Neil PaineMay 21, 2024, 07:00 AM ET
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- Neil Paine writes about sports using data and analytics. Previously, he was Sports Editor at FiveThirtyEight.
Sometimes, to see into the future, you need to look to the past.
For instance, fans have spent the 2024 NBA playoffs daydreaming that the Minnesota Timberwolves' Anthony Edwards is the next Michael Jordan, comparing Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic to previous three-time NBA MVPs and examining the parallels between the 1994 and 2024 New York Knicks. As much as we are often prisoners of the moment, we also frequently use history as a guide to help contextualize the present.
With that in mind, let's borrow the same exercise as when we compared the NHL's top contenders to Stanley Cup winners from years past and search for the most similar historical NBA champions to each of this season's "final four" teams.
Our method looks at both the regular season and playoffs -- with playoff games getting more weight -- and uses several layers of statistics, starting with winning percentage and offensive efficiency, moving through the so-called Four Factors on both sides of the ball and also considering categories such as a team's average age (penalizing a team for being too young or too old) and the quality of its best player (according to Estimated RAPTOR). After using percentiles to scale each of these factors relative to all other playoff teams and weighting them for importance, we found for each conference finalist the NBA champ that had the smallest set of differences across all our metrics.
Going back to 1984, when the league expanded to a 16-team playoff bracket, here are the most similar champions for each remaining squad:
No. 1 seed Boston Celtics
Eastern Conference finals: Game 1 vs. Indiana (Tuesday, 8 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN2)
Title odds: 54.9% (ESPN BET) | 54.5% (BPI)
Most similar champion: 2014 San Antonio Spurs
Championship calling card: Potent offense
There's a good case to be made that the Spurs played the sharpest NBA Finals in modern history when they beat LeBron James and the Miami Heat in 2014. In that five-game series, San Antonio posted the best net rating (+17.2) and second-best offensive rating (118.5) of any team in the Finals since at least 1997, burying Miami under a landslide of efficient and unselfish team basketball. The 2024 Celtics have a similar ability to beat teams in a variety of ways, with many different contributors. They led the NBA in offensive efficiency during the regular season with the highest single-season points per 100 possessions (123.2) in league history, and they're averaging nearly that much (118.3) during the playoffs, as well. In the style of the 2014 Spurs, who rained down a barrage of 3-pointers on the opposition, Boston easily leads all teams in 3s per 100 possessions; the Celtics also have five players with an assist rate in the double digits but below 30%, spreading the ballhandling around just like San Antonio did in the 2014 playoffs.
Biggest question for Celtics: Who's their Kawhi Leonard?
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the biggest differences in our factors between those Spurs and today's Celtics was in the quality of their top player. The 2013-14 season saw Leonard's breakout as an NBA star, a status he officially cemented by winning Finals MVP honors for his all-around excellence as San Antonio breezed past the Heat. Between the regular season and playoffs, Leonard's RAPTOR that campaign was in the top 25% of all championship-leading players since 1984. For the Celtics, No. 1 star Jayson Tatum is instead a bit closer to the median top player on a title team; that's nothing to sneeze at but indicative of how Tatum leads an ensemble cast rather than single-handedly driving the squad's success. (And it is something especially apparent when we get into Tatum's clutch statistics, which could stand to be more Kawhi-like.)
No. 3 seed Minnesota Timberwolves
Western Conference finals: Game 1 vs. Dallas (Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. ET, TNT)
Title odds: 26.6% (ESPN BET) | 18.8% (BPI)
Most similar champion: 2003 San Antonio Spurs
Championship calling card: Suffocating defense
Anthony Edwards has been one of the most electrifying offensive forces of the postseason, ranking fourth among all qualified players with 28.9 points per game -- and Karl-Anthony Towns isn't too far behind, pouring in nearly 19 a night. But make no mistake, the Timberwolves' strength is on the other side of the ball, where they led all teams in defensive rating during the regular season and boast reigning NBA Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert. So, it should come as no surprise that the most similar champions to Minnesota are a bunch of defensive juggernauts, including three of the most exceptional modern examples of teams winning with defense: Tim Duncan and the 2003 Spurs, Kevin Garnett and the 2008 Celtics, and Ben Wallace and the 2004 Detroit Pistons. That's the kind of neighborhood this Wolves team will be moving into if they win the title.
Biggest question for the Wolves: Can they pull off the defense-over-offense formula?
