Comments on: Most Dominant Playoff Teams of All Time… March Madness Style

By: Bill Reynolds

Bill Reynolds — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:53:15 +0000

Neil -- Interesting. Thanks for the response again. I know your work well enough to figure there was an explanation. The reason I am so interested in this is I would love to be able to look at these kinds of figures over a period of years that would include non-championship seasons. In other words, what was the best five-year playoff run of all time? The Bulls from 1990-94 (when they went 61-23, the best winning percentage over five years of playoffs ever)? Or the Lakers from 2000-04 (they went 64-26 and probably faced tougher competition in the postseason)? Or the Bulls from 94-98? (56-22) It would be great to have additional SRS data on the site. I didn't know the "official" SRS figures don't account for HCA. It would be great to get an SRS for each team/year that includes playoffs, and a separate SRS for just the playoffs (if that is possible), and an SRS that accounts for HCA. SRS is such a cool tool, give us more! Thanks.

By: Neil Paine

Neil Paine — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:01:00 +0000

For "full season SRS", I didn't use teams' official Basketball-Reference SRS because it doesn't factor in HCA and only uses regular season results -- instead, I used an SRS that took into account all games, regular-season and playoffs, and made HCA adjustments. So in that Lakers example, their opponents would be:

2001 PHI: 3.10
2001 SAS: 7.13
2001 SAC: 5.72
2001 POR: 3.92

"Adjusting" for the home/road split in each series you get:

2001 PHI: 3.89
2001 SAS: 7.13
2001 SAC: 5.72
2001 POR: 2.61

Take a weighted average by the # of games in each series, and you get 4.92.

By: Bill Reynolds

Bill Reynolds — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:21:51 +0000

Neil -- Thanks for the info. I'm having a little trouble replicating your results. Take the 2001 Lakers. They played the Blazers (4.52 SRS), the Kings (6.07), the Spurs (7.92) and the Sixers (3.63). If I understand your method correctly, there is no adjustment to either the Kings' or the Spurs' SRS, because both those series were decided in 4 games, with an equal number of tilts on each team's home court. In the Blazers series, there were 2 games in LA and one in Portland, so the Blazers SRS for the two road games would be 0.62 and for the one home game would be 8.42. Overall, Portland's adjusted SRS then is (2(0.62) + 8.42)/3=3.22. To adjust Philly's SRS, we note that the series went 5 games, but because it was a 2-3-2 series, 3 games were played in Philly while 2 were played in LA. Philly's SRS for the road games is -0.27, while for its home games it is 7.53. So adjusting Philly's SRS, we get (2(-0.27)+3(7.53))/5=4.41. So the four SRSs of the 2001 Lakers' opponents, adjusted where necessary for home court, are: POR 3.22 SAC 6.07 SAS 7.92 PHI 4.41 Add them up and divide by four and you get 5.41. But your table lists the Lakers SOS for that year as 4.92. It occurred to me that you might have overlooked the fact that more of the Finals games were played in Philly than LA even though LA actually had the HCA in the series. So maybe you multiplied Philly's road SRS by 3 (instead of 2) and its home SRS by 2 (instead of 3). That would cause Philly's (incorrect) adjusted SRS to be (3(-0.27)+2(7.53))/5=2.85. Then you would have the four adjusted SRSs as 3.22, 6.07, 7.92, and 2.85. Add them up and divide by four and you get 5.02, which is still off your finding of 4.92. So I'm confused. (Note: the 1990, 1991, and 2004 Finals were other cases where the team with HCA in the series overall still played only two of the five games at home, which can only happen in the Finals, with the 2-3-2 format.)

By: Neil Paine

Neil Paine — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:24:38 +0000

I actually just used a constant HCA across every season in NBA history, based on (PPG_hometeam) - (PPG_roadteam) for each regular-season game since 1950 (the HCA ended up being 105.1 - 101.2 = 3.9 PPG). So for every playoff game, the SOS component would be your opponent's full-season SRS minus 3.9 if you were at home or plus 3.9 if you were on the road. If I had used a season-specific HCA, there were actually some seasons where the "advantage" was near zero or some other strange amount that I wasn't really comfortable using, so it was not only easier to use a constant HCA term but it also seemed more practical.

