"Missing Rings" on Basketball-Reference

[FromWayDowntown]

There will be, I presume, a 2nd part to this and I would think it would include the 05-06 Spurs, but for spots 6-10, the author points to both of the Phoenix teams the Spurs vanquished on their way to titles.

Frankly, I think the '07 Suns were a much better bet to win a title than the '05 team. Suns fans will, I suspect, say otherwise, but that 2005 Suns team lost 6 out of 8 to the Spurs that year, Joe Johnson or not. One of their 2 wins was the infamous night that Pop rested Duncan and Ginobili at Phoenix, prompting Sarver's chicken nonsense. The '05 Spurs were never seriously threatened by that Suns team -- certainly not in the same way that they were threatened by the '07 Suns.

Anyway, here's the list:

http://www.basketball-reference.com/blog/?p=796

Missing Rings: 2000s Edition (Part I)
Posted by Neil Paine on January 12, 2009

As a part of their America’s Game documentaries, the NFL Network has a series called The Missing Rings, which highlights franchises who have never won a Super Bowl, and when they came closest to winning the big game. That’s a topic which seems particularly suited to the NBA (only 8 different franchises have won a title in the last 28 years), and it’s one I’d like to tackle here at some point during the season, if not simply because of pro basketball’s uniquely oligarchical balance of power.


However, today I want to do another variation on the “missing rings” theme: which single-season teams were the best (i.e., most talented, etc.) to never win a championship? The next 2 posts are going to look at the 10 teams this decade that best fit that description. (And don’t worry, Cleveland fans, we’ll finish up the “Virtual 1980s Cavs” series soon as well…You haven’t been forgotten in the new year!)

Unlike the usual Simple Rating System (which just adjusts regular-season margin of victory for schedule strength), the method I’m employing here is a fairly arduous version of the pythagorean formula, incorporating not only strength of schedule, but also playoff games, home-court advantage, and an adjustment for the spread of competition in the league (using the standard deviation and something called a Box-Cox power transformation). Don’t try this at home, folks!

To make a long story short, the end result of the process for every team is a z-score, the number of standard deviations above/below average they were. The best overall team in this period was the 2000 Lakers, who were a full 2.030 standard deviations better than an average team (2nd were the 2005 Spurs, who checked in with a z-score of 2.004). Both of those teams won championships, however; here are the top 10 teams since 2000 that failed to pull off that feat, starting with…

10. 2007 Phoenix Suns
Remember these guys? With the league’s best offense and an underrated D (13th in the NBA), the Suns were well on their way to breaking that tired old “run-n-gun teams can’t win championships” mantra in ‘07, thanks to the dream D’Antoni lineup of Steve Nash, Raja Bell, Shawn Marion, Boris Diaw, and Amare Stoudemire (with a little Leandro Barbosa, Kurt Thomas, and James Jones thrown in for good measure). They had blazed a path to the Western Conference Finals a year earlier without Stoudemire, and had taken care of the Lakers fairly easily in a 5-game quarterfinal series. But then came the Spurs. The two bitter rivals seesawed back and forth, splitting the first 4 games, but we all know about the infamous confrontation that occured in the waning moments of Game 4. Deprived of Stoudemire and Diaw in Game 5, the Suns collapsed down the stretch to lose 88-85, and finally succumbed in Game 6 after a big 3rd quarter by San Antonio. In the end, the Spurs were a superior team… but not by much, leaving many observers wondering what might have been if not for the Game 5 suspensions to 2 of Phoenix’s best players.

9. 2004 San Antonio Spurs

Lest you think San Antonio got off scot-free, the Spurs had their own hard-luck ending in 2004. After winning the first 2 games of their semifinal series against the Lakers’ “4 Hall of Famers” at home, they dropped the next 2 games in Los Angeles, leading to an epic Game 5 in which they desperately fought to keep their home-court advantage. Trailing 72-71 with 5.4 seconds left, Tim Duncan hit a jaw-dropping fallaway jumper from the top of the key with Shaq in his face, giving S.A. a 1-point lead with just 0.4 seconds on the clock. So game over, right? Um, no. Enter Derek Fisher. Fish’s miraculous J gave L.A. a 3-2 series lead, and the Spurs would fall again two nights later in Tinseltown, ending their season. But if Fisher’s shot doesn’t fall, there’s a pretty decent chance San Antonio makes it back-to-back titles in ‘03 and ‘04.

