Is a Golden State Warriors vs. Atlanta Hawks NBA Finals inevitable?
By Will Osgood
The Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks are the talk of the NBA, and currently the two best teams by a pretty wide margin, but are they locks to meet in the NBA Finals?
Welp, I was getting ready to write this piece about how incredible the Golden State Warriors are. How they never, ever lose at home. How they were headed for the second best regular season of all-time behind the Chicago Bulls team which lost just 10 games in 1995-96, based on this article.
Then they lost at home on Tuesday night to the Bulls in a wonderfully played, thrilling overtime contest. And my thesis that the Warriors are invincible, is now gone. But in some ways, Tuesday lends more credence to this article.
Prior to Tuesday night, it was a mere inevitability that the Warriors would land in the NBA Finals. Sure, there are many good teams in the Western Conference. Heck, there are many really, really good teams.
But new descriptors are necessary to explain the level of play we have seen from Steve Kerr’s team this season. The adjective “good” is too weak. Adding the adverb “really”, frankly is not good enough. Even saying they are really, really good (the second “really” for emphasis) leaves us longing for more.
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The J-Notes
The Warriors prior to Tuesday night were otherworldly. As said already, only one other team has ever approached the level of play in a single season that Golden State has, until Tuesday.
But that night they showed frailty for the first time in 11 weeks when playing at Oracle Arena. Bulls guard Derrick Rose turned the ball over 11 times, but hit the game-winning shot with seven seconds left to play in overtime.
The point, though, is not to rehash that particular game. And it’s not to say the Warriors should instantly be thrown back into the assortment of popular choices for Western Conference supremacy. Even with the loss in a game they led convincingly throughout, the Warriors remain the proper choice to select as front-runner for representative from the west in the NBA Finals.
It’s only that for the first time in quite a while there is a hint of doubt, and that hint is justified.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Hawks are currently in the middle of a 17-game winning streak, and have won 31 of their past 33 games. They have just one more loss than the Warriors (seven) and two more wins currently.
There is a distinction between the two, though. Golden State’s point differential stands at +11.5, whereas the Hawks reside at +7.3, which is certainly not paltry, but also not the sort of figure that should immediately cause us to crown their [you know what, thanks Dennis Green!].
One of the best ways we can make an intelligent prediction about who will play in the upcoming NBA Finals is to look back to see some of the properties of teams who made it in the past. We will limit our results to just the past five seasons as the game has invariably changed in that time.
When looking at those numbers we notice that “hero ball” has mostly been replaced by “team ball”.
Of the 10 teams who played in finals in those five seasons, the worst finish in ORtg (points per 100 possessions) for any team was Boston’s 107.7 in 2009-10, which ranked them 15th in the league. The champion Lakers were 11th that season 108.8.
In 2010-11, the champion Dallas Mavericks finished the regular season eighth at 109.7, while the runner-up Miami Heat were third at 111.7. In 2011-12, the runner-up Oklahoma City Thunder finished second in O-Rtg, in a year where the league was down overall. Miami finished eighth as they captured their first title with the “Big Three”.
In 2012-13, Miami repeated as NBA champions after finishing second in O-Rtg behind the Thunder. The team they defeated in the finals, the Spurs, finished seventh in O-Rtg. Finally, a season ago, Miami and San Antonio repeated as NBA Finals counterparts despite finishing fifth and seventh in O-Rtg, respectively.
Clearly, it is a necessity to finish in the top half of the league in O-Rtg, and in reality probably a good idea to finish in the top-10. But it not necessary to finish first, as no team which did made it to the NBA Finals in that season. Of course that is based on a small sample size, so our conclusions are a bit suspicious.
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Golden State this season is fourth in O-Rtg at 111.9 points per 100, while Atlanta has the sixth most efficient offense scoring 110.0 points per 100 possessions.
But what about D-Rtg (points allowed per 100 possessions)? How important is it to making the finals?
D-Rtg seems to be of less importance even. None of the leaders in D-Rtg over the past five seasons made it to the finals. And only three teams who finished in the top-20 in D-Rtg consisting of all five seasons, made it to the finals.
The Thunder finished 26th overall (for the five seasons) in the year they made the finals. Most of Miami’s teams fit within the 20-40 range. So D-Rtg is important, but it is not a definitive factor either.
Golden State currently ranks first giving up just 100.3 points per 100 possessions, while Atlanta is fourth giving up 102.2 per 100 possessions.
What about PACE (possessions per game)? Is there any commonality among the last 10 finalists?
The Spurs’ two Finals squads were the only two teams to fit within the top-20 fastest teams in the past five years. The Thunder squad that made the Finals in 2012 came in 33rd in PACE over the past five seasons.
The point in all of this is that Golden State and Atlanta are not so clearly headed to the 2015 NBA Finals. They may be favorites, and both are very deserving of such a marker. But both can be knocked off and stepped over, assuming that recent history is any indication.
The 2009-10 Lakers were 35th among all teams in the last five seasons. Interestingly, Miami—a team generally known with LeBron James as a team which loved to run—did not show up on the list until No. 62. The Heat were not even in the top-50 of teams with the most possessions in the past five seasons.
