If there's one thing we've heard over and over again this month, it's that preseason games don't matter. Whether a team plays well or not, we've been told, is largely irrelevant to how they'll fare in the regular season.But it turns out the preseason can be useful after all. And based on the results, I can give you four potential breakout teams this season: Orlando, Atlanta, Indiana and Memphis.The research comes courtesy of Roland Beech of 82games.com. His 2006 study showed that in some cases, preseason results can be quite telling.In particular, it seems to matter for teams who win at least three-quarters of their preseason games. Beech studied five NBA seasons and found 20 such teams; all but two had winning records in the regular season, and the average won 48 games. Throw in last season's Raptors and Warriors and it's 20 for 22. Moreover, one of those two teams with losing records had a real good excuse -- the injury-ravaged 2004-05 Rockets, who went 34-48 while sporting a D-League roster for half the season.That preseason trend is a good omen for Atlanta, Orlando and Indiana this season. Atlanta was the league's preseason "champion" at 7-1, while Orlando was 6-1 with a whopping +15.6 victory margin and Indiana went a surprising 6-2. I've been on the bandwagons of Orlando and Atlanta for some time, so this only furthers my hopes for those teams. But Indiana? Like everyone else, I think the Pacers' roster is pure hamburger. But if history tells us anything, we should be paying much closer attention to the Pacers this season -- who knows, maybe they can squeeze out 42 wins or so and surprise us all. Based on these results, I'll be watching them much more closely in the opening weeks.As an aside, one other team looks promising in Beech's study -- Memphis. He found that teams who won fewer than 30 games the year before but had a winning preseason record improved by an average of 19 games the following season; adding in last year's results drops the improvement to 17 games, but it's still eye-opening. The Grizzlies had a winning preseason after winning 23 games last season. Were they to improve by the average of 17 games, they'd go 40-42 and make a strong run at a playoff spot in a Western Conference that isn't nearly as deep as it used to be.Finally, there's one other item to discuss -- what about the teams that lose a lot in preseason? For some reason, the trend isn't as strong with these teams … but it's still there. 12 of the 18 teams that lost three-quarters or more of their preseason games had losing records in the regular season, with the average win total (34) being dragged down by a couple of you've-gotta-see-this-bad seasons. Still, this is hardly a good omen for the past two Eastern Conference champions. Cleveland went 1-6 in preseason, while the Heat went winless at 0-7 (punchline: they still had a better record than the Dolphins). Fans of those teams can take solace in one fact: Beech found the correlation between preseason win-loss record and regular-season win-loss record was far greater for teams that had losing records the year before. In other words, for some reason preseason games are a lot more indicative for the Grizzlies than they are for the Spurs.This lets Cleveland off the hook in particular -- Beech found virtually no correlation between preseason and regular-season record for teams that had won 50 or more games the season before. And remember, Cleveland went 1-6 in last year's preseason too. But Miami should be nervous. Yes, Dwyane Wade, and yes, getting minutes sponge extraordinaire Ricky Davis will help ease the depth concerns, but the Heat are old and injury-riddled and weren't that good a season ago. Suffering several one-sided losses in the preseason is an indication that they may not be any better this time around.