8. 2006 Detroit Pistons

Without Larry Brown in ‘06, the Pistons were expected to take a step backwards under new coach Flip Saunders, who lacked a single galvanizing catchphrase like, say, “play the right way” to inspire his troops. Except instead of regressing, the Pistons ran roughshod over the league during the regular season, starting 42-9 en route to a 64-18 record and the top seed in the East. With four All-Stars in their starting lineup, Detroit took out the Bucks rather easily in Round 1, but they faced a major challenge from LeBron James’ up-and-coming Cleveland Cavaliers in the semis, eventually outlasting the Cavs in a hard-fought 7-game series. Facing the Heat in the conference finals, the Pistons looked tired from the ordeal of the Cleveland series, and the locker-room chemistry that carried them under Brown suddenly evaporated at the most critical stage of the season. Although Detroit valiantly forced a sixth game with a 91-78 win at the Palace in Game 5, the Heat eliminated them in Game 6, ending what had been a terrific season up until mid-May.

7. 2005 Phoenix Suns

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the ‘05 Suns (and not the ‘06 version which pushed Dallas to 6 games in a tightly-contested Western Conference Finals) were the best Phoenix team during the Mike D’Antoni era. Fresh off his first MVP award, Steve Nash led a talented 62-20 Suns team into the playoffs alongside Stoudemire, Marion, Barbosa, Joe Johnson, and Quentin Richardson, and Phoenix beat the Grizzlies and Mavs by a combined margin of 8 games to 2 in the first two rounds of the playoffs. Unfortunately for the Suns, the Spurs team they faced in the West Finals was a buzz saw — as we mentioned earlier, they were the 2nd-best team in the league between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. Despite holding home-court advantage over San Antonio, the Spurs beat the Suns at their own run-and-gun game in the first 2 matchups, and ground out a win at home in Game 3 as well. Though the Suns extended the series with a road victory in Game 4, San Antonio closed out Phoenix in 5 two nights later. Unlike 2007, there were no defining moments in the defeat, no egregious suspensions or blown calls to point to… The Spurs were just better than everybody else, and they proved it by defeating the defending-champion Pistons in the Finals three weeks later.

6. 2000 Portland Trail Blazers

This list is chock full of tragic stories, but perhaps none is more Shakespearean in nature than the infamous collapse of the 2000 Portland Trail Blazers (well, except for the 2002 Kings, but we’ll talk about them in the next installment). Portland was consistently a good team throughout the 1990s (they went to the Finals twice in the early 90s), but they lost in the first round 6 consecutive years from 1993-1998. In 1999, they finally broke through again, advancing to the WCF before being swept by a great Spurs team. In the summer of 1999, they fleeced the Hawks into taking Isaiah Rider off of their hands in exchange for understated team leader Steve Smith, and Portland suddenly had the makings of a championship-caliber squad. Staying in the Lakers’ rearview mirror all season long, the rivals collided in one of the most hotly-contested Western Conference Final series ever. L.A. got the better of Portland early, winning 3 of the first 4 games, but the Blazers battled back to win Game 5 on the road and Game 6 at the Rose Garden. That set up a dramatic Game 7 showdown for all the marbles… And the Blazers jumped out to a surprisingly easy 71-58 lead after 3 quarters. That gap would eventually widen to 75-60 with 10 minutes to play, and it looked like Portland would start the 2000s the same way they kicked off the 90s, with a Finals berth. But then they started to miss shots. And more shots. And suddenly they had bricked 13 consecutive FGAs down the stretch, allowing L.A. to tie the game at 77 with 2:44 to go. With 1:34 remaining, Kobe Bryant made 2 free throws to put the Lakers up 81-79, and it was a lead they would never relinquish. Here’s a YouTube video of the meltdown/comeback, which truly has to be seen to be believed. The Blazers were never the same after this game, quickly devolving into full “Jail Blazer” mode (before Kevin Pritchard rebuilt them into the solid team you see today), while the Lakers used it as a springboard to 3 consecutive titles. All because Portland couldn’t hold on to a 15-point lead with 10 minutes left to play.

[FromWayDowntown]

where's sacramento- 2002?

I'm guessing that they'll be #1.

[sonic21]

I'm guessing that they'll be #1.

sorry stupid question, i didn't see the numbers.

[HarlemHeat37]

well the 2002 Kings basically did win the title..you guys know what I mean..

