Oct 15, 2015; Cleveland, OH, USA; Indiana Pacers guard Joseph Young (1) runs the offense in the third quarter against the Cleveland Cavaliers at Quicken Loans Arena. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

The Indiana Pacers’ season begins tonight when they take on the Toronto Raptors (clever girl) but it isn’t too late to predict how this entire season will play out.

While the pundits are down on the Pacers that hasn’t fully dampened the 8 Points, 9 Seconds staff’s optimism.

In what won’t be amazingly off-base by season’s end we try to pick who will lead the Pacers statistically and where Indiana will finish in the NBA hierarchy.

To start we made our picks for who would lead the team in various categories. Everyone agreed Paul George will lead the team in points (not that Monta Ellis won’t try) but after that we couldn’t find a consensus on the team’s leaders.

While Ian Mahinmi was the easy pick for the team’s leader in field goal percentage (led the team with 55.2% last season), some of us are concerned starters minutes and stiffer competition could eat in to that number.

Judging by our picks it looks like the belief is George Hill will remain as the team’s primary ball handler and if preseason was any indicator then that will be the case.

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Will the Indiana Pacers make the playoffs? The entire staff except for Tim Donahue thanks so. Most of our youthful optimism (or his old man cynicism) may be blinding us the staff’s pick for total wins averaged out 43.08 wins for the Pacers this season. To varying degrees we see that as good enough to be in the hunt for the playoff spot by only Donahue sees the Pacers missing out. Only one of us (Justin Ochoa) picked Indiana to win the division.

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Finally we picked some of the less tangible categories including most and least valuable player. Paul George was the unanimous pick for MVP while Solomon Hill led the way in the LVP voting. The variety of picks for the Pacers biggest statistical strength this season tells you one thing: We have no idea exactly what this team will look like.

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And that does it. Who do you think will be leading the Pacers in statistics and who will be the biggest surprises and disappointments? Let us know in the comments below.