No One Can Win The Title
Every team has damning historical trends against them, but someone has to win, here's every team's best argument
In so many words, the process of analysis is the act of filtering trends of what you can measure historically and applying that to things happening in the present in order to predict what will happen in the future. Recently, I wrote a piece explaining why the Nuggets are being substantially overrated in popular discourse and I think this series against the Timberwolves has shown that I was fully correct and that they are not standing head and shoulders over the other teams. I’m not going to do a victory lap for picking The Field because that would be deeply embarrassing, and instead, I’ll take a step back and do a brief overview of every team still alive. I won’t go into the same level of depth as I did for the Nuggets, otherwise, this would become a short novel, but I’m going to quickly go through the historical trends that say each team cannot win. But since someone has to win in the end, I’ll also talk about why this might be the year a team bucks each trend. For our purposes, all trends are based on the 3-point era (1980- ), and if a stat requires raw counting (such as 40/20) I have simply excluded all the shortened seasons to keep the data set clean.
Starting from the worst-performing regular season teams and going up, let’s talk about the Indiana Pacers. Quite frankly, they would probably have been eliminated by now had the Bucks been healthy. Additionally, even if they were good, the league and officials do not appear inclined to let a team from Indiana defeat the all-important New York Knicks. However, there are also a number of basketball reasons why this team cannot win the title. First and foremost, they were a 6-seed. While they did manage to have the 10th-best Net Rating, the seeding enough is borderline prohibitive. 1 of our 44 title teams in this sample accomplished this feat. Additionally, they lack an MVP (5/44 teams have won without one) and would be the worst-ranked defense to ever win a title. This defensive stat feels more attenuated, but it’s worth noting the only other team to even be outside the top 15 defensively the year they won was the 01 Lakers. Those Lakers were part of a three-peat and had the top-ranked defense in 2000 and the 7th ranked defense in 2002. There was ample reason to believe they could play defense and part of the equation was likely that Kobe Bryant missed 14 games and Derek Fisher missed almost the entire season. Compare this with the Pacers who have been terrible defensively all year and there is no real reason to believe this is an anomaly, their defense would be the worst by a county mile. Finally, they did not meet Phil Jackson’s famous 40/20 test (all contenders win 40 games before they lose 20). Only 3 of 40 teams have won the title without accomplishing this task. 4 of the remaining 8 teams this year have done so.
I don’t really believe these deficiencies are overcomable for this group, but in the interest of good faith, I will steelman their argument as best I can. While they don’t have an MVP, the only MVP still around is Nikola Jokić and he looks unlikely to make it another round. If this happens, the title will almost certainly be won by a team without an MVP this year, rendering this anomaly mostly moot. Pivoting to secondary awards, if Haliburton makes an All-NBA team this season, that will give the Pacers 2 All-NBA players within the last 3 years, something all but 5/44 teams have had. Adding to the value here, the only team to win without a top-3 seed was the 95 Rockets, who added an All-NBA player mid-season, similar to these Pacers. Pascal Siakam also adds a level of experience in having been a key player on a championship team; something that some of the other teams still lack. Siakam may also excuse them from the 40/20 rule. Those Rockets were one of the teams that failed it and potentially if adding Siakam is enough to overcome the seeding deficiency, it is enough to overcome the less oppressive 40/20 deficiency. Finally, perhaps the time is right for a team to win the title with terrible defense. In the last 8 years, 4 of our champions have had a 10th-ranked or lower defense, compared to 3 in the 36 years prior. This could signal a pivot in what impacts winning in the playoffs and perhaps the Pacers are the team that can rip the lid off and open the floodgates for the future. My personal take is they are going to lose to the Knicks in 6 games, less if the league continues to put their whole fist on the scale.
