The first two rounds of
the NBA playoffs were relatively shaky for the Atlanta Hawks. After winning 60
games and posting a +4.8 Simple Rating System (SRS) score during the regular
season, the Hawks have played at only a +2.7 SRS level in the playoffs,1 having
been taken to six games by both the Washington Wizards (+0.2 regular-season
SRS) and Brooklyn Nets (-3.1) despite holding home-court advantage in each
series.
And now the real test
begins: Atlanta’s first Eastern Conference finals berth ever.2 Waiting for the
Hawks are the Cleveland Cavaliers, the second-biggest overachievers of the
playoffs thus far, according to SRS. Despite the Hawks’ home-court edge, our
power ratings set the Cavaliers’ odds of winning the series at 63 percent, and
the Vegas sportsbooks concur, setting Cleveland as roughly 67 percent favorites
in the series.
Much of the difference
in talent between the two teams boils down to one simple fact: The Cavaliers
have LeBron James, and the Hawks do not. According to the latest update of
ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus ratings,3 James has inched past Stephen Curry as the
most effective player in the NBA right now.
But maybe the math is
even simpler than that.
At the most elemental
level of analysis, a James-led team hasn’t lost before the NBA Finals since
2010. James has won five conference finals in six tries. And, most notably, he
is arguably the best conference finals performer the league has seen since 1985
(the first year for which Basketball-Reference.com has complete playoff game
logs and — coincidentally — Michael Jordan’s rookie season). James has been
mostly stellar in every round of the playoffs, but in this particular stage,
the only peer James has is Jordan himself.
This is apparent using
the single-game version of Daniel Myers’s Box Plus/Minus (BPM), which is one of
(if not the) best box-score metrics4 available to the public because of its
ability to predict team performance in pseudo out-of-sample tests. Using BPM,
with adjustments for the level of competition faced, home-court advantage and
the leverage of each game, we can measure how many points above replacement
were contributed by every player to appear in each round since 1985.
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