The Nuggets are better, but the Celtics are still the favorites

The title of this article was intentionally provocative, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

Right and wrong is such a nebulous concept in sportswriting. Statistically, nobody really knows anything and predicting the outcome of games is largely impossible. Otherwise, the sports betting industry couldn’t possibly exist.

Instead, this provocative statement that the Nuggets are clearly a better team yet the Celtics are still the title favorites is meant to illustrate the glorious complexity yet elegant simplicity of sports, and how with enough numbers, calculations, extrapolations, garlic, salt, pepper, and maybe a little soy sauce you can make any emotionally contrived belief into a reality. At least on paper.

The Nuggets are definitely better than the Celtics. By “better,” I don’t mean they have a better record (they don’t) nor do I mean they have a better chance of winning the NBA Finals (we’ll get to that). I simply mean that in a straight-up matchup, the Nuggets have a clear advantage over the Celtics. They are the only team in the league that can say that.

The Nuggets present an incredibly unique challenge, both on paper and on a basketball court. Denver is 10th in offensive rating, which sounds low until you realize their 117.2 number is actually better than last year when they ranked 5th. What’s alarming, though, is how they achieve this without many three-pointers.

Among the teams I’d consider to have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the 2024 NBA Championship—Boston, Milwaukee, Denver, Minnesota, Oklahoma City, LA Clippers, and Cleveland—Denver generates by far the fewest points from three-pointers, 27th in the league at a pedestrian 29.9 percent. The next closest team in that group is the Thunder, who are 11 spots higher at 33.3 percent.

The lesson from that blitzkrieg of statistics is not “every team should shoot fewer three-pointers,” but rather that the Nuggets are a completely different beast than their peers. For 29 teams, three-point shooting is like an arms race. It is not mathematically feasible to rely primarily on two point shots, given that one’s opponent is statistically expected to make about 36 percent of about 35 attempts per game.

That’s 36 points, which would require 51 percent shooting on the same number of shots if one wanted to do that with only two pointers in the same number of possessions. That’s pretty doable, but things get dicey when opposing teams shoot anything better than 36 percent from three. The feasibility of shooting two-pointers falls off as soon as you begin to scale three-point success.

But basketball isn’t played on a spreadsheet. The Nuggets routinely buck this trend even though the odds of successfully navigating a statistical asteroid field is 3720 to 1. Spreadsheets can track huge swaths of data, but they don’t tell you how good a shot is. Enter Nikola Jokic, fine purveyor of getting everyone a really good shot.

There’s absolutely no terminator-wizard-magic going on here. It’s just a simple dribble hand off into a soft spot on the elbow, with Jokic realizing that Al Horford was dropped way too deep to get a good contest on Caldwell-Pope. In real time, it feels like you’re getting beat over the head with a plastic toy hammer. In slow motion, it’s truly beautiful.

That does not, however, mean the Celtics are completely hopeless in a potential Finals matchup, though it’s probably not ideal. Had the Celtics shot 36 percent or better from three instead of a pitiful 28 percent, they would have won by three. Had they hit their magic number of 40 percent or better, it wouldn’t have been particularly close.

There’s always a chance the Celtics get hot-enough often-enough in a single seven game series to beat this beastly Denver team, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on that kind of variance in a straight-up, winner-take-all series. So how on Earth can I say the Celtics are still the favorites?

Well, I said I wouldn’t bet the farm on the Celtics getting hot enough to overpower the Nuggets, but I might bet at least a few months’ harvest and a bunch of livestock on somebody doing that over the course of the playoffs. The Nuggets play a style of basketball that translates gloriously to the playoffs when guys tighten up and the game slows down, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get caught in the variance blender.

In Game 2 of the 2023 NBA Finals, the Miami Heat shot 49 percent from three to snag their lone win of the series. In Game 3 of the Second Round against the Phoenix Suns, Denver wasn’t able to overcome the Devin Booker and Kevin Durant combining for 86 points. Could something like that happen enough times in a row in the West?

The Celtics remaining the title favorites comes down to a simple probability calculation. If a Nuggets-Celtics Finals started tomorrow, I’d bet my tractor and any remaining crops on the Nuggets. But fortunately for the Celtics, the odds of any specific Finals matchup is pretty low. Why plan for the Nuggets when the Bucks, Knicks, or Cavaliers are way more likely?

There’s a reason the New York Knicks traded for OG Anunoby instead of Jusuf