Regular Season Outlook

Our team is young, for the most part. But when you have a team like ours - with young stars in Dwight Howard and Jameer Nelson, along with some good veterans like myself, Hedo Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis and a lot of good shooters like J.J. Redick, it gives us a lot of options when we're on the floor. We can play a lot of different combinations. And that bodes well for us during the course of the year.

I think a lot of people are going to be surprised with the way we play. We're very open, we're very unselfish and we like to run the ball. And I think a lot of people won't be expecting that out of us because they think that just because we're a team form the East, they expect us to walk everytime.

Obviously, everyone's goal is to make it to the NBA Finals. And I think we have the potential to get there.

But our success will be determined, to a great extent, on how far Dwight and Rashard can take us. But I think more than that, there are a lot of teams in the East who are good enough to win an NBA title. There's no longer that saying that you can walk through the Eastern Conference to get to the NBA Finals.

The Eastern Conference is very competitive now. Especially when there you have teams like Gilbert Arenas and the Washington Wizards, the Boston Celtics and the Big Three. Even though Cleveland was swept in the finals, it is still a very formidable team. There's always Detroit. And you simply can't count out the Miami Heat. And I don't think you can even count out the New York Knicks now that they have added Zach Randolph to complement Eddy Curry. Charlotte now has good thing going since they've added Jason Richardson.

So the East is starting to look a lot like the West - it's very competitive. We are a pretty good team at home. So if we can't play well on the road, we'll be successful.

- Adonal