It's crystal ball time over at espn.com, and the hoops experts are evidently competing with one another for the most peculiar preseason prediction. Congenital Wizards doubter (though otherwise very smart guy) John Hollinger is guessing that Agent Zero and the gang will go 33-49, with the 5th best record (yes, that's last) in the weak Southeast Division and the 13th best in the Eastern Conference. (Subscription required, I'm afraid.) Hollinger comes to his cataclysmic conclusion by making incontrovertibly true observations (the Wizards play atrocious defense) and downright odd ones--e.g., suggesting Caron Butler is going to get worse because he just had "a career year at 27." First off, Butler has improved every year for the last three years, so this wasn't some kind of strange outlier. (Indeed, the "career year" was only marginally better than his previous year--18.41 PER to 17.11 PER, using Hollinger's own vaunted stat for overall performance.) As for the fact that his best year so far came at 27(!), I'm not even sure whether Hollinger thinks that's too old or too young; it seems to me a pretty typical place to have a (to date) career year. Yes, if Arenas is significantly hampered by his offseason knee surgery or the team suffers an unanticipated rash of injuries, it could be an ugly year. But otherwise, there is absolutely no way this prediction comes to pass. Not to be outdone, Marc Stein calls the Celtics the 2nd best team in basketball in his preseason power rankings--ahead of Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and any number of other teams who would annihilate them in a 7-game series. Yes, the Garnett-Pierce-Allen triumverate (shall we just call them "GPA"?) is going to be great fun to watch. But they've never played together before; they have a lousy coach; the "P" and "A" legs of the stool are both coming off injury-ridden seasons; and they have quite possibly the worst supporting cast in NBA history. I know everyone's talking Finals for Boston, but a round or two in the playoffs seems like a more plausible goal for the new amigos--and, even if they should somehow find themselves at representing the Leastern Conference in June, they will be summarily crushed by whoever survives the West. --Christopher Orr