The Cleveland Cavaliers suffer from many of the same deficiencies as the Pacers. They also lack an MVP, are not a top-3 seed, and also did not reach 40/20 this year. Additionally, they were outside the top 10 in net rating (1/44) and only have 1 All-NBA player (5/44 teams). While they did manage a top-10 defense, they also had a below-average offense (3/44), which is less dispositive than a below-average defense, but still a major problem historically. Additionally, while Marcus Morris currently satisfies the definition of a rotation player who has previously been to the Conference Finals (present on all 44 previous title teams), none of their starters have previously won a ring (10/44 teams have succeeded without). While this is not nearly as damning as other traits, they are clearly one of the least experienced teams in terms of deep playoff runs. Perhaps their biggest problem is that they need to beat the Celtics in the next round; a team who finished 16 games ahead of them in the standings and had a higher net rating by 9.2 points. For context, a +9.2 net rating on its own (not a gap, just a flat rating) would be tied with the 86 Celtics for the 17th-best net rating of all time, a gap that no team has ever overcome in a playoff series. The largest net rating gap to ever see an upset in a playoff series was 8 points, no other team with a net rating above 9 has lost to a team with a net rating below 4.5.
The MVP deficiency gets the same treatment as the Pacers; with the impending loss of the Nuggets this applies to all teams and therefore it is not actually a valid reason why a team cannot win a title. Other than the Celtics, the Timberwolves, and maybe the Pacers, all the remaining teams only have 1 All-NBA player within the last 3 seasons. Additionally, 3 of the 5 teams to win with only 1 have been the last 3 champions; potentially suggesting this is less relevant these days than it has been in the past. The biggest problem for them is that their regular season numbers simply say they are good but not title-level. As noted previously, the 95 Rockets are the only team to not be a top-3 seed or be outside the top 10 in net rating. The question is if there is anything unique about the Cavaliers that may indicate they are more than their numbers say they are. To me, the best argument is that maybe Darius Garland suddenly transforms back into an All-Star Level player, and then suddenly they are way better. If they can get past the Celtics - perhaps their pull-up shooting can exhaust Al Horford and without a lot of size, the Celtics get overwhelmed - then perhaps they can end up with a series of match-ups that don’t look particularly overwhelming. If the Pacers beat the Knicks then a team outside the top 3 must advance to the finals. If that happens, then only one more series that looks like it requires huge amounts of variance needs to occur. Quite frankly, I find this argument less persuasive than “the Pacers added an All-NBA player” and think they probably have the worst chances of anyone in the NBA right now to win this year’s title.
Next up is the Mavericks. They technically won the tie-breaker over the Knicks for the standings, but given the substantial gap in Net Rating, I am considering them the worse regular-season performer. The Mavericks were not a top 3 seed, had the 15th-ranked net rating, and failed 40/20. Additionally, they have the 18th-ranked defense, lack an MVP, and have 1 All-NBA player within the last 3 seasons. While they have a starter with a ring and a decent bit of Conference Finals experience in their rotation, their team numbers are incredibly underwhelming.
What could go right for them? Let’s start with the defense. In the final quarter of the season, the Mavericks had the best defense in the league. In round 1, they were the best team in terms of forcing their opponent to take more contested shots. There is good reason to believe their defense as currently constructed is better than their season average. While this has not historically translated to titles, putting this up next to the note that defense has been seeing less relevance in title teams over the last decade may instill us with some belief that the Mavericks can overcome this limitation. Similarly, in that time frame, the Mavericks had the second-best record (only 0.5 games out of first) and 5th best net rating in the league. While the end-of-season numbers are rarely reflective of a team’s playoff success, perhaps this can be an example of getting hot at the right time. As noted above, the lack of MVP is likely to be a problem for everyone. While they do not have 2 All-NBA players within the last 3 years, Kyrie Irving has been before and it is not clear that he has declined much since that point in his career. Perhaps their biggest hope is that none of their prospective opponents feel completely out of historical range of them except for perhaps the Nuggets and the Celtics. The Thunder had better regular season success, but are probably the least experienced team in the playoffs and feel primed for a stunning collapse in the near future. If the Timberwolves take out the Nuggets, the Mavericks will once again have an experience advantage and despite the regular season numbers, we have a conflict between the bad Timberwolves offense and the bad Mavericks defense; hard to say which will prevail. If this happens, you could argue the only series they feel like a significant underdog in would be the Finals. One series with a bit of luck is easy to imagine. Some may point to the Mavericks' clutch brilliance this season as a reason to believe in them, but historically teams with +20 net ratings in the clutch are more predictive of playoff collapses than of playoff success so I do not consider these points in their favor. On net, I feel they could make a solid run, possibly losing in the finals if things break right for them, but over the larger sample, the numbers suggest they will eventually be overmatched by one of the four remaining teams who had definitively better seasons than them.