[NFGIII]

Missing Rings: 2000s Edition (Part I)
Posted by Neil Paine on January 12, 2009

9. 2004 San Antonio Spurs

Lest you think San Antonio got off scot-free, the Spurs had their own hard-luck ending in 2004. After winning the first 2 games of their semifinal series against the Lakers’ “4 Hall of Famers” at home, they dropped the next 2 games in Los Angeles, leading to an epic Game 5 in which they desperately fought to keep their home-court advantage. Trailing 72-71 with 5.4 seconds left, Tim Duncan hit a jaw-dropping fallaway jumper from the top of the key with Shaq in his face, giving S.A. a 1-point lead with just 0.4 seconds on the clock. So game over, right? Um, no. Enter Derek Fisher. Fish’s miraculous J gave L.A. a 3-2 series lead, and the Spurs would fall again two nights later in Tinseltown, ending their season. But if Fisher’s shot doesn’t fall, there’s a pretty decent chance San Antonio makes it back-to-back titles in ‘03 and ‘04.


Frankly it would have been possible to win against the Pistons that year but not very likely. I just didn't have that feeling that the Spurs were clicking on all cyclinders so to say. Hedo was disappearing and TP had yet to come into his own. Anyway that Piston team was a team on a mission. The Rasheed W trade put them over the hump and made them what they would be for several years to come. Their D was fantastic and I thought that they were the best team that year. Look what they did to the Lakers in the Finals.

[taps]

Portland's story is a very good one. I also like the '77 backdoor sweep of Doc J where Walton played out of his mind.

[diego]

since he based this on stats, he should have posted the scores for the champ and the score for the "missing ring" team.

for ex, he says the 05 spurs were the 2nd best team in the league from 00-08 with a 2.004. if the 05 suns were, say, a 1.6, was it really hard luck to get their asses wooped by a much better team? now, if the 05 suns were a 1.98, higher than say the 06 champ heat, you look at it different.

by the way the list is going i think i dont agree with the model anyways.

[galvatron3000]

Frankly it would have been possible to win against the Pistons that year but not very likely. I just didn't have that feeling that the Spurs were clicking on all cyclinders so to say. Hedo was disappearing and TP had yet to come into his own. Anyway that Piston team was a team on a mission. The Rasheed W trade put them over the hump and made them what they would be for several years to come. Their D was fantastic and I thought that they were the best team that year. Look what they did to the Lakers in the Finals.

Spurs just needed to hit shots, other than that the could have beat the Pistons too. Pop should have adjusted his lineup a bit because Hedo was Hedon't against the Lakers and should have been pulled for Manu. Missing shots killed those guys that year. Pistons well, the Hedo vs Tayshaun would have been nice to see, with Duncan and Wallace too. Manu and Rip. That would have been good if the Spurs played better.

[Nathan Explosion]

I suspect we'll see the 2002 Kings, the 95 Spurs and maybe the 2006 Spurs where Duncan carried the team, plantar faciitis and all, and nearly willed the Spurs to a series win over Dallas.

[FromWayDowntown]

I suspect we'll see the 2002 Kings, the 95 Spurs and maybe the 2006 Spurs where Duncan carried the team, plantar faciitis and all, and nearly willed the Spurs to a series win over Dallas.

Since the list only concerns the 2000's, I don't think the 1995 Spurs will be on it. Just a guess, though.

Excluding teams that reached the Finals, I suspect that the last 5 teams on that list will include: 2002 Kings, 2006 Spurs, 2004 Pacers, 2001 Spurs, and the 2005 Heat. Just a guess.

[sonic21]

2004 lakers

[FromWayDowntown]

2004 lakers

While that team had great star-power, it didn't have the flashy regular season that would have made a playoff elimination seem unlikely. They finished with the 3rd best record in the league, but were a pretty pedestrian 7th in differential and, therefore, had a pretty low pythagorean win projection (52-30), which is among the calculations that the author relies upon.

That's why I think they will be excluded -- I certainly could be wrong.

[HarlemHeat37]

the 2006 Spurs better be on it..that Manu foul most likely cost us another title..Duncan's performance in that series was incredible..

[Armando]

the 2006 Spurs better be on it..that Manu foul most likely cost us another title..Duncan's performance in that series was incredible..


Miami was not complaining about that Manu foul.

[Armando]

There will be, I presume, a 2nd part to this and I would think it would include the 05-06 Spurs, but for spots 6-10, the author points to both of the Phoenix teams the Spurs vanquished on their way to titles.

