Nate Silver and his team of brainiacs at FiveThirtyEight have released new rankings of the best NBA teams of all-time.
And here’s the top 10…
One Celtics team in the top 10? 17 championship teams and one makes the top 10???
Before I start spouting off, let’s look at the criteria:
- The ratings depend only on the final score of each game and where it was played (home-court advantage). They include both regular-season and playoff games. The principal source for game-by-game scores is Basketball-Reference.com.
- Teams always gain Elo points after winning games and lose ground after losing them. They gain more points for upset wins and for winning by wider margins.
- The system is zero-sum. When the Denver Nuggets gained 30 Elo points by upsetting the No. 1 seed Seattle SuperSonics in the first round of the 1994 NBA playoffs, the Sonics lost 30 points.
Guess you can’t fault number-crunchers for putting heavy weight on final scores and margins, but that’s the real problem with this system. Teams who pull back on the throttle, whether in game or in season, are punished.
I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single, sensible Lakers fan (already an extremely rare find) who would pick the 08-09 Lakers as the greatest Lakers team. Our beloved 2008 Celtics champs rank 39th. Of all the C’s early dynasty teams, the 64-65 Celtics ranks the highest – 47th. 47th!
Five Thirty Eight addresses this disparity:
The list might seem to be biased toward relatively recent teams: Among the top 50 seasons all-time, only six from before 1980 make the list. This is mostly a consequence of there being more teams than there once were. Simply put, it’s much more impressive to be the best team in a 30-team league than in a 10-team league.
But it’s also hard to say the NBA is watered down, at least right now. In fact, it’s barely expanded in recent years, adding just one franchise since 1995. That makes recent teams’ performances more impressive than those from, for example, the early 1970s, when the NBA almost doubled in size over a few seasons. When Elo ranks a team higher or lower than you might expect intuitively, it’s usually because it perceives the team’s competition to be especially strong or especially weak.
Sorry, if there are only 9 teams in the league, I’m assuming each of those teams is STACKED. Lack of talent isn’t the reason why the NBA started with 9 franchises.
Sorry MJ and Chicago, the 86 Celtics will always be my #1. Five of their top 6 players turned out to be HOFers. All bad-ass mofos with giant balls.
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