Scanlon: NBA title is up for grabs, and Wembanyama too

The NBA's 77th season starts Tuesday night. It will be the 34th season for the Orlando Magic, the 35th for the Miami Heat, the 20th for LeBron James and only the third season using the play-in format, in which everyone goes to the playoffs except those who choose to play the lottery instead.

Some season-opening observations:

I see 12 teams with a chance to win the championship if everything goes right, the way it did for Golden State last season.

Normally there are no more than five or six teams with a realistic chance to win, but there isn't a dominant team, and the defending champion Warriors do not have the look of a repeat champion at this point.

Phoenix came closest to dominance last season. The Suns won 64 games during the regular season before losing by 33 points at home in the final game of their second-round playoff loss to Dallas.

Everything had to go right for the Warriors to get their fourth championship in eight years. Their aging core players had to get healthy at the right time. Dallas had to knock off Phoenix for them. Several other contenders (Memphis, Milwaukee, the L.A. Clippers, Denver) were eliminated by injuries.

And this season will start unpleasantly, just two weeks after hot-head forward Draymond Green slugged teammate Jordan Poole during a practice session, an incident that was caught on video (of course). Green got some kind of fine, issued some kind of apology, and, well, Warriors will be Warriors.

Part of what makes team evaluations so difficult is that no fewer than five veteran players are returning to their respective teams after missing the

entire 2021-22 season.

Kawhi Leonard returns to the Clippers and Jamal Murray to the Denver Nuggets, both after ACL tears. Enigmatic forward Ben Simmons returns to the Philadelphia 76ers after a season lost to . . . nobody seems to know.

Zion Williamson returns to the New Orleans Pelicans after missing the entire season with a foot injury. And Jonathan Isaac will return to the Magic - at some point - after missing two entire seasons recovering from knee and leg injuries.

Simmons and Williamson are former first-overall draft picks.

It was not a big off-season of player movement, by NBA standards.

The biggest names changing teams were center Rudy Gobert, traded from Utah to Minnesota; forward Donovan Mitchell, traded from Utah to Cleveland; guard Malcolm Brogdon, traded from Indiana to Boston; and guard John Wall, who signed with the Clippers.

The trades of Gobert, a three-time Defensive Player of the Year, Mitchell and Bojan Bogdanovic for a bunch of draft picks completed the dismemberment of the Jazz, who had the best record in the league in 2020-21, and removed the Jazz from the list of championship hopefuls.

Also missing from that list are the Los Angeles Lakers, who did little to upgrade their roster after going 12-29 in the second half of the season and failing to make the playoffs, or even the play-in.

The Lakers are pinning their hopes on the recovery of Anthony Davis, who has missed more than half of each of the last two seasons with injuries. Davis is reportedly ready to play in Tuesday night's opener.

The Lakers' Darvin Ham is among four new head coaches including Steve Clifford, who is in his second stint as coach of the Charlotte Hornets. The other new guys are Mike Brown in Sacramento and Will Hardy in Utah.

If any of them get their teams into the playoffs, they should get Coach of the Year votes.

Only four coaches — Gregg Popovich in San Antonio, Erik Spoelstra in Miami, Golden State's Steve Kerr and Denver's Michael Malone -- have coached their current teams more than four years.

Impact rookies? The Rookie of the Year Award is Paolo Banchero's to lose, according to the preseason buzz.

Drafted first overall by the Magic, the 6-foot-10 Banchero is expected to step into the starting lineup immediately and have a major impact on a franchise that has made the playoffs only twice in the last 10 years.

Chet Holmgren, the 7-1 center drafted second overall by Oklahoma City, will  miss the entire season after having his right foot surgically repaired.

Victor Wembanyama is a name you will hear increasingly as the season goes on. He is an 18-year-old from Paris (the one in France) who stands 7-2 and is already penciled in as the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft. The question is: by whom?

Let the tanking begin. The season too.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: NBA preview: NBA title is up for grabs, and Wembanyama too