NBA Finals: Charting narratives and championship probabilities
By Ian Levy
Narratives can turn in a moment. After two games it looked like the Cleveland Cavaliers were done, not just about to lose their second consecutive NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, but so hopelessly overmatched that it was time to completely overhaul the roster or completely abandon the idea of LeBron ever winning a title in Cleveland. One 30-point blowout win at home and suddenly those skies don’t seem so dark.
While the storylines are prone to wild swings in focus and exaggerated elements (my father always told me never to let the truth get in the way of a good story), statistics and statistical projections tend to move a little more slowly.
For the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors, the path to the NBA Finals has been full of twists and turns, both of story and of probability. I thought it might be fun to map both on top of each other and see how they compare.
The graph below shows the weekly progression of NBA Championship probabilities for each team, from FiveThirtyEight. I’ve taken the liberty of annotating each point on the graph with the prevailing sentiment about the team at that moment in time.
Cleveland’s championship odds rose steadily, peaking just before the Finals began. However, even at their highest, their odds never touched 33 percent. As bad as things looked for the Cavaliers in the first game of the Finals, their odds didn’t change dramatically. The 30-point blowouts they have traded with Golden State have depressed their odds further, but not nearly as severely as you might think.
The Warriors, on the other hand, really were in dire straits against the Thunder. The valley in their odds shown here came between Games 5 and 6. Although, at that point, they still had better championship odds than the Cavaliers did when they were up 3-0 on the Atlanta Hawks.
For all the words that have been written and stories that have been spun, the fundamental reality hasn’t changed much over the past two months. The Cavaliers are very good but the Warriors are better and still the favorites to win the title. Now let’s all get back to preparing our Crying Jordan memes for tonight’s game.
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