The Knicks actually have some of the fewest obstacles to overcome. We have finally reached teams that were both top 3 seeds and top 10 net ratings; eliminating the biggest hurdle for most of these teams. They are the final team remaining to fail to reach 40/20 and this remains the biggest stroke against this team. They have conference finals experience and generally are within the range of ages teams tend to win titles, but lack a starter with a ring, an MVP, or a 2nd All-NBA player. Aside from trends, the Knicks are also incredibly weak to variance. Among all top-3 seeds, they have the worst record when shooting under 33% from 3 and also the worst when opposing teams shoot 40% or better from 3. This makes them more vulnerable in each individual game and each individual series, making it harder to win a long sequence of games.
A lot of these are secondary problems and the Knicks should absolutely be considered a favorite over all the teams listed previously in this post. Their status as a top-2 team in their conference dramatically reduces the amount of things that they need to get lucky on to make a title run. Arguably, their path feels easier than the Western teams who will all have to beat two very solid teams just to make the Finals and then another team once they arrive while the Knicks only have to beat one serious team to get to the dance. This also helps mitigate their weakness against shooting variance since they likely have an overwhelming talent advantage for one extra round. As noted before, it appears likely that the eventual champion will lack an MVP and most possible winners lack the second All-NBA player. If you want to be technical, Julius Randle was All-NBA last year, and adding a qualifier for “healthy” feels like a post-hoc modification to reduce our evaluation of the Knicks, but also it feels like it should be implied. For me, it feels like a more compelling caveat to say only the Celtics, Wolves, and Pacers have the second star and the Pacers are terrible than it does to say Randle satisfies the condition. Their most damning condition is failure to hit 40/20. However, almost 8% of champions succeed without hitting it. I don’t wish to try to extrapolate on the knowledge or instincts of Phil Jackson, but this rule seems to stand for the proposition that getting hot and blitzing at the end of the season for good results is not a sustainable model for getting through a playoff run. This seems like it would be particularly compelling for a team getting into long series consistently (a title run of all 7-game series is 28 games, more than ⅓ of a season) and playing a huge amount of clutch minutes (the Knicks have reached clutch time in 8/9 playoff games with the one being a blowout loss to the 76ers). However, if the Knicks can take care of business quickly against the Pacers, this may mitigate some of this and perhaps they could be the rare team to be carried by getting hot at the right time. I believe their best argument is actually just that they are from New York. The screwjob at the end of Game 1 against the Pacers should instill huge hope that the league has a vested interest in their success and that can carry them through. My final evaluation is I simply don’t think they’re good enough for referees to tip the scales against the teams with truly massive talent gaps and they don’t have a serious chance to overcome these problems.
We now enter the section where we are talking about teams that feel like legitimate contenders. While some of them have traits that have been overcome less often than the Knicks or even the weaker teams, they hold the benefit of having a substantial gap on the rest of the league in terms of talent and results to date. The gap between the Timberwolves, the lowest performer of the 4, and the Clippers, the 5th best record in the NBA, is the same as the gap between the Clippers and the Warriors; who missed the playoffs. For me, these four occupy a space where maybe there would be a major historical outlier in a technically greater sense than the weaker teams, but any of them losing to any of those teams would be considered such an upset in its own right that it would be foolish to say their odds are lower. Make no mistake, these are the real contenders.