Frankly, I think the '07 Suns were a much better bet to win a title than the '05 team. Suns fans will, I suspect, say otherwise, but that 2005 Suns team lost 6 out of 8 to the Spurs that year, Joe Johnson or not. One of their 2 wins was the infamous night that Pop rested Duncan and Ginobili at Phoenix, prompting Sarver's chicken nonsense. The '05 Spurs were never seriously threatened by that Suns team -- certainly not in the same way that they were threatened by the '07 Suns.

Anyway, here's the list:

http://www.basketball-reference.com/blog/?p=796

Missing Rings: 2000s Edition (Part I)
Posted by Neil Paine on January 12, 2009

As a part of their America’s Game documentaries, the NFL Network has a series called The Missing Rings, which highlights franchises who have never won a Super Bowl, and when they came closest to winning the big game. That’s a topic which seems particularly suited to the NBA (only 8 different franchises have won a title in the last 28 years), and it’s one I’d like to tackle here at some point during the season, if not simply because of pro basketball’s uniquely oligarchical balance of power.


However, today I want to do another variation on the “missing rings” theme: which single-season teams were the best (i.e., most talented, etc.) to never win a championship? The next 2 posts are going to look at the 10 teams this decade that best fit that description. (And don’t worry, Cleveland fans, we’ll finish up the “Virtual 1980s Cavs” series soon as well…You haven’t been forgotten in the new year!)

Unlike the usual Simple Rating System (which just adjusts regular-season margin of victory for schedule strength), the method I’m employing here is a fairly arduous version of the pythagorean formula, incorporating not only strength of schedule, but also playoff games, home-court advantage, and an adjustment for the spread of competition in the league (using the standard deviation and something called a Box-Cox power transformation). Don’t try this at home, folks!

To make a long story short, the end result of the process for every team is a z-score, the number of standard deviations above/below average they were. The best overall team in this period was the 2000 Lakers, who were a full 2.030 standard deviations better than an average team (2nd were the 2005 Spurs, who checked in with a z-score of 2.004). Both of those teams won championships, however; here are the top 10 teams since 2000 that failed to pull off that feat, starting with…

10. 2007 Phoenix Suns
Remember these guys? With the league’s best offense and an underrated D (13th in the NBA), the Suns were well on their way to breaking that tired old “run-n-gun teams can’t win championships” mantra in ‘07, thanks to the dream D’Antoni lineup of Steve Nash, Raja Bell, Shawn Marion, Boris Diaw, and Amare Stoudemire (with a little Leandro Barbosa, Kurt Thomas, and James Jones thrown in for good measure). They had blazed a path to the Western Conference Finals a year earlier without Stoudemire, and had taken care of the Lakers fairly easily in a 5-game quarterfinal series. But then came the Spurs. The two bitter rivals seesawed back and forth, splitting the first 4 games, but we all know about the infamous confrontation that occured in the waning moments of Game 4. Deprived of Stoudemire and Diaw in Game 5, the Suns collapsed down the stretch to lose 88-85, and finally succumbed in Game 6 after a big 3rd quarter by San Antonio. In the end, the Spurs were a superior team… but not by much, leaving many observers wondering what might have been if not for the Game 5 suspensions to 2 of Phoenix’s best players.

9. 2004 San Antonio Spurs

Lest you think San Antonio got off scot-free, the Spurs had their own hard-luck ending in 2004. After winning the first 2 games of their semifinal series against the Lakers’ “4 Hall of Famers” at home, they dropped the next 2 games in Los Angeles, leading to an epic Game 5 in which they desperately fought to keep their home-court advantage. Trailing 72-71 with 5.4 seconds left, Tim Duncan hit a jaw-dropping fallaway jumper from the top of the key with Shaq in his face, giving S.A. a 1-point lead with just 0.4 seconds on the clock. So game over, right? Um, no. Enter Derek Fisher. Fish’s miraculous J gave L.A. a 3-2 series lead, and the Spurs would fall again two nights later in Tinseltown, ending their season. But if Fisher’s shot doesn’t fall, there’s a pretty decent chance San Antonio makes it back-to-back titles in ‘03 and ‘04.

