The 2023-24 Boston Celtics Are One of the Greatest Regular-Season Teams in NBA History
For now, let's put aside what that means in the playoffs and appreciate greatness.
It’s easy to let the long NBA regular season wash over you, numb to the daily ups and downs of various teams and players across the league. But every so often, a result is so eye-popping that it cuts through even the dog days of early March.
Such was the case on Sunday, when the Boston Celtics rolled all over the Golden State Warriors. Boston finished the first half on a 61-17 run (no that’s not a typo) and ended up blowing the doors off Steph Curry and company by 52 points, the third-most lopsided victory in the history of the NBA’s winningest franchise.
Even setting aside the fact that it was the Warriors’ fourth game of a six-day road trip, this was an impressive clinic, put on by a team that has been the NBA’s best for most of the season. It was also Boston’s 11th win in a row; they haven’t lost back-to-back games since Nov. 8, 2023. Sunday’s rout should be a wake-up call that this isn’t any ordinary great NBA team. This Celtics squad is looking like one of the best ever, at least in terms of regular season history.
Let’s run through a few ways we can measure regular-season dominance. There’s basic winning percentage, whereby the Celtics’ .800 mark (48-12) ranks 14th-best since the ABA merger and 19th-best in league history:
That’s pretty impressive — a team the likes of this comes around every 4.1 years in NBA/BAA history, on average. But Boston looks even more impressive if we start to dig deeper into their numbers. Let’s take a look at the best teams ever by Net Rating (i.e., offensive efficiency minus defensive efficiency), using Basketball-Reference’s estimates for seasons prior to when turnovers and various other key stats were tracked.
By that standard, the 2023-24 Celtics are essentially tied with the 2016-17 Kevin Durant Warriors for the third-best regular season in NBA history, trailing only the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls of 1995-96 and 1996-97. Of course, these ratings aren’t adjusted for strength of schedule, which could make a difference when splitting hairs among the best teams ever. What happens if we look instead at Basketball-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS), which adjusts a team’s points-per-game margin for the average quality of its opponents faced?
There, they edge slightly ahead of the 2017 Warriors, but are also passed by the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks and 1971-72 L.A. Lakers, so Boston stays in fourth place. Finally, let’s see where the Celtics rank according to the end-of-regular-season Elo ratings, which chart any given team’s course with a rolling rating that changes over time based on its results.
Because it takes a longer view of things and cares more about W-L records, Elo is a little harder to impress, knocking this year’s Celtics down to 10th all-time. But still, Boston should enter the playoffs with one of the highest Elo ratings a team has ever had at that stage of the season.
Any way you slice it, the Celtics should be on the short list of best regular-season NBA teams ever. That doesn’t always translate to a title — see No. 1 on the Elo list above — but these dominant regular-season teams have a pretty good track record of cashing in on their championship potential. Sometimes, it’s simply the Year of a Great Team, in which all the pieces fit right and that squad rules the league wire-to-wire. This season is looking like it may well end up being the Year of the Celtics when all is said and done.
Filed under: NBA
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