Kurtenbach: How the Warriors broke one of the NBA’s most popular prediction models

The Warriors came into this postseason as an unknown. Klay Thompson only played once the calendar flipped to 2022, Draymond Green dealt with an injury that kept him out for two months, and then Steph Curry missed the final 12 games of the regular season with a foot injury.

In all, the Warriors were a sub-.500 team after the All-Star Game and entered the postseason without a set rotation, momentum, or any sort of continuity on both sides of the court.

So of course they reached the NBA Finals.

Now that Golden State is in a sixth NBA Finals in eight years and sits four wins away from a fourth title, there are plenty of believers in the Warriors once again.

The wise guys in the desert — or, more accurately, the bookies pushing odds to your phone in certain states — love the Warriors to win the title, regardless of the opponent.

In fact, after Boston lost a series-clinching game at home against Miami on Friday night, pushing the Western Conference Finals to a Game 7, it seems as if everyone — not just the bettors — is in on the Dubs.

But the computers remain skeptical.

Ok, it’s only one computer I know about, but there could be more out there. Cyberspace is vast.

By now, you might have seen a screenshot or heard tell of the website FiveThirtyEight’s NBA predictive model. They call it RAPTOR — who cares why? — and as of Saturday morning, says that the Warriors, despite being in the NBA Finals and being the odds-on favorites to win the title, have only a 29 percent chance of winning the series.

So the @celtics beat the @warriors in seven 83% of the time according to @FiveThirtyEight

I’m not a statistician or big nba guy but that seems high… pic.twitter.com/G38XDefanw

— Kyle Cattermole (@KCattermole) May 28, 2022

Twenty-nine percent?

Surely they must be joking.

(Did I do a good job faking outrage there?)

That Golden State title percentage — which has risen from as low as 7 percent in recent weeks  — has become a bit of an internet meme. It’s been tossed around so much — paired with the necessary outrage, of course (it’s the internet, after all) — that it could make someone believe that these Warriors are the second-coming of the We Believe team.

Well, I’m sorry to say that these Dubs are no underdogs.

No, Golden State was, instead, a team that had only played up to its full potential for a few moments — a few games at the absolute most — this season.

And it’s now fair to say that the Warriors are playing somewhere close to that level as they await their NBA Finals opponent. Things changed for the Warriors.

The model remained the same.

The truth is that 11 total minutes of Steph, Klay, and Dray on the floor together in the regular season is going to mess up a predictive algorithm just a bit.

You can only get out what is put in, and what the Warriors had put in before the postseason (and even in the postseason) was not championship material.

Some bullheaded columnist might have even written a column in early March going that the team had lost the benefit of the doubt regarding their championship contender credentials.

I’m not sure when, exactly, those credentials were regained. The end of the Memphis series, perhaps? That even feels like a stretch given how the Warriors messed around against their first-round opponent, the Nuggets, and were pushed hard by the Grizzlies, who at one point in Game 5 of that series held a 55-point lead.

Maybe the turn didn’t happen until the Warriors played Dallas. Perhaps it came after they beat Dallas. It’s kind of hard to say a team isn’t a championship contender when they’re now playing for a title.

One could make the argument that a team that is four wins away from raising a banner is yet to play its best basketball this season.

This might just be the reality of the new NBA. In a sport so often defined by dominant squads, this is an era of parity.

There was even a colloquial name for it: The post-Warriors era.

We might want to get together and think about re-branding that one.

The Warriors have found their form in this postseason and that deserves plaudits and trophies.

But let’s be honest: The team’s three matchups heading to these Finals have proven favorable as well.

A shorthanded Denver team stood no chance against the Dubs, even with NBA MVP Nikola Jokić.

Once Memphis lost Ja Morant, that was curtains for them in the semifinals.

And then the Mavericks tried to beat the Warriors with one guy. How did anyone think that was going to go well?

But the results are unimpeachable: The Warriors have won three of every four games this postseason. They have the best offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) in the playoffs, too. Curry, Green, and Thompson have played 308 minutes together this postseason and have outscored opponents by 61 points.

Whether it is matchups, a team rounding into form, or a combination of those two things and so much more, the Warriors are unquestionably a different team now than they were just a few weeks ago.

The data that brought you the now-famous 29 percent number is out-of-date. And there’s nothing FiveThirtyEight or any other similar operation can do about it.

The Warriors sandbagged them. They sandbagged us all.

And speaking of sand, if you want to know what the Warriors’ actual chances are for winning this year’s title — go with the numbers from the guys in the desert.