Does the NBA Have More Great Teams Than Ever — Or Just More Bad Ones?
The league is stacked at the top this year. It's also weak at the very bottom.
With all the off-court drama leading up to this week’s NBA trade deadline, it’s easy to forget that games are still being played — and many of them are producing some pretty extreme results this season.
At the positive extreme, the Oklahoma City Thunder are having one of the greatest statistical regular seasons in NBA history. As of the morning of Deadline Day on Thursday, their schedule-adjusted PPG margin of +12.9 is tracking to be the highest ever in a single season, and their +13.0 net rating is second only to Michael Jordan’s 72-win Chicago Bulls from 1995-96 since the ABA merger. And OKC isn’t alone at the top: the Cleveland Cavaliers also rank 10th since the merger with a +10.3 net rating (sandwiched between the 2014-15 and 2015-16 Golden State Warriors), and the Boston Celtics have followed an all-time season of their own last year with the 25th-highest net rating ever (+9.0) this season.
The negative side is nearly as extreme. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but the Washington Wizards are bad — like, “lose 16 straight games multiple times in the same season” bad. Because of this, Washington’s -13.5 net rating is tracking to be the third worst in postmerger NBA history, ahead of only the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats and 1992-93 Dallas Mavericks (both are tied at -15.2). This means the 2024-25 NBA regular season is on pace to be the first in modern history to contain both a team with a +12 net rating and a -12 net rating at the same time.
All of this begs the question asked by reader
, who wondered whether the league’s best teams are that good, or if the worst teams are that bad?Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Neil’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.