Good morning! I'll take your questions.
From Forest: Which teams other than OKC are contenders? Any of them? If so, how credible?
To answer this, I can lean on the definition of contender that I've used in previous stories. That's inclusive of teams that either make the conference finals or hit four of the following five benchmarks:
- 50 or more regular-season wins.
- Making the second round of the playoffs.
- Ranking inside the top 10 in both offensive and defensive rating.
- A pace-adjusted scoring margin (net rating) of plus-5.0 or better.
- A plus-5.0 or better rating in Basketball-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System, which adjusts point differential for strength of opponent.
Obviously, we don't yet know which teams are going to make the conference finals or the second round, but we can shortcut that by denoting the top two seeds in each conference as the conference finalists (as of this writing, that's the Thunder and Spurs in the West and the Pistons and Knicks in the East) and then using the top four teams in each conference as the second-round teams.
There are only five teams that have an SRS of 5.0 or better. Three of them are already on the list (Thunder, Pistons, and Spurs), and the other two are the Rockets and Spurs. Those five teams, plus the Knicks, are the only ones with a net rating of 5.0 or better. So that already eliminates any non-Rockets and Celtics teams from being added to the list. Houston and Boston are each top-four seeds and on track for 50-plus wins, and Houston has both a top-10 offense and defense. So each of those two teams satisfy four of the five secondary criteria.
That makes our initial list of contenders six teams long: Thunder, Spurs, Rockets, Pistons, Knicks, and Celtics. I'd personally add the Nuggets, who are not on some of these lists because of their various injuries. We know how good they are when they're fully healthy. The Wolves are also borderline here, as they hit three of the five secondary criteria, only missing out on net rating and SRS, where they are at 4.9 and 4.4, respectively.
That group of teams mostly seems right to me, though they are "contenders" to varying degrees. I'm not sure I'd put any of the three East teams above any of the five West teams, for example. (Except for maybe Minnesota, unless the Wolves make a trade for a guard.) Regardless of how the Thunder are playing amidst all of their various injuries, I do think they're still the best team until proven otherwise. I wouldn't quite take them over the field like I would have earlier in the year — mostly because I need to see Jalen Williams back on the court — but they still seem like the most likely team to take it down in the end.