With the All-Star Game in the books, it’s time to reset the NBA’s title race heading into the stretch run of the regular season.
The Boston Celtics, preseason championship co-favorites with the Milwaukee Bucks after adding Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, have lived up to that billing by taking a four-game lead over the rest of the league with a balanced combination of offense (No. 1 on a per-possession basis) and defense (No. 3) that augurs well for a deep playoff run.
Out West, the race for the top spot is more competitive. Although the Minnesota Timberwolves have opened up a 1.5-game lead over the Oklahoma City Thunder, the top four teams — including the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets — are separated by just three games.
Meanwhile, three of the teams with the most playoff experience in the field, the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat, lurk in play-in range after the Heat and Lakers rose up through the play-in a year ago to reach the conference finals (and, in Miami’s case, the NBA Finals).
Now that rosters are largely set with the trade deadline complete and the buyout market unlikely to yield any other players of note, let’s look at who is most likely to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy in June by sorting the contenders into tiers based on their chances of winning.
It’s possible we’ll look back in June at an 18th Celtics banner — which would edge them past the Lakers’ total across Minneapolis and Los Angeles — as inevitable. Quietly, Boston is putting together an all-time regular season. The Celtics are threatening to become just the 13th team in NBA history to outscore opponents by at least 10 points per game.
At one time, that all but assured a title. Through the first Warriors trophy in 2015, the only team in the plus-10 club not to win the championship was the 1971-72 Bucks — who happened to run into another member of the group (the Lakers) in the conference finals. Since then, just one of the past four teams to accomplish the feat (the 2016-17 Golden State team that added Kevin Durant) has actually completed the run in the playoffs, with both the 2015-16 Warriors and San Antonio Spurs as well as the 2019-20 Bucks falling victim to upsets.Despite the recent disconnect between regular-season success and the playoffs, there’s reason to believe in Boston. The Celtics’ offseason moves addressed their biggest postseason shortcoming: mucky late-game offense. Boston’s offensive rating ranks fifth in what NBA Advanced Stats defines as clutch situations (when the score is within five points in the last five minutes of regulation or any overtime) after finishing 11th last season and 26th in 2021-22.
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