8. 2006 Detroit Pistons

Without Larry Brown in ‘06, the Pistons were expected to take a step backwards under new coach Flip Saunders, who lacked a single galvanizing catchphrase like, say, “play the right way” to inspire his troops. Except instead of regressing, the Pistons ran roughshod over the league during the regular season, starting 42-9 en route to a 64-18 record and the top seed in the East. With four All-Stars in their starting lineup, Detroit took out the Bucks rather easily in Round 1, but they faced a major challenge from LeBron James’ up-and-coming Cleveland Cavaliers in the semis, eventually outlasting the Cavs in a hard-fought 7-game series. Facing the Heat in the conference finals, the Pistons looked tired from the ordeal of the Cleveland series, and the locker-room chemistry that carried them under Brown suddenly evaporated at the most critical stage of the season. Although Detroit valiantly forced a sixth game with a 91-78 win at the Palace in Game 5, the Heat eliminated them in Game 6, ending what had been a terrific season up until mid-May.

7. 2005 Phoenix Suns

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the ‘05 Suns (and not the ‘06 version which pushed Dallas to 6 games in a tightly-contested Western Conference Finals) were the best Phoenix team during the Mike D’Antoni era. Fresh off his first MVP award, Steve Nash led a talented 62-20 Suns team into the playoffs alongside Stoudemire, Marion, Barbosa, Joe Johnson, and Quentin Richardson, and Phoenix beat the Grizzlies and Mavs by a combined margin of 8 games to 2 in the first two rounds of the playoffs. Unfortunately for the Suns, the Spurs team they faced in the West Finals was a buzz saw — as we mentioned earlier, they were the 2nd-best team in the league between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. Despite holding home-court advantage over San Antonio, the Spurs beat the Suns at their own run-and-gun game in the first 2 matchups, and ground out a win at home in Game 3 as well. Though the Suns extended the series with a road victory in Game 4, San Antonio closed out Phoenix in 5 two nights later. Unlike 2007, there were no defining moments in the defeat, no egregious suspensions or blown calls to point to… The Spurs were just better than everybody else, and they proved it by defeating the defending-champion Pistons in the Finals three weeks later.

6. 2000 Portland Trail Blazers

This list is chock full of tragic stories, but perhaps none is more Shakespearean in nature than the infamous collapse of the 2000 Portland Trail Blazers (well, except for the 2002 Kings, but we’ll talk about them in the next installment). Portland was consistently a good team throughout the 1990s (they went to the Finals twice in the early 90s), but they lost in the first round 6 consecutive years from 1993-1998. In 1999, they finally broke through again, advancing to the WCF before being swept by a great Spurs team. In the summer of 1999, they fleeced the Hawks into taking Isaiah Rider off of their hands in exchange for understated team leader Steve Smith, and Portland suddenly had the makings of a championship-caliber squad. Staying in the Lakers’ rearview mirror all season long, the rivals collided in one of the most hotly-contested Western Conference Final series ever. L.A. got the better of Portland early, winning 3 of the first 4 games, but the Blazers battled back to win Game 5 on the road and Game 6 at the Rose Garden. That set up a dramatic Game 7 showdown for all the marbles… And the Blazers jumped out to a surprisingly easy 71-58 lead after 3 quarters. That gap would eventually widen to 75-60 with 10 minutes to play, and it looked like Portland would start the 2000s the same way they kicked off the 90s, with a Finals berth. But then they started to miss shots. And more shots. And suddenly they had bricked 13 consecutive FGAs down the stretch, allowing L.A. to tie the game at 77 with 2:44 to go. With 1:34 remaining, Kobe Bryant made 2 free throws to put the Lakers up 81-79, and it was a lead they would never relinquish. Here’s a YouTube video of the meltdown/comeback, which truly has to be seen to be believed. The Blazers were never the same after this game, quickly devolving into full “Jail Blazer” mode (before Kevin Pritchard rebuilt them into the solid team you see today), while the Lakers used it as a springboard to 3 consecutive titles. All because Portland couldn’t hold on to a 15-point lead with 10 minutes left to play.



I agree with you. The 2007 Suns were better built to beat the Spurs. Kurt Thomas allowed them to play Duncan 1 on 1 and stay home on Manu and Parker. Plus it kept Amare and Marion from foul trouble and wearing out having to guard him. But it was not meant to be. Blown chance by the Suns.