The Timberwolves fell just short of the Western rivals to finish as the 3 seed but finished with the third-best Net Rating in the league, just above the Nuggets. They met 40/20 and had the league’s best defense. They lack an MVP, but assuming Anthony Edwards is an All-NBA player this season, they will have two within the last 3 years. Their main flaws are that they lack experience and that they have the 17th-ranked offense in the league. As previously noted, only three teams have managed to win a title with a below-average offense. The most damning is their experience. No team has won a title without a rotation player who has previously been to the Conference Finals and only 4 teams have won a title with a best player who has not reached their 5th year in the league. Of those 4, 3 had a former MVP on the roster as well.
For me personally, this is the most interesting team in the West and steelmanning them feels the easiest of any team. Of the 3 below-average offensive teams, all were top-2 defenses. The Wolves were number 1 by a full 2 points. The Wolves' defense has of course been stunning through the playoffs so far. Pivoting from their drop scheme to destroy the Suns and now the containment of Nikola Jokić and Aaron Gordon to put the Nuggets in hell, the defense looks very promising and speaks highly to Chris Finch’s ability to tailor a scheme to his opponent and his roster’s ability to execute it. Perhaps they can win with a bad offense; the Warriors did it most recently in 2022. The experience question is more of a challenge to overcome but it becomes much simpler if they can get past the Nuggets. The Thunder have even less experience than the Wolves do and if that is the Conference Finals, one of them has to win. The Mavericks would have an advantage, but the talent gap between these two teams appears substantial based on our other markers. That just leaves the Celtics in front and maybe they can pull that off. They split the season series but both Gobert and Conley sat the game the Celtics won. Regardless, the Wolves have not looked like a team that is too inexperienced to make this run so far and maybe they can continue that trend. I love them to come out of the West right now, especially with their advantage over Denver, but I think they just can’t keep up with the Celtics offense. Even a momentary lapse lets the Celtics pile on points and that should favor them.
Next up is the Nuggets. I’ll spend the least time on them due to my lengthy breakdown a few weeks ago and the fact that they have fallen behind substantially against the Timberwolves. I’ll basically summarize by saying they would have the second-lowest average wins per season of any back-to-back ever, the lowest win total in the best season of a title streak ever, as well as only having 1 All-NBA player.
The reason they could win is if we treat each season as an independent event, then using back-to-back data amounts to a gambler’s fallacy and we can disregard all of it. In that case, the only thing they need to go against history on is their All-NBA player count and as we previously noted, the most recent couple of titles suggests that may not hold continuing relevance. If that is the case, they basically hit every marker by default. While this would not make them a juggernaut, it would make them a clear favorite if not for the historic dominance we are seeing from the Celtics right now. My ultimate take is that I do not think each season is an independent event and think there is actually a negative effect on the next season’s playoff run by winning a championship. Additionally, the Nuggets currently look primed to lose to the Timberwolves and once they are eliminated it becomes impossible to steelman an argument for them.
The top seed in the West this year was the Thunder. The Thunder checked most boxes and notably were one of two teams in the top 5 for both offense and defense. They have three main deficiencies on the metrics we’ve been looking through; 1 All-NBA player, not enough experience, and they would be the youngest team to ever win a title.
