t sustainable. The offense has a lot of questions. The shooting is iffy. How does Brandon Ingram fit into the pass-happy style Darko Rajakovic prefers to play? We still haven’t seen Immanuel Quickley as a starter much yet, and when we have, it’s been on an injured team we can’t really judge. This is another “watch the incentive” team. They’re over the luxury tax. Why? It makes sense for this low-ceiling team to make a move to duck it, which won’t help their win total.
Can you guess the fewest games Erik Spoelstra has ever won in a season? The Heat won only 15 games in 2008… but Pat Riley was still the head coach. There has to be a really down year in there somewhere, right? Wrong. He’s finished below .500 three times in 17 years and never won fewer than 37 games. Essentially, the under means you’re betting he’ll either match or exceed the worst season in his entire career. Does that feel especially likely? Not to me. While the offense is certainly a work in progress (especially with Tyler Herro out), the defense and inevitably depth discoveries alone give Miami a floor that’s too high for this under.
Unlike Spoelstra, the Eastern Conference’s other future Hall of Fame coach actually does have a fair few seasons below this number. Five of them, to be exact, including two during this Indiana stint. Boston at least has an identity outside of the players it lost. The Celtics can win games on shooting volume alone. Indiana’s identity was tied so heavily to Tyrese Haliburton, who in turn badly needed a shooting center like Myles Turner, that the Pacers have lost far more than just the players who are gone here. They have to effectively retrofit the players they have into an entirely new sort of team, only to then pivot back into Haliburton-ball in a year. Their margin for injuries is minimal. There’s even an argument to trade some of the older players. TJ McConnell will be 35 when the 2027 playoffs roll around. It probably makes more sense for him to participate in the 2026 postseason on a team that plans to compete in them, and he’s not the only Pacer who fits that description. Indiana, like Boston, has a rare chance to add cheap labor with a top draft pick. If they’re on the borderline, they’ll surely be tempted to take it.
Their defense is going to be abysmal. We’ve also had at least one bottom-five defense win 34 or more games six years in a row. Chicago would be my pick to do so this season. You’re banking quite a bit on their stellar March against weak competition, but that laid a blueprint. The Bulls are going to be a pain to play. They’re the fastest team in the NBA, and they take among the most 3s. That’s going to steal wins against tired opponents in the middle of the season. The Bulls never tank, going so far as to trade for one of their own protected picks back last season just so they could seek the Play-In Tournament in peace. Then there’s just the natural attrition of the season. Say you assume the Hornets, Nets and Wizards are overtly bad. That would, at a minimum, put Chicago in 12th. If a team in that range wants to reach the Play-In, it usually can. Teams above them get hurt. They make trades to get worse. We’ve never had a Play-In Team win fewer than 34 games in an 82-game season. So if you think the Bulls wind up in the Eastern Conference Play-In as they usually do, the over is the safe pick here.
The line here is just so low. Yes, their defense is going to be a disaster. They don’t have a proven NBA center. But Ryan Kalkbrenner was a four-time Big East Defensive Player of the Year, and the defense was surprisingly competent during Moussa Diabaté’s minutes last season. If you think those are even rotation-caliber centers, not even starting-caliber, they can get by. The guard rotation is good, and adding Collin Sexton at least gives them a bit more LaMelo Ball injury insurance. Brandon Miller has more or less lived up to the No. 2 overall pick hype but some injuries and playing in Charlotte has completely dulled enthusiasm for him far too early into his career. They’re going to be bad. There’s just enough here to assume they aren’t tanktastically bad like the teams beneath them.
The pre-All-Star-break Wizards won at roughly a 14-win pace last season. The post-break Wizards played at a 26-win pace. They were reasonably competent down the stretch, especially defensively, where they ranked 19th after the break. There are at least a few veterans lingering here. CJ McCollum is still a reasonably effective offensive player. All of the raw youngsters have another year of seasoning. Again, you can be bad without being this bad. It’s not hard to win 21 games, especially in the East. The Wizards want high draft picks, but as the end of last year proved, they’re not going to stand in the way of their young players if they accidentally string together a few decent months.
I was somewhat tempted to take Brooklyn’s over purely because of Jordi Fernandez and the Eastern Conference, but, as we’ve touched on with so many teams, incentives. The Nets actively traded back for their 2025 and 2026 first-round picks. They paid a premium to do so. That went poorly in 2025, producing a No. 8 pick where no trade would’ve slotted them at No. 10. They basically have to get this tank right because the Rockets control their 2027 pick. So expect the Nets to leave no tanking stone unturned. Picking five ball-dominant rookies in the first round was a nice start.
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