[timvp]

Nice find :tu

It'll be interesting to see if the 2001 Spurs make the list. That team, IRRC, had the largest point differential of any Spurs team that didn't win the championship. But according to the article, the formula takes into account the playoffs ... and Game 3 and Game 4 of the Lakers series probably negated any positives from that team :lol

[Ditty]

Nice find :tu

It'll be interesting to see if the 2001 Spurs make the list. That team, IRRC, had the largest point differential of any Spurs team that didn't win the championship. But according to the article, the formula takes into account the playoffs ... and Game 3 and Game 4 of the Lakers series probably negated any positives from that team :lol

yah we were 8-2 going into the lakers series and if we would of won that year defintly we would have 5 titles on our shoulders right now and trying to match jordan's bulls this year and truly say we win it every other year

2006 dalllas mavs anyone?

about how they were up 2-0 to the heat and blew 4 games in a row maybe number 2

[scanry]

the 2006 Spurs better be on it..that Manu foul most likely cost us another title..Duncan's performance in that series was incredible..

Stupid ass Manu cost us a definte championship in 2006. However without Manu, the Mavs would've swept us in that series.

The Spurs would've routed the Heat that year if we had got through.

[ClingingMars]

Miami was not complaining about that Manu foul.

:toast that's for sure

-Mars

[galvatron3000]

Nice find :tu

It'll be interesting to see if the 2001 Spurs make the list. That team, IRRC, had the largest point differential of any Spurs team that didn't win the championship. But according to the article, the formula takes into account the playoffs ... and Game 3 and Game 4 of the Lakers series probably negated any positives from that team :lol

dang it was thinking of the 2003 team

[HarlemHeat37]

well ya, obviously without Manu we wouldn't have went that far..but that's irrelevant, because my point was that it was just a ridiculously unnecessary and stupid foul, that could(and SHOULD) have been avoided..

[FromWayDowntown]

Here are 1-5 in this analyst's list:

http://www.basketball-reference.com/blog/?p=818

Okay, you’ve been waiting for it and here it is, our list of the 5 best teams since 1999-2000 (based on regular-season and playoff pythagorean win %, adjusted for home/road performance, strength of schedule, and league competitive balance) that failed to win a title…


5. 2006 San Antonio Spurs

The Spurs make a ton of appearances on this list; in addition to their 3 titles this decade, they’ve also had a number of near-misses, which I suppose is one of the consequences of being a contender every single year (since 2000, their average season has consisted of 58 wins and a 6.81 SRS). In ‘06, they came particularly close to greatness, falling in overtime of Game 7 against Dallas in the Western Conference Semifinals. People forget that San Antonio actually led the Mavs 104-101 with 32 seconds left in that game, but Manu Ginobili’s foul on Dirk Nowitzki with 21 seconds left led to a 3-point play which forced OT, where Dallas outscored the Spurs 15-7. It was an unfortunate end to a banner season for San Antonio, who set a new franchise record with 63 wins and led the NBA in defensive efficiency and SRS. In an alternate universe where Ginobili heeds Gregg Popovich’s exhortations to not foul, there’s a good chance the Spurs — whose defense was far better equipped to stop Dwyane Wade than Dallas’ — win 3 straight titles from 2005-2007.

4. 2002 Sacramento Kings

It was as evenly-matched a series as you’ll ever find in the NBA, and the long-suffering Kings had clawed their way to a 3-2 advantage by gutting out a 92-91 victory in Game 5. The 2-time defending champion Lakers were on the ropes, especially considering the fact that they’d have already been eliminated if not for Robert Horry’s miracle buzzer-beater in Game 4 (or Samaki Walker’s 3-pointer to end of the 1st half, which counted despite clearly being released after the buzzer sounded). Then came Game 6, one of the most controversial games in sports history (even before Tim Donaghy’s allegations). I don’t want to get into the merits of some of those calls against Sacramento (though our friend Roland Beech has a very good breakdown here), but I will say that this was the high-water mark for the Kings, and obviously the absolute best chance their early-2000s team had to win a championship. They were the NBA’s best team by SRS that season and essentially equal to L.A. by the method I’m using to rank teams here; East champ New Jersey would not have stood any more of a chance against the Kings in the NBA Finals than they ultimately did against the Lakers (who swept them 4-0). So for better or for worse, the WCF was the de facto Finals that year, and it’s a terrible shame that such a great matchup and an intense rivalry had to end under such controversy. Both teams — and, more importantly, we the fans — deserved better.

