College basketball fans are used to hearing the use of Basketball Power Index or BPI, a tool that could help differentiate which at-large schools would make it to the March Madness and which ones would not. This time around, however, BPI has been used to project how NBA teams would fare in the fast-approaching NBA season.
For the uninitiated, here’s a basic definition of BPI according to ESPN:
ESPN's NBA Basketball Power Index (BPI) is a measure of team strength developed by the ESPN Analytics team. BPI is meant to be the best predictor of a team's performance for the rest of the season. BPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. BPI accounts for game-by-game efficiency, strength of schedule, pace, days of rest, game location and preseason expectations.
If fate would follow the trajectories of NBA teams according to their respective BPIs, then the NBA Finals would have the Golden State Warriors and the Boston Celtics meeting in the league championship series next year – or at least that’s what’s likely to happen.
👀 (More preseason BPI notes) pic.twitter.com/RcpUYKcV6U
— Chris Forsberg (@ChrisForsberg_) September 20, 2017
The Warriors aren’t just BPI darlings. They’re also the owners of the shortest odds to win the NBA title again in 2018, but the Celtics have retooled over the summer to become a stronger contender in the Eastern Conference than they were in previous seasons. While Isaiah Thomas is now gone, the arrival of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward give Boston a shot in the arm they haven’t had since the days of the Big Three of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen.
Numbers could only tell us so much, however. It still is the action on the court that would determine the champion of the 2017-18 season.
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