Dallas has Luka and kyrie and that’s basically it. Their defense is gonna be horrendous and their front court is abysmal. And Luka is a great player but he’s definitely gotten a bit over rated. He’s pretty much always considered top 4 in the league and people act like he’s better than prime harden as a pg.That can’t be the case if you can’t even get your team into the play ins, any top 4 player should be able to do that on any roster, and prime harden was dragging some terrible rockets teams to high seeds every year. Kyrie is not a consistent playoff scorer and he doesn’t provide much else. I just don’t see how they could beat the wolves who have probably still the most impactful defensive player in the league, are going to have KAT back, have ant looking like a budding superstar, and have a ton of really solid role players everywhere else. The only way I see them doing well is if Luka makes the leap to like 2019 harden level where he had arguably the best offensive season this millennium with “worst contract in the league” Chris Paul who could barely move as his second option and was basically the only guy who could reliably create a shot or even dribble the ball on the team and he still dragged them to 50+ wins and took two games off the kd warriors while averaging 35 and clearly outplaying Steph. And I just don’t think he’s that level of player yet. Like prime harden teams pretty much never even lost in the first round in a super stacked west and he had some pretty terrible supporting casts, you’re not that level of player if you can’t even get your team into the play ins.

Even healthy Zion had the Pelicans as the first seed for a bit then without him they missed the play ins entirely.