3. 2006 Dallas Mavericks

When considering home/road splits and playoff performance, the Mavs slightly edge out the Spurs in ‘06 despite a lower SRS. That’s because Dallas also had to close out a tough Phoenix team (one which made our honorable mention list) in the Conference Finals, and they were only outscored by 1 PPG on average in the Finals. This team seemingly had a title firmly in its grasp, up 2-0 on the Heat and leading by 13 with 6:34 to go in Game 3… but then Dwyane Wade took over the series, rallying Miami all the way back to a 98-96 win (a possible game-tying FT missed by Dirk Nowitzki with 3.4 seconds left didn’t help Dallas’ cause, either). Wade would go on to torment the Mavs for the rest of the series, averaging 34.7 PPG en route to MVP honors; Avery Johnson threw everything he had — Adrian Griffin, Marquis Daniels, Devin Harris, Josh Howard, and a variety of zone looks — at Wade, but ultimately no one could stop him when he made up his mind to attack the basket. The Heat were a team that peaked at the right time, and the Wade-Shaq tandem was tailor-made to exploit the Mavs’ defensive weaknesses, but it’s worth remembering that Dallas had a fantastic season and were close to winning this series (despite Wade’s heroics) if not for a few late-game miscues.

2. 2003 Dallas Mavericks

Oddly enough, the Mavs’ ‘06 Finals team wasn’t even their best of the 2000s — that honor belongs instead to the 2003 team, which boasted the league’s top SRS by a wide margin and had one of the best offenses in NBA history (who else misses the Steve Nash/Dirk Nowitzki pairing?). They tied San Antonio for the league’s best record with 60 wins, and ran through a brutal playoff gauntlet which included Portland (6th in SRS), Sacramento (2nd in SRS, albeit with Chris Webber suffering an untimely injury in Game 2), and finally San Antonio (3rd in SRS). If not for some clutch long-range shooting from Steve Kerr late in Game 6, the Mavs could very well have advanced to the Finals, where they would likely have been favored over the Nets. Most people will look back and see the 2006 Dallas team that squandered a 2-0 Finals lead over Miami as the Mavericks’ best Nowitzki-era team, but the numbers show that the 2002-03 version was in fact Dallas’ top squad of the decade.

1. 2001 San Antonio Spurs

Not the team you were expecting, right? Well, look at the numbers: At 58-24, San Antonio sported the league’s best record. They led the league in pythagorean wins with 62.7. They were 6th in offense, and were #1 in defense. Their 7.92 SRS was by far the best in the league (Sacramento’s 6.07 and Utah’s 5.00 ranked a distant 2nd and 3rd, respectively). The 2001 Spurs were simply dominant for most of the season, and they did it in the most competitively-balanced league of the decade. Under the formula outlined here, they were 1.920 standard deviations above an average team, which was one of the best marks of any team, champion or otherwise, during the 2000s.

Unfortunately, the Spurs’ ‘01 campaign has a pretty glaring flaw — they were outclassed in every sense of the word by the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. L.A. had battled injuries all year long (Derek Fisher missed 62 games, Ron Harper missed 35, and Kobe Bryant sat out 14), plus — let’s be real about it — they also coasted big-time during the regular-season, assuming they could “turn it on” come May. And boy, did they ever. They only lost once during the playoffs, and they toasted the Spurs by an average margin of 22.3 PPG in a devastating 4-game sweep.

Still, the Spurs were clearly the 2nd-best team in the NBA in 2001, and though their regular-season numbers won’t show it, the 2001 Lakers (playoff version) were just about as dominating a force as any team in league history. The way they exited the playoffs was admittedly embarrassing, but that’s no reason to forget the ‘01 Spurs’ legitimately great full-season performance.

________________________

For ease of reference, here is the complete list:

10. 2007 Phoenix Suns
9. 2004 San Antonio Spurs
8. 2006 Detroit Pistons
7. 2005 Phoenix Suns
6. 2000 Portland Trail Blazers
5. 2006 San Antonio Spurs
4. 2002 Sacramento Kings
3. 2006 Dallas Mavericks
2. 2003 Dallas Mavericks
1. 2001 San Antonio Spurs

[m33p0]

i've been waiting for this. thanks for updating. :tu

[m33p0]

People forget that San Antonio actually led the Mavs 104-101 with 32 seconds left in that game, but Manu Ginobili’s foul on Dirk Nowitzki with 21 seconds left led to a 3-point play which forced OT, where Dallas outscored the Spurs 15-7.
heartbreaker :depressed

[Bender]

what was the controversy in 2002 with the kings / lakers ? did the refs hand the game to the lakers?

