Last fortnight’s NBA Power Rankings are right here.
All team statistics are recorded as of games played on Apr. 7th. This model is now using luck-adjusted ratings (with adjustments to account for turnover rates, free throw rates, and rebound rates to capture shooting luck. A few of the Sunday contests aren’t included in the model, which marginally affects the results.
Here are the results after the penultimate week of NBA action. Because the NBA Power Rankings’ data was not compiled using rolling averages, extraordinarily hot/cold teams aren’t given strikingly high/low valuations; rather it’s an evaluation/estimation of a team’s winning success given its year-long offensive and defensive execution.
Notes for this week’s rankings
- This doesn’t necessarily imply that these teams have championship odds that perfectly correlate with their placement in the rankings.
- The random forest measures Portland and Oklahoma City as if they are each confident playoff teams, but hierarchical clustering is predisposed against teams with underwhelming shot profiles– therefore, they’ve been reflected a bit poorly by the final outcome. This is an assessment of their bodies of work (specifically OKC in this case, which shoots more than a percentage point below the league average TS%). As the Thunder showed last night, their ceiling is a bit higher if their defense plays dependably. But was that defensive intensity just an aberration?
