Loughery

What a way to start the season, with the Heat receiving its championship rings in front of a Bulls team that gave it a run in last year’s playoffs. With the additions of P.J. Brown, Ben Wallace, the two rookies who are very athletic, Tyrus Thomas and Thabo Sefolosha, and returning players like Kirk Hinrich, Ben Gordon and Chris Duhon, I think Chicago is the most improved team in the NBA. It doesn’t hurt either that they are well coached by Scott Skiles.

Miami is the champion and they have the best center in the league, Shaquille O’Neal, and the best four quarter player in the league, Dwyane Wade. There has been some talk of him having tired legs due to his intense schedule over the past year, but I don’t think it will be a factor. He is a young player and one thing with Wade, he loves to play. I think such a heavy workload hurts the players who don’t truly love the game, who see it as a bit of a business, but Wade isn’t that way. He is a dominant player who is the closest thing to Michael Jordan we have in the NBA.

Tired legs or not, Dwyane Wade could take over this game on opening night. Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images

I am looking for Miami to start off this season a little slow, then build up during the year to the Finals. They have only one goal and that is a championship. They’ll miss Jason Williams a bit due to the injury, but they can overcome him being out. What Jason does is he wins x-amount of games, maybe 10-12 games a year where he is really a factor.

The one thing that Miami has going for them with Shaq and Alonzo Mourning is that they don’t have to guard anybody in this game. The one thing with Shaq is how he is going to play in April. He is still a dominant player. As good as Wade was in The Finals and throughout the playoffs, Shaq has to be guarded. There are only a few centers in the NBA that you have to guard, and Shaq and Mourning happen to be two of them that can create a double-team. That was a factor in the playoffs last year. They were able to zone up. I look for Miami to play an awful lot of zone in this game. When you have a frontline of Wallace, Brown and Luol Deng, the weakness is the outside shooting, which helps the Heat.

Make sure to pay attention to Ben Wallace in this game. When you watch him play, he only plays one way, and that is full effort. In the preseason, he was more involved in the offense and handled the ball more. He wasn’t scoring big, but that will help him. I think he would really like to come out and show the world that Detroit made a major mistake by not giving him that extra year.

Possibly the biggest x-factor, outside of Wade’s play, is that when you have a ring ceremony with so much emotion and fanfare before a game, there is the chance for teams to lose focus a bit. This really is a perfect time to be playing Miami for Chicago. For players like Payton and Walker and Shaq, who said he would bring a championship to Miami when he arrived, this will be an emotional time which they deserve, but they can be off their game a little bit.

For Chicago, Ben Gordon is the one to watch. He didn’t shoot well in the preseason and it looked like he was trying to change his game and take the ball to the hoop more. They want him to be more aggressive going to the basket and getting to the foul line which he didn’t do a lot of last year, but he has just looked a bit off so far early on.

I think this will be a very close game, a game Chicago will be in all the way. Wade could take over the game, but I think Chicago will win.

-- Kevin Loughery appears courtesy of the National Basketball Coaches Association