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Baconbacon's NBA finals preview Part 1. The statistics

There are specific strategies that underdogs can employ to close the gap between them and the better team. You can try to shorten the game, try to push the focus into segments where you have an advantage, take the opposition out of their comfort zone, etc, etc. Of course these strategies rely on teams being capable of implementing them. It is all well and good to look at a rebounding disadvantage a team might have and say "turn it into a battle over the glass" but it won’t work without at least the basic personnel to do it.

The question then is two fold, what are the favorites weaknesses and what can the underdogs do about them. Theoretically what can the Warriors do the bridge the gap between them and the Cavaliers.

I’m sorry, have you not been paying attention? Are you still reading back issues of the news paper and sticking in gaudy (regular season) stat lines to power your algorithm? I apologize, I didn’t realize I was skipping ahead, and first things should come, well, first.

Cleveland has simply been a different team in the playoffs, I can understand if year 1 you thought small sample size, and year 2 it was ‘yeah, but Bogut went out and Green’s suspension’, but right now we have 54 playoff games since Lebron returned, negating a lot of the SSS complaint, and the team appears to be getting better. Here are the numbers.

In those 54 games the Cavs have a lazy net rating of +9.7, and a weighted net (ie adjusting for number of games vs each opponent) of +8.9. Those numbers compare reasonably favorably against the Warriors 73 win season of +10.7, but the Cavs put it up against playoff level competition. Adjusting for this, in what I call out of laziness a ‘double net rating’, the Cavs are +13.8, and a weighted double net rating (WDNR) of +13.6.

The trouble with a narrative without numbers is that you get "look how dominant this team is’ when that team is +8 or so, which is an extremely good team, and then in the playoffs you get a +13 but your general crappy vocabulary has you using those same words to describe the very good team and the, I don’t know for sure but maybe, best team in the history of the NBA.

Again, I am not talking about the Golden State Warriors.

Also I am not making the strongest case for the playoff Cavs. That WDNR includes 3 full series without Kevin Love, 5/6ths of a series without Kyrie and a few J.R. Smith suspension games thrown in for good measure. If we do a little bit of (very justified sounding cherry picking) and only include series in which Love and Kyrie combined for at least 2 games then we drop the 14/15 finals and the Cavs WDNR jumps to a hair over +15.

Well maybe I am overrating sweeps against the Hawks and Celtics from 3 postseasons ago, and those numbers really aren’t that relevant.

Nope. Turns out that the Cavs WDNR this postseason so far is +16.8. This Cavs team was +3.3 during the regular season, which makes the Playoff Cavs Team (PCT) roughly 5.1 times better than the regular season group.

We can run this same exercise for GSW. They come out with a +9.5 lazy net, a +13.1 double net, and 8.4 weighted net, and a +12.2 DWNR (trust me GSW fans you don’t want to drop the series when Curry was injured, and the +19.4 DNR they put up against Houston).

So with the most basic level of analysis Cleveland over the past 3 years has been slightly better with the lazy method (+9.7 to +9.5), slightly better weighting by their opponents regular season production (+13.8 to +13.1), better by weighting per game (+13.6 to +12.2).

If we drop the one matchup without Love and Kyrie its a large difference, +15.0 vs +12.9.

Confounding everything is Golden State’s road to the finals this year. The last 3 series, with Durant, have been 3 of the Warriors 4 best ratings by double net, at +17.1, +19.9 and +23.0, though each team was missing a starter for 3/4ths of each series, including an MVP finalist in the SAS series.

At this point the samples are getting too small to really draw conclusions, we could estimate the value of Kahwi vs Isaiah, argue about dropping the Indiana series this year where the Cavs hadn’t turned up their defensive pressure yet, and make all kinds of other adjustments but it is difficult to both do these accurately and to do them in an unbiased nature and tiny flaws will have potentially large repercussions due to the small sample.

This is enough of a base to argue that the Cavs ought to be considered on par with, if not a favorite over the Warriors in the upcoming finals. Part 2 will flesh out the arguments in terms of individual matchups, lineups, flexibility and,that tiny little thing the Cavs have going for them in Lebron James.

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