NC Power Rankings: The Warriors are Unimaginably Good

The first power rankings based off of actual season results were predictably…all over the place. There’s nothing like small sample size theater, and with some teams having played as few as five games, these rankings are based off of the smallest of sample sizes.

There are some fun results (holy crap, the Warriors’ Net Rating is what?? The Lakers are how bad?) and some downright surprising results (I know the Jazz are good, but..that good? What’s up with Memphis?). Correspondingly, it will take some time to parse what of this is indicative of long term results and what is likely a blip on a long season’s map, likely to be ironed out by the Law of Large Numbers.

Before we dive in though, a word on how the Power Rankings are calculated: the teams are ranked by a “RankScore,” a score that’s based on the team’s point differential per 100 possessions over their last 25 games and it’s adjusted by the team’s strength of schedule, whether or not the team suffers a sudden injury or has a player return from injury, and by the team’s “rate of change” over that same sample of games, or by how much the team improves or gets worse over a stretch of games.

These power rankings, despite having a “formula” by which each team is consistently ranked on a semi-weekly basis, are not supposed to be predictive, or indicative of a team’s likely long-term success. Instead, these power rankings are built on the premise that power rankings are – at their heart – silly, and meant entirely for fun.

If these rankings were intended to be predictive, they’d be almost entirely the same week to week after the first three weeks if they were any good at all. That doesn’t sound particularly interesting, does it?

Instead, these power rankings are built to be consistent, scientific, and arbitration-free, but also highly volatile, crazy, and full of recency-bias in a way that conforms to the “eye-test.” If this isn’t going to win you bets against Vegas, at least it’s, hopefully, a little fun.

Since there haven’t been 25 games yet this season, the Net Rating for this week’s RankScore was the average of each team’s Net Rating so far and their predicted Net Rating from Nylon Calculus’ pre-season models. Everything else was calculated the same way.

So, with that in mind, lets see how the beginning of the season is shaking out.

The Top 10

1. Golden State Warriors – The Warriors came into the season as the overwhelming favorites, but in fairness, that’s usually true of the reigning champ. What’s more shocking is how much of an overwhelming favorite they’ve been so far. With a Net Rating of 19, more than double the second best team’s point differential, they’re so good that it’s legitimately comical. I laughed writing this. The extent of their dominance is hard to internalize.
2. San Antonio Spurs – Outside of the Warriors and maybe the Cavs, the Spurs are the team that has most lived up to the offseason hype, despite the relatively poor performance of new addition superstar LaMarcus Aldridge. This, really, is due to the unreal, superhuman performance of Kawhi Leonard, who has been one of the only players so far in this early season to give Stephen Curry a run for his money in the MVP race.
3. Oklahoma City Thunder – The Thunder still have lots of questions around them: Enes Kanter is showing his defensive warts, Billy Donovan hasn’t shown himself to be enormously different from Scott Brooks, but as it turns out, just having Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant makes you an incredible team, and Dion Waiters has looked functional so far.
4. Cleveland Cavaliers – The Cavaliers are without Kyrie Irving and they’ve still been one of the absolute best teams in the league. They’ve shown weaknesses, to be sure. The defense is faltering, LeBron has looked human, and so on. But in some ways, that’s scarier: behind the incredible performance of Kevin Love and some great team chemistry, the team has blitzed opponents. Watch out.
5. Los Angeles Clippers – I was most skeptical of the Clippers of the elite teams, and in some ways I still am, but many of the concerns (is Lance good, how is Josh Smith going to play?) are still question marks, but they just don’t seem to matter much behind the continued brilliance of Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and DeAndre Jordan, who are all amazing players.
6. Utah Jazz – The Jazz are sixth here largely as a result of their middling preseason projections, the Jazz actually have the second best point differential in the league so far, and their defense has been unfathomably good; they’ve been stifling teams to a level unseen since the early 00’s Eastern Conference. Who knows if they can keep this up, but for now, it’s impressive.
7. Portland Trailblazers – The Blazers are getting a huge undue boost here by an easy early schedule and a modest improvement from game to game that will surely find them settling in the low-to-mid teens soon. Still, what an impressive early start for a team that many expected to roll over and die.
8. Toronto Raptors – The Raptors have been good this year. And actually good, not like last year’s “they might be good but…probably not.” There’s reason to think that will hold up, too: they projected very well for this year. But is DeMarre Carrol really the difference between a mediocre team and a great one?
9. Atlanta Hawks – The Hawks have had quite the start to the season, but they haven’t exactly blown teams away, and their schedule has been fairly easy so far. They look like last year’s Hawks, and they walk like last year’s Hawks…but will they be last year’s Hawks, when all is said and done?
10. Boston Celtics – The Celtics are getting something of a boost from preseason expectations here. They’ve been fine. They will likely be fine, too, though they’ve performed a bit below expectations of late. The Celtics are sort of like having a grilled cheese for lunch that you haven’t spiced up in any way. It’s a perfectly good lunch, but it’s nothing special.