1 All-NBA player, like MVP, is becoming a recurring theme and we mostly just have to look past those or accept that the Celtics will steamroll everyone. Perhaps this is the case, but for the reasons enumerated above, it might not be. The experience factor is far more concerning. The Thunder would be the first of 48 in not just one, but two different metrics relating to inexperience. However, like the Wolves, they have a sneaky advantage. They are a far more talented team than the Mavericks, the numbers are not even particularly close, and the data suggests they match up fairly well in terms of where they like to attack and how they like to defend. While the Mavericks have a substantial experience advantage on them, this can be overcome through sheer talent. If they get through this series, they will likely face the Timberwolves in the Conference Finals, with neither team having a rotation player who has made it before. This is also a match up that on paper looks favorable to the Thunder. The Wolves have had a lot of wrinkles this post-season that I was not expecting defensively, but the teams are comparable and OKC’s massive experience deficiency won’t be particularly exploitable. This only leaves the Celtics as opponents in the finals. While the Celtics are significantly more experienced, this is just one series. A few bounces here, a few bounces there and anyone can win a series. I do think this is a long shot, several things have to go their way, and there is really no cushion against a total collapse for no reason (as tends to happen to young and inexperienced teams) at any of these stages, but it does look like they could at least sneak into the Finals if everything goes right.
Our final team is the Celtics. I’m going to spend a bit more time identifying flaws for them than other teams because they have been given the best odds to win almost universally and quite frankly most people would be surprised if they don’t win the title this year. The most obvious is that they lack an MVP, but we’ve already largely dismissed that as damning out of necessity. They have the best offense, the second-best defense, the third-best net rating in NBA history, and dominated the league from start to finish. They had the largest lead on their conference two seed of any post-merger team and have more 20-point wins than they have losses total. Every single rotation player they have except Kristaps Porzingis has been to the Conference Finals and Jrue Holiday holds a ring. They have 2 All-NBA players but also a host of other plays who can simulate the secondary creator role if necessary - as has been the case for the last few title teams. It is hard to find any flaw with this team beyond the lack of an MVP.
While we have dismissed the MVP question since Jokić is the only remaining MVP, perhaps there is still an argument about top-end talent to be made. The Celtics would be the only team remaining without a top-5 MVP finisher this season. The counterpoint to this is that in basically any year prior to 2017, Tatum likely would have received around 85% of the first-place MVP votes for what his team accomplished this season. The shifting criteria for MVP makes this a little bit harder to evaluate but ultimately the data says what the data says and we will use it as such. If we accept MVP votes as a proxy for player ranking, the Celtics lack a top-5 talent this year (though perhaps Tatum will make the first team, making this evaluation a little weirder). Conventional wisdom says top-end talent matters more in the playoffs than in the regular season, but this is not clearly the case. In years where Tatum was the lead scorer, the Celtics are 6-3 when the other team has a player that finished above him in MVP voting. They are also 4-2 when he is the highest-voted player in the series. The ultimate suggestion here is that either the conventional wisdom is false, or MVP voting is not a reasonable way to measure this. Either way, it is hard to make an objective argument for the Celtics lacking top-end talent but saying a team such as the Timberwolves or Thunder does.
The best argument against them in my opinion is simply that they haven’t won yet. I did a whole series recently about the many rebuilds the Celtics have undergone since the Big 3 era, but if we cut through all the player movement and roster changes, it is simply rare for a team that is consistently a playoff team but not a champion to eventually win a title. Barring active streaks, there have been 30 teams in the post-merger NBA to make the playoffs at least 6 years in a row and not win a title, only 5 of them would win a title after that streak with the same core. While the Celtics definitely more closely resemble the teams that did, and I’ve written before about the unprecedented nature of their situation, it is possible that this is not only correlative but also causative. That is to say, we cannot rule out the possibility that making consistent playoff runs without winning actually has a deleterious effect on the players that lessens their ability to win in the future. I don’t have the data to say confidently one way or the other in this regard. What I will close with regarding their prospects is that they have turned over a LOT during this era and it started at a very odd time. Without an actual deleterious effect, we can likely disregard this due to wild fluctuation in year-to-year regular season results suggesting they have performed roughly within a standard deviation of expectations this entire time. This is the first season since 2008 that it seems fair to say the expectation is that the Celtics win a title and so it is hard to count previous seasons against them in that regard.
What do you think? Do some of these trends feel fake to you? Is there some reason why some might not be important anymore due to a changing landscape? Let me know what you think!