Per Ringer The 1995 Rockets had most difficult path to the NBA Title

Of course they beat 2 60 win teams and 2 55 plus win teams in route to the title

 

while not having HCA in any series

 

Robert Horry is the great equalizer.

 

i remember deciding one day i was going to do essentially what they did. match up all pythagorean win counts (or SRS) and see how playoffs would play out and see who won more or less than they should. then i realized two things:

a) i had no ability to extract all the data from basketball-reference and i wasn't going to do it manually for all of nba history
b) i did it for a couple of years and quickly realized this method really underrates great teams and makes players on those teams look good

i know they said the model is good at predicting series results, but i just feel like heavy favorites tend to win nba titles way more than a simple multiplication of 4 consecutive series odds would indicate. and good but not great teams rarely if ever win. the method simply produces title odds that are too close together between great teams and good teams and nba history says that's not how it plays out at the highest levels. it's extremely tough to get titles odds much over 50% by multiplying series odds, and yet does anyone really feel like jordan was expected to win 2.8 titles? i suppose there could have been some doubt in the first one, but after that i think people assumed the bulls would win every other title they won and that it would have been a failure to not win them.

kobe has 1.3 expected titles and shaq only has 1.6! that's a crazy under-estimate for those two. it felt like shaq/kobe were supposed to win all 3 titles they won. sure, it took an epic 4th quarter collapse by the blazers and massive ref screwjob against sacramento to get it done, but what happened was exactly what the world thought would happen. i guess 2004 felt inevitable and then wasn't, but the outliers seem to be exactly that, outliers. people pretty much thought the lakers and celtics would win every 80's titles and they basically did. russell's celtics seemed dominant and they won 11 titles, even though you would probably need like a 75-7 record every year to predict 11 in 13. there doesn't seem to be a way to quantify it with simple regular season point differentials, but it's there.

which is probably because of the next point. great teams often underperform in the regular season because they don't have to care. the recent warriors put up something like back to back 57 and 58 win seasons with 4 all-stars. does anyone think they were 58 win teams when playing at full intensity? pythagorus can tell us lebron james 2009 cleveland team with 66 wins and mo williams as the 2nd best player was 4x more likely to win than jordan's 1993 team with 57 wins and scottie pippen, but i don't think anyone watching either year felt that way. the 2001 lakers tore everyone apart in the playoffs but shaq was lazy enough to hold them to a pythagorean win total of 51. so basically being lazy in the regular season makes you look good by this measure. even the rockets last year, by injury or underperformance, only won 53 games, but i don't think anyone thought we were anything other than a major contender.

i'm sure the method predicts the average playoff team against the average playoff team really well, because their numbers are probably based on maximizing their regular season performance. there's simply too much difference in regular season and playoff intensity from great teams for this to mean that much.

all that said, hakeem with 0.1 expected titles and winning 2 and getting to a 3rd finals is another reason why he needs to be held up high in the rankings (although our '95 team is also a good example of regular season underperformance with underlying ability obviously being there, even if i don't think we were being lazy). the rockets won in seasons where there was no obvious winner like some of the other examples i was talking about, so the odds are probably decently accurate. though we obviously benefited from the sonics being knocked out by someone who wasn't us.