Nylon Calculus: How close was each team to an NBA title this decade?

By examining betting market data, we can see which franchises were truly close to the NBA’s ultimate prize.

Sports are binary. There is one winner and one loser. One team wins the championship each season and everyone else does not. The clarity of having winners and losers, judged by a literal scoreboard, is one of the great pleasures of sports. In most areas of life success and failure is murkier.

But the black-and-white nature of sports leaves out the inherent complexities. While there is only one champion at the end of the NBA season, there are of course many teams who had a legitimate shot to capture the top prize. These talented squads put themselves in a strong position to compete for a ring only to be undone by a run of poor play, some hot shooting by an opposing role player, or even an injury.

Because of the inherent uncertainty in the playoffs, I think it is instructive to go back and quantify just how close the contenders were to a title. To do this, I will use betting market data stored by SportsOddsHistory.com. While betting markets are of course imperfect, they offer us a snapshot of the relative strengths of the contenders of the moment.

I used this betting market data to compute what I am calling Pre-Playoffs Expected Championships (PPEC) over the last 10 years. PPEC are exactly what they sound like — the number of expected championships for a team as measured by betting market odds, frozen before the playoffs would have started.

I should point out that Zach Kram of the Ringer did a similar type of analysis over a longer time period with a different methodology. He wrote two excellent pieces, one comparing Michael Jordan and LeBron James’s title paths and the other looking more generally at the performance of playoff teams above or below expectations, focusing on the past three decades.

To compute a team’s PPEC for a given season, we simply take that team’s title odds at the beginning of the playoffs, as implied by the betting market, and divide this number by the sum of each team’s implied title odds.

As an example, take the 2014 San Antonio Spurs. Their title odds at the start of the playoffs, as stored by SportsOddsHistory.com, were +330 in betting parlance; this means a bettor has to risk $100 for the chance of winning $330. The Spurs’ implied title odds, if we assume this market is fair, are about 23 percent. But the sportsbook is trying to make money, so each team’s implied title odds may be a bit on the high side. If you add up all the 2014 playoff teams’ implied title odds, you get roughly 127 percent. Dividing 23 percent by 127 percent (and converting to a decimal) we get about 18 percent, a better estimate of San Antonio’s 2014 pre-playoffs title odds.

While the Spurs’ PPEC for 2014 was 0.18 expected championships, they in actuality won the title of course.  So they netted themselves about 0.82 championships above expectation. We can do this same calculation for each team over the last 10 playoffs (from 2010 to 2019) and adding up PPEC for each franchise. To see the full spreadsheet, go here.  The top 10 teams in terms of expected championships are below:

Which NBA teams were closet to a title this decade?

Unsurprisingly, we see two decade stalwarts, the Golden State Warriors and the Miami Heat, at the top of the table. They are followed by two other champions of this decade — the Spurs and the Cavaliers.  But we also can see that the Warriors actually netted themselves an additional 0.64 championships above their PPEC of 2.36. The Heat were even more successful at rising above pre-playoff expectations; they won twice while their PPEC was just 1.18. But this makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Title winners by definition gain more championships than their PPEC.  Even in 2017, a year where Golden State was a relatively large favorite at 0.59 PPEC, the Warriors title victory gained them 0.41 championships above expectation. The Spurs and the Cavaliers interestingly each won one title, about what we would expect from this analysis.

Moving to fifth on the board, we see an interesting story. The Oklahoma City Thunder, employers of both Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook for over half the decade, sit at 0.66 PPEC despite going titleless from 2010-2019. In the context of PPEC, we can see that the Thunder organization deserves credit for putting themselves in a strong position to capture a championship. For the three-year stretch from 2012 to 2014, Oklahoma City was a strong secondary contender at between 0.16 and 0.18 PPEC each season. The Thunder made the NBA Finals in 2012 and came within a game of the Finals in the 2016 playoffs when they were not as highly regarded (0.04 PPEC). The Thunder deserve a lot of credit for drafting Durant, Westbrook, and other strong contributors like Ibaka and Harden. While they certainly made mistakes in hindsight, such as trading James Harden to the Rockets before the 2012-13 season, Oklahoma City could have won the franchise’s second championship with a bit more good fortune. In fact, if you take PPEC at face value, Oklahoma City had a 51 percent chance of winning at least one championship from 2010-2019. This is not bad considering that the NBA is a competitive 30-team league; the median team only had a 14 percent chance of winning at least one title over this time period.

Moving down the list, I think it is interesting to touch on another team that was relevant to this decade: the Houston Rockets. Houston general manager Daryl Morey has made no secret of his aggressive push to capture a title, and his squad racked up 0.50 PPEC over this decade. Morey said in an interview with The Ryen Russillo Show in 2017 “Like, what is the point of this league except winning a title?” The Rockets’ results show a team that was in a very solid position in 2018 (0.29 PPEC) and had a second season in 2019 as a lower-tier contender (0.08 PPEC). The 2018 team is an example of how the vagaries of injury luck can shape league history. Had Chris Paul not been sidelined with a hamstring injury with the Rockets up 3-2 on the Warriors, Houston may have broken through and claimed a title.  We will never know.

Another interesting observation that we get from this type of analysis is that the gap between a good team and a serious title contender can be steeper than the gap between a good team and a poor in terms of expected titles.  Consider the cases of the Indiana Pacers and the New York Knicks. Indiana had a solid decade and accumulated 0.21 PPEC, mainly due to a strong 0.14 PPEC 2014 squad anchored by Paul George and Roy Hibbert that had the number one defensive rating in the NBA, per Basketball-Reference. But, despite having just one season below 37 wins and posting a winning record in seven of the 10 years, the Pacers did not accumulate too much championship equity. They never put themselves in a position to be above 0.04 PPEC in any season other than 2014.

Contrast Indiana with New York, a team that won an average of 11 fewer games per year than the Pacers from 2010-2019 and only made the playoffs three times. The Knicks had a rough decade and accumulated only 0.08 PPEC. Even though the Pacers were more successful than the struggling Knicks, they ended up with just 0.13 more expected titles over 10 years. The gap between good and bad in the NBA, say between the Pacers and Knicks, is not as large as the gap between the excellent and good, like between the Warriors and Pacers.

There are some areas where this type of expected titles analysis falls short. For one thing, betting markets are by no means perfect. Big market teams, such as the Lakers or Knicks, may be overvalued and given more credit than they deserve. It would also be valuable to average the odds from many different betting markets together.

Also, taking title odds immediately before the playoffs begin is a subjective choice. Why not look at pre-Conference Finals or pre-Finals odds? I think the time before the playoffs begin is a good place to take a snapshot, but it is worth considering different vantage points. One could also point out that maximizing expected championships is not the only valid goal in sports; a team could be happy to put together a consistent string of strong winning seasons without quite being a serious title contender. This is a perfectly valid perspective.

Another more fundamental criticism of this type of approach is that winning in the playoffs is the whole point of the NBA (and most sports in general). Who cares that the Mavericks only had 0.15 PPEC this decade? They won the whole thing in 2011!  There is definitely some truth to this criticism. And we should care which players and teams raise their games in the playoffs.  But I think a PPEC-type analysis does help take a step back and look past the black-and-white nature of sports for a moment. We can then recognize that there is a lot of inherent uncertainty and unpredictability in the game. Once we do this, it can be instructive to see just how close each franchise came to the ultimate prize.