The Phoenix Suns are … the team to beat in the Western Conference? OK, so I didn’t make much of Phoenix’s opening-night blowout win over the Sacramento Kings, necessarily. But I was impressed with the Suns taking a solid Denver Nuggets team to overtime on the road, and losing by a single point. And it […]
Coming into this season, it was a pretty widely accepted notion that the Golden State Warriors wouldn’t win another title in 2020. After losing Kevin Durant in free agency and Splash Brother Klay Thompson in the NBA Finals to an ACL tear, things were never going to be the same. But even if you didn’t […]
When the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook’s 2019-20 NBA championship odds first opened back in May, the Golden State Warriors were the early favorites to win this season’s title. At +175, the Warriors’ odds implied a 36 percent chance to win the championship — pretty high in absolute terms, but low relative to recent Warriors odds, […]
Now that we’ve thoroughly broken down the best and worst — sorry again, Collin Sexton — players of the player-tracking era (since 2013), let’s zoom out to look at a larger slice of NBA history. As a refresher, we just introduced a new player rating metric, RAPTOR — the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) […]
Kemba or Kyrie? That is the question. Whether ‘twas nobler for the Boston Celtics to take their chance with Kemba Walker after his All-Star season or make it work with Kyrie Irving? In this next installment of our NBA Stat Battle, senior sportswriters Neil Paine and Chris Herring debate who is the better point guard. […]