Ahead of today’s Game 1 of the NBA Finals, let’s get one thing out of the way: Our forecast model loves, loves, loves the Boston Celtics. (Or maybe it just hates the Golden State Warriors.) Either way, the model gives Boston an 80 percent chance of winning the championship over Golden State, in very stark […]
Going into the playoffs, our NBA model wasn’t particularly high on the Dallas Mavericks’ chances of making a deep run. We gave Dallas only a 37 percent chance of beating the Utah Jazz in the first round and a 12 percent chance of making the Western Conference finals. But that was before Luka Dončić returned […]
Nikola Jokić’s case to win the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award for a second-straight season is quite compelling. The Joker finished in the top 10 in points (27.1), assists (7.9) and rebounds (13.8) per game while shooting an astonishing 58.3 percent from the field. As FiveThirtyEight’s Robert O’Connell wrote recently, no high-scoring big man has […]
No NBA team was more disappointing this season than the Los Angeles Lakers. L.A. opened the season among the inner circle of favorites to win the NBA championship, joining the Brooklyn Nets and Milwaukee Bucks as the only teams with better than 10-to-1 title odds, according to Basketball-Reference.com. Alas, the Lakers won’t even get to […]
For much of NBA history, building an elite defensive team came down to simply employing one of the league’s handful of generational defensive bigs. Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics regularly lapped the field defensively. David Robinson instantly made San Antonio a top-three defense during his rookie season in 1989-90; the Spurs wouldn’t dip below the top […]