By: Bill Reynoldst

Bill Reynoldst — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:10:58 +0000

Neil - Fantastic stuff. Can you explain exactly how you made the home court advantage adjustment to the opponents' SRS to arrive at the avg. SOS figure? Is there a different HCA adjustment for each season? If so, can you post the figures for each year? Again, thanks for a great post!

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:27:55 +0000

I'd like seeing the "most dominant" playoff teams that didn't end up winning it all. Last year's Cavs looked so good in the first two rounds...

By: MCT

MCT — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:42:30 +0000

I was also surprised to see the '83 Sixers so low. The Lakers' run in '01 was often compared to theirs. The Sixers beat teams with 44, 51 and 58 wins. Glancing at their playoff scores, it looks like they played a number of fairly close games, even though they almost always pulled out the victory in the end; that may be the explanation. I'm intrigued by the placement of a couple of older Celtics teams. One is the '69 team (the last year of the Russell dynasty). As most people reading this probably know, that team won only 48 games and was the last team to make the playoffs in the East, but upset three teams with better records to win the title. Statheads have long noted that they seem to have been a better team during the regular season than their record would indicate, however. They led the league in point differential, were second in SRS, and their pythagorean W-L has them winning 55 games. In light of that, it's interesting to see them in the middle of the pack on this list -- not super-dominant, but ahead of a lot of teams who had better regular-season records than they did. I don't know if they rested up all their aging veterans in the regular season with the intention of doing exactly what they did, or just lost a lot of bad-luck games, or what. The other Celtics team that catches my eye is the '76 team, which is near the bottom of the list. Contrary to the experience of the '69 team, analysis has identified them as a team that wasn't as good as their regular-season record suggests (they won 54 games, but their pythagorean W-L has them winning just 47). From that viewpoint, they were an aging team in decline with a shallow bench that was able to use its veteran smarts to keep people fooled and make one last run. It looks like that carried over into the posteseason. They undoubtedly also benefitted from playing in an era of extreme parity, and from the Suns' stunning upset of the Warriors in the West Finals that year. The 59-win Warriors were the only team other than the Celtics to win 50 games that year (in a league with 18 teams); in the postseason Boston faced teams with 46, 49 and 43 wins. In light of all this, the Celts' collapse over the next few seasons isn't so surprising.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:24:45 +0000

>Neil Paine What's interesting is that the 2000 Lakers weren't really a dominant postseason team: They faced elimination twice, were actually outscored by Portland in that WCF series, and needed 6 games in the Finals to beat a good (but hardly great) Indiana team that was much weaker by SRS than last year's Magic. All season long, yes, they were pretty dominant. But in the playoffs, they didn't really show a lot of that form. You're right. The '00 Lakers struggled against good 3-point shooting teams. Infact, I would favor the '09 Magic over the '00 Lakers, assuming Nelson is healthy. I can post Phil's interview with Bob Costas that post-season when he essentially admits as much. That match-up ('00 Lakers vs. '72 Lakers) is Shaq vs. Wilt and Kobe vs. Logo.

By: Romain

Romain — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:59:07 +0000

The 1995 Rockets are not very high on this list because they went 15-7 in the playoffs, however in terms of quality opponents I'm not sure it can get any better.

The went 47-35 in the regular season and were seeded #6 in the West, and then they beat
- 60-22 Jazz in the 1st round (3-2)
- 59-23 Suns in the 2nd round (4-3)
- 62-20 Spurs in the WCF (4-2)
- 57-25 Magic in the Finales (4-0)

These were the 4 best teams of the regular seasons!! (The Magic were tied at n°4 with the Sonics).

I've only followed the NBA since the early 1990's but I've never seen anything like that

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:38:31 +0000

Am I missing something here? Why are the "fo',fo,'fo'" 1983 Sixers in at #16". I,ve seen the playoffs since 1969, Philly was one of the three most dominating playoff teams I've ever seen. You are right about '71 Milwaukee. In the Finals, they made the Bullets look like the Boston Shamrocks or the New Jersey Reds.