We've seen a few examples of defense-first teams winning it all in recent seasons, such as the 2022 Golden State Warriors (yes, they ranked 17th on offense and No. 1 in defense that season) and the 2019 Toronto Raptors. But it's undeniable that most of the teams to travel that path to glory were from earlier eras of the game -- including the 1990 "Bad Boy" Pistons if we had expanded our list above to the top 10. That's not to say strong defensive teams haven't won rings more recently (the 2015 and 2017 Warriors had top-two defenses), but those efforts were usually coupled with top offenses (Golden State also was among the top two on offense in both of those seasons). By contrast, Minnesota ranked 16th in offensive rating this past regular season. While the Wolves have improved to fourth best among the 16 playoff squads this postseason, they would be the second-lowest-ranked regular-season offense to win a title since those 2004 Pistons finished 18th.
Kyrie shares heartfelt appreciation for teammates
An emotional Kyrie Irving thanks his Mavericks teammates for all their hard work after the team clinches a Western Conference finals berth.
No. 5 seed Dallas Mavericks
Western Conference finals: Game 1 at Minnesota (Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. ET, TNT)
Title odds: 15.1% (ESPN BET) | 20.7% (BPI)
Most similar champion: 1995 Houston Rockets
Championship calling card: Star power
The 1995 Rockets are one of the most fascinating champions of the post-merger era. As years go by, it's easy to lump together Houston's back-to-back champions as part of the same Hakeem Olajuwon squad that won while Michael Jordan was off playing baseball. But after outlasting the Knicks in a seven-game classic Finals in 1994, the follow-up Rockets had a championship hangover, dropping to 11th in net rating and entering the playoffs as the No. 6 seed in the West. Instead of Vernon Maxwell and Otis Thorpe serving among Olajuwon's running mates, the team had traded for Clyde Drexler at midseason and was using that future Hall of Fame core to carry it to the Finals over teams that had better regular-season records. For their part, the Mavs have used the star-powered duo of Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving to knock off two higher-seeded squads ... and counting.
Biggest question for the Mavericks: Will they run out of surprises?
Despite the pedigree of Phi Slamma Jamma teammates Olajuwon and Drexler, Houston was constantly being underestimated during the 1995 postseason. They weren't favored in any of their series, carrying +250 odds into the Western Conference finals against league MVP David Robinson and the Spurs and +130 odds ahead of the NBA Finals versus Shaquille O'Neal, Penny Hardaway and the Orlando Magic. But the Rockets went a combined 8-2 in those series, including a shocking four-game sweep for the title over a squad that had just beaten Jordan's Bulls to win the East. Those Spurs never ran out of teams with superior records to beat. Will these Mavericks?
No. 6 seed Indiana Pacers
Eastern Conference finals: Game 1 at the Celtics (Tuesday, 8 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN2)
Title odds: 3.5% (ESPN BET) | 5.9% (BPI)
Most similar champion: 1995 Houston Rockets
Championship calling card: Elite scoring
Well, this is awkward. We just covered a team whose most similar champion was the 1995 Rockets. Are we really going to do that again? I'll spare us, because the truth is that practically no modern champ is really all that similar to the 2024 Pacers. During the regular season, Indiana won only 57.3% of its games; the team also ranked second in offensive rating but 24th on defense. This is a historically lopsided build for a team trying to win a title, so it's incredibly hard to find parallels from NBA history. The only other team to win it all after a regular season spent winning as little as 57.3% of their games? You guessed it, the 1995 Rockets; but even they weren't as extreme in their reliance on offense to power a title run. So, the pressure continues to be on Tyrese Haliburton, Pascal Siakam & Co. to score enough to make up for their weak defense at the other end of the court.
Biggest question for the Pacers: Can they defy the history of bad defensive squads?
There's something significant about that 24th-place defensive ranking when it comes to the Pacers' championship potential. Since 1984, only four teams have won titles with a defense even ranked outside the top 10 in the league, while only two have won from outside the top 14 and only one champ -- the 2001 Los Angeles Lakers, who ranked 21st -- has won from outside the top 20. Granted, the playoff incarnation of that Lakers team went 15-1 and might have had the greatest postseason of any team ever; but even they weren't quite as suspect defensively as this year's Pacers. (It's also a stretch to compare that team lead by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal to these Pacers in general; by our comparison system, those Lakers rank among the bottom half of all playoff teams since 1984 in similarity to Indiana.) All we can say is, if the Pacers do end up winning it all, it arguably will be the most unique championship season in NBA history.
