Last year's Eastern Conference playoffs showed how a stronger team can overcome not having home-court advantage, which the Boston Celtics ultimately did, as projected.
And going in to the play-in games, both conferences' 9 and 10 seeds have a higher model rating than their respective 8 seed. The wrinkle is, having to win two games instead of one is really hard - especially with the second being on the road. So even being the "weaker" team, the 8 seed has a huge advantage, and both make the playoffs ~3/4th of the time:
Should these results hold, the 1 and 2 seeds in each conference still shouldn't have much difficulty in the first round. Milwaukee, Boston, Denver, and Memphis are all significantly stronger (and have home court) over any of the possible 7 or 8 seeds:
I'll update this after the play-in games are done, but as it stands, it's better than 50/50 that one of Boston, Milwaukee, and Phoenix will win the title.
No comments:
Post a Comment