Other Teams of Interest

• Detroit Pistons – This is the team who has been far and away most disrespected by the early returns of the rankings, largely as a result of very poor projections for the season. Andre Drummond has exploded in a way that even the most ardent Stan Van Gundy acolytes could have only dreamed of, and Reggie Jackson has looked much better this season than he ever has before. The team didn’t have much roster overhaul, but the improvement of those two players and a replacement of Greg Monroe with a real stretch 4 might be all the Pistons need to be great this season.
• Chicago Bulls – The Bulls are picking up where they left off last year: they might be good, maybe, but they’re incredibly inconsistent and don’t show up half the time. Derrick Rose looks better already than he did most of last year, and Fred Hoiberg seems to be embracing the modern game more than Thibs ever did, but the offense still isn’t sophisticated, Joakim Noah hasn’t looked good, Pau Gasoline is a mixed bag, and the rest of the team is a huge question mark on any given night. Expect them to sit around the mid teens for most of the year.
• Washington Wizards – The Wizards weren’t very good last year, and their roster got, if anything, a little bit worse, so their place in the rankings shouldn’t really surprise. Still, it’s very encouraging to see Randy Wittman experimenting with a genuinely fast-paced, high octane offense, and it’s really benefited both John Wall and Bradley Beal. Here’s hoping the new system shows some reward in the next few months.
• Houston Rockets – What’s happened to the Rockets? They started the season hurt and James Harden just started slow, though has since adjusted, but even with Harden and now Dwight Howard playing well their offensive system – which at its best pretty much consisted of Harden running pick and rolls and the team whipping the ball around the perimeter – still looks like a stagnant mess. Can they really not adjust t0 having two ball handlers running pick and rolls?
• Minnesota Timberwolves – The Wolves were consistently in the bottom 3 for the vast majority of last year, and here they are this year, in the middle of the pack! Their biggest offseason addition, Karl-Anthony Towns, has been a beast, but the radical improvement of the Wolves is largely due to health and enormous improvement from both Andrew Wiggins (who is clearly a star in the making) and Ricky Rubio. They’re so fun to watch.
• New York Knicks – The Knicks have, largely, been bad, but not that bad. Carmelo Anthony looks something like a good, skilled basketball player again and KRISTAPS PORZINGIS has been enormously fun (and just enormous) already. The Knicks might be…fun?
• Memphis Grizzlies – The Grizz have been a disaster, and unlike their Western Conference Southwest-powerhouse-turned-sadsack compadres the Pelicans, they don’t have a slew of injuries to excuse it. No one is really sure what’s going on here, and admittedly, they have 3 wins, but those wins are against very bad teams and the losses have been brutal. This might be a small sample size thing, but it might be time to worry about Memphis.
• New Orleans Pelicans – It seems like everyone on the Pelicans has been hurt, and that Anthony Davis has struggled a bit – his 43 point game excepted – in this early season doesn’t help. Their 0-6 start already puts them in risky position for the playoffs, and they might be headed for another draft pick, at this rate.
• Los Angeles Lakers – The Lakers might not have the disastrous Net Rating of the Nets and Pellies right now, but they’ve had the easiest schedule in the league by a pretty wide margin so far and they’re supposed to be awful. As their schedule ramps up, it looks like the Lakers might be unspeakably bad.