Which group is your greatest of all time? To answer that question with much more rigor than it’s typically debated in sports bars, in 2015 I ranked every team since minutes played were first tracked in 1951-52 (sorry to the 1949-50 Minneapolis Lakers) according to their performance in the regular season and playoffs.
Three years later, it is time for an upgrade using a new No. 1, and several other newcomers to the record as a result of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors dominating the contest in their respective conferences.
The method
For winners, I took the average of their point differential during the regular season and their stage differential in the playoffs plus the point differential of their opponents. That tells us how many points each game better than an average team each winner was, giving equal weight to the postseason as the regular season to reward the most significant games.
For non-champions, the beginning point is the same, but their playoff differential was adjusted by effectively giving them a five-point reduction for each game they came up short of the title. That has little effect on teams like the 2012-13 San Antonio Spurs, who lost in Game 7 of the Finals, but it harshly penalizes teams that rolled up big success margins early in the playoffs before falling short in the conference finals.
The previous adjustment deals with quality of play. It is no surprise that some of the greatest single-season team performances in NBA history came in the early 1970s, once the league had expanded rapidly and battled the ABA for incoming draft selections. The redistribution of gift enabled stars to glow even more brightly. For each season, I quantified how players watched their minutes per match increase or decrease the subsequent season compared to what we would expect given their age. More minutes indicates a poorer league, while fewer minutes indicates one that has gotten stronger.
Each season is ranked relative to 2017-18, from a high of 21 percent more powerful in 1965-66, the last year the NBA had just nine teams, to a low of 10 percent poorer in 2004-05, the last time that the league enlarged. That modification is multiplied by the team’s average regular-season and playoff scores to provide a last score better than an average team this year.
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