It's almost Labor Day, which means we can actually see the next NBA season on the horizon.  I don't know about you, but this summer has felt longer than any other I've blogged through (to be fair, there's only one other choice here). 

Nevertheless, we're close to the season, and there are many readers here that weren't around last year.  There are a few running things we like to do here before the start of the season that you all might not know:

1.  Competition Discussions

While we're Wizards fans, we're also NBA fans, and that means looking at how the rest of the league stacks up.  Some have already started making predictions, so it's probably time to get started on our quick look at other teams. 

Every couple days or so from now until the start of the season, I'll post a "competition discussion" thread for each of the other 29 teams in the league.  I'll recap the teams' offseason moves and make a quick predicition, and you all follow suit in the comments.  A year later, we can look at how smart or silly we were and laugh at ourselves. 

More importantly, every time there's a game thread against that team, I'll link our competition discussion so that we even know how we're doing on our predictions during the season.  How's that for instant gratification?

We didn't get through everyone last year because we started too late, so this project will probably begin very soon (i.e. later today).

Oh, and as far as predicting the Wizards?  Every year, CelticsBlog rounds up a bunch of bloggers to write a season preview for their respective teams.  I just got the e-mail yesterday, so the project will happen again.  I usually like to incorporate as many people's thoughts as possible, so I'll probably post an open thread for ideas.  Here's what our preview looked like last year.

2.  Community projections

A similar idea to the above concept, but instead of predicting other teams, we'll have threads where we predict the statistics of our players.  We'll go one player at a time, starting with the bench guys and moving up to the stars.  You can predict as many stats as you want, so if you'd like to predict what you think Oleksiy Pecherov's assist rate will be next season, be my guest.

3.  Top 10 themes countdown

This is something new.  Remember how I asked you guys to list what you felt were the 10 most important factors that will determine the success of the 2008/09 season?  I'm going to consult that list and come up with a master list of 10 things that will determine the Wizards' success.  We'll count those themes down in 10 threads, starting with number 10 and going down to number one.  That'll make things easier for us when we think about writing our season preview.

I'm sure there's more stuff we're doing, but I have to run to class.  If there's something I missed, let me know.