2016 western conference finals8/24/2023 If nothing else, adding stretchy big man Channing Frye at the trade deadline will provide them with better spacing than they had before. However, Golden State would be wise to learn from their series against Oklahoma City, who they also swept during the regular season: after firing head coach David Blatt and promoting Tyronn Lue, Cleveland seems to have figured out a few things since January that could make them a more formidable opponent than they were in previous meetings. The Warriors beat the Cavs in both of their regular season meetings this season, playing a close game on Christmas Day before blowing them out in Cleveland on January 18. The championship series will begin with the Warriors hosting the Cavs at Oracle Arena on Thursday at 6 p.m. But with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook facing a healthy Steph Curry and the rest of the record-setting Dubs, nobody outside Texas should complain about the Spurs’ early absence from the playoffs.Having beaten the Oklahoma City Thunder in a thrilling seven-game 2016 Western Conference Finals series, the Golden State Warriors will advance to their second consecutive NBA Finals series for a highly-anticipated rematch with LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Not every series that looks great on paper ends up delivering on its promise. (To give credit to series where both teams were strong - instead of cases where one of the teams propped up the overall average - I used the harmonic mean, a special type of average that penalizes low outliers.) Since NBA adopted current playoff structure in 1984. The best conference finals matchups, according to Elo In fact, according to the pre-series Elo ratings (which estimate each team’s strength at any moment), it’s the single best-looking conference finals matchup since 1984: YEAR But look on the bright side: the Warriors-Thunder series is also shaping up to be a classic. So NBA fans are going to be deprived of that long-anticipated Warriors-Spurs battle. The previous low playoff score for a +10 team was 250, achieved by the 2008-09 Cleveland Cavaliers, but even they managed to make the conference finals. Excluding the 2015-16 Spurs, teams with an efficiency margin of +10 or better since 1983-84 averaged a playoff score of 859.6, which is somewhere between a championship victory and a Finals loss. So San Antonio only gets a playoff score of 125 points for all its trouble this season - an absurdly low total for a team with its +11.3 efficiency differential. (This means the NBA champion gets exactly 1,000 points for its playoff run.) And win the chip? That’s a 500-point prize. Make it to the NBA Finals? Grab 250 points. Advance to the conference finals? Tack on 125 more. Win a first-round series? Get 63 bonus points. And from there, it’s all about advancement. By qualifying for the postseason, a team increases its chances from 1-in-30 (3.3 percent) to 1-in-16 (6.25 percent), so it gets a 29-point bonus just for making the playoffs. Every team starts with 33 initial points, or 1,000 times one-thirtieth (there are 30 teams, so at the beginning of the season every team has a 1-in-30 chance of winning the title). I have a point system for rewarding playoff success based on how far a team advances in the playoffs (and how many teams it had to beat out to get there). But NBA fans can take solace: The Thunder ought to give the Warriors a terrific series, too. And given the Spurs’ preseason hype - as well as the extraordinarily high level at which they operated all season long - San Antonio’s second-round ouster has to be seen as an historic disappointment. After all the buildup and all the hypotheticals, there will be no epic Warriors-Spurs showdown. The Warriors did their part, beating the Portland Trail Blazers in five despite missing Steph Curry for the better part of the series.īut the Oklahoma City Thunder shocked the Spurs, knocking San Antonio out of the playoffs with a 113-99 victory Thursday night. Both were historically dominant, and it seemed a practical certainty that they would eventually meet in a Western Conference finals for the ages. All season long, the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs seemed to be on an irreversible collision course.
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