Yeah and last year ESPN predicted Charlotte to win 34 and they actually ended up winning 48. They predicted New Orleans to win 46 and they actually won 30.
I'll let you in on the secret for predictions. You take how many games a team won last year and for most almost every team, add or subtract less than or equal to 5 wins. Seriously, they did this for 11 of the 15 teams. The only exceptions besides us were Milwaukee where they added 6 wins instead of 5, Miami where they subtracted 12 wins (reasonable given the loss of DWade and likely Bosh), and Philly where they felt obligated to predict 20 wins when they only won 10 last year because why add insult to injury.
Read between the lines, with the exception of Philly, where the difference between 10 and 20 wins is almost trivial, ESPN predicted the Knicks to have the biggest improvement from last year by improving by 8 wins. From a prediction standpoint, that's pretty aggressive. Long story short, they marked us as literally the only bad team from last year who they are predicting to be in playoff contention this year in the East, which I think is fair.