The Warriors would finish first among all the teams in the past five seasons if their half season were included in these rankings. They average 98.8 possessions per game. Atlanta is just 15th right now, but as already shown this is not devastating to their finals chances.
So style, or simply extra possessions, does not automatically correlate to postseason success either. At this point, some of the key stats we use to evaluate teams, and that we expect to be either causal or at least correlative, have not been, at least for making the finals, though strong rankings in them do seem to be correlated. Let’s dig a bit deeper.
When we look at Effective Field Goal percentage, we see that the past two Miami squads rank first and second in eFG%. Not surprisingly, the past two Spurs teams also came in the top-10 among squads in the past five seasons.
The 2010-11 Mavericks are 15th overall over the five seasons. The Thunder’s 2011-12 finals team comes in 26th in that time span.
It should be noted that the Warriors rank first in eFG% at .544 percent. Atlanta is third at .534 percent. This seems to bode well for each of them.
What about the hypothesis that teams who move the ball better offensively are more likely to reach the finals? It comes from the fact that Golden State and Atlanta are one and two in assist percentage and assist ratio (and two and three assist/turnover ratio), according to NBA.com.
In 2009-10, the Celtics were second in assist percentage, though the Lakers were middle of the pack in the league. The Mavericks led the league in assist percentage in 2010-11, though Miami was almost worst in the statistic.
The 2011-12 finalists finished 25th and 30th, making that season a poor season for ball movement among its finest teams.
The finalists in 2012-13 proved that moving the ball successfully for assisted made field goals was more important, as San Antonio finished third, Miami 13th. Finally, a season ago the champion Spurs finished fifth while Miami came in 13th.
Thus, we can say that a team’s sharing the ball for made field goals is of questionable importance, at least over the span of the last five seasons.
Using advanced metrics there is very little we can say definitively.
The point differential always seems like a strong argument. By going back through the past five seasons, we find something else that is interesting. The league leader in point differential (among the five seasons we’ve been using) only won the title last season.
The point in all of this is that Golden State and Atlanta are not so clearly headed to the 2015 NBA Finals. They may be favorites, and both are very deserving of such a marker. But both can be knocked off and stepped over, assuming that recent history is any indication.
The 2015 NBA All-Star reserves were revealed on Thursday night. As expected, two Warriors ended up on the All-Star team: point guard Stephen Curry and fellow “Splash Brother” Klay Thompson who set the NBA record for most points in a quarter one week ago against the “rival” Sacramento Kings.
Thompson could not be stopped, as he did not miss a shot going 13/13, including nine for nine on 3-point attempts. His Warrior teammates were literally forcing him the ball, something that wouldn’t normally be considered a sound offensive strategy. Draymond Green, who at least according to Jeff Van Gundy, was an All-Star snub, would say of that game, “you don’t get that hot in (NBA) 2K.”
Later the underrated former Michigan State Spartan told reporters that his teammates were simply playing hot potato when they got the ball.
Meanwhile the Hawks netted three All-Stars, one off the number some suspected they would. The notable snub, assuming you were inclined to that line of thinking, was Thompson’s mirror image (at least as a 3-point shooter), Kyle Korver.
Korver, who owns the single-season record for 3-point field goal percentage of 53.6 percent set in 2009-10, is just two-tenths of a percentage point behind his own mark, at 53.4, leading the league by a wide margin. However, the 3-point gunner is only averaging 13 points per game.
Whether such an antiquated statistic should factor into an All-Star bid or not, it does. But the other three Hawks to make it, Al Horford, Paul Milsap and Jeff Teague were all easy choices, though I did not include Horford in my article last week on players who should be in the All-Star Game.
It doesn’t seem to matter if a team has one, two or three All-Stars, making the NBA Finals is ultimately unrelated. Yes, the NBA requires at least one guy who steps up when it matters most. But as was the case with the Spurs last June, and with the Lakers in the Shaq-Kobe years, that player can be someone who would garner few, if any, votes for the midseason All-Star contest.
Robert Horry and Kawhi Leonard are of course the players who stepped up to play major roles in memorable NBA championship moments.
As it turns out both teams have similar type of players, ones who did not make the All-Star Game, but are more than capable of making a clutch play, or five, when needed in the months April through June. For the Warriors it would be the aforementioned Draymond Green, while Andre Iguodala, David Lee and Shaun Livingston give off the impression they too can, and likely will, have shining moments in the postseason.
The Hawks, too, have a few such players. Korver likely will drain a key three, while Kent Bazemore and Mike Scott are the kind of players often so key in a championship run.
Of course, a healthy Spurs team is battle-tested. Oklahoma City, when fully healthy, scares everyone. And the Rockets, with James Harden currently an MVP front-runner, remain dangerous, even though the Warriors swept them 4-0 in their regular season series, which oddly has already ended, despite the calendar not even yet reaching February.
In the Eastern Conference, the Cavaliers still appear to be the team to beat on paper. The Wizards gained some valuable postseason success a year ago, and gained noted playoff assassin Paul Pierce this past offseason primarily to take them to the next level. And if the Bulls are healthy, they too cannot be counted out.
All of those teams fair well in the statistical categories discussed above.
In other words, a Warriors-Hawks finals is far from inevitable. But the odds are definitely in the favor of the Warriors and Hawks.