I followed the NBA back in the 1970s, then I became an NFL fan instead. Did not start following the NBA again until 2003...

[mexicanjunior]

We can thank Juwan Howard for screwing our chances of being competitive with the Lakers in 2001. Once Derek Anderson was out, we didn't have anyone athletic enough to run and gun with that Laker team. I think he would have really helped our chances in those first 2 close games in San Antonio. Once we dropped both of them, the team folded...

[IronMexican]

Awesome list. No 2004 Lakers? Who knows if Malone was healthy, right? And I love America's Game: Missing Rings. Almost makes me cry at times.

[mexicanjunior]

And I love America's Game: Missing Rings. Almost makes me cry at times.

I love that show also...The Bills, Chargers and Bengals episodes were great.

[FromWayDowntown]

Awesome list. No 2004 Lakers? Who knows if Malone was healthy, right? And I love America's Game: Missing Rings. Almost makes me cry at times.

Again, the list has everything to do with teams that were great during the regular season and faced quality playoff pools but came up short. I've argued earlier in this thread that the 2004 Lakers weren't exactly a regular season juggernaut:


While that team had great star-power, it didn't have the flashy regular season that would have made a playoff elimination seem unlikely. They finished with the 3rd best record in the league, but were a pretty pedestrian 7th in differential and, therefore, had a pretty low pythagorean win projection (52-30), which is among the calculations that the author relies upon.

[Phenomanul]

How does one rank the 2001 Spurs at the top of this list and not mention the Derek Anderson injury as a significant detriment? By losing Anderson the Spurs lost their season x-factor, their only true slasher, and one of their most athletic players - it was a more devastating blow to the Spurs' chances than the general NBA community would ever admit - particularly because Anderson never really played out to his potential after leaving the Spurs.

[FromWayDowntown]

How does one rank the 2001 Spurs at the top of this list and not mention the Derek Anderson injury as a significant detriment? By losing Anderson the Spurs lost their season x-factor, their only true slasher, and one of their most athletic players - it was a more devastating blow to the Spurs' chances than the general NBA community would ever admit - particularly because Anderson never really played out to his potential after leaving the Spurs.

I think that's a good point. While I don't think it would have ultimately changed the outcome of that WCF series, I think it might have affected whether the Spurs went out in 4, 5, or 6. Games 1 and 2 of that series were winnable for the Spurs, and with a win in, say, Game 2 (which the Spurs led most of the way) a Game 5 win wouldn't have been out of the question. They weren't ever going to win that series, though.

This list and the frequent inclusion of the Spurs on it led me to ponder another question: did the fiasco in 2001 against LA forever change the public perception of this Spurs "dynasty" and make it impossible for this group to win the widespread view that they are a historically-significant club? I frankly think it might have. I think that had the Spurs lived up to their 2001 billing in that series and at least pushed that Laker team a bit, there would have been less doubt about whether they were historically great. Of course, at the same time, I think the cleansing that came after the Laker beatdown in 2001 led to the culture that now makes the Spurs the always-dangerous team of venerable veterans. But that practicality aside, I think the greatness of the Spurs' run since 1999, while mostly acknowledged, has suffered from that 2001 series. Curious what others think.

[HarlemHeat37]

what was the controversy in 2002 with the kings / lakers ? did the refs hand the game to the lakers?



game 6 of that series was probably the worst officiated game in NBA history..the Kings were completely screwed the entire game, and they managed to have the advantage for most of it, despite the shady officiating..some of the worst calls I've ever seen..it got to the point where even the announcers were talking about how ridiculous it was..

Laker fans like to bring up game 5, but nothing was even close to that game..typical Laker fan shit..

[mexicanjunior]

This list and the frequent inclusion of the Spurs on it led me to ponder another question: did the fiasco in 2001 against LA forever change the public perception of this Spurs "dynasty" and make it impossible for this group to win the widespread view that they are a historically-significant club? I frankly think it might have. I think that had the Spurs lived up to their 2001 billing in that series and at least pushed that Laker team a bit, there would have been less doubt about whether they were historically great. Of course, at the same time, I think the cleansing that came after the Laker beatdown in 2001 led to the culture that now makes the Spurs the always-dangerous team of venerable veterans. But that practicality aside, I think the greatness of the Spurs' run since 1999, while mostly acknowledged, has suffered from that 2001 series. Curious what others think.

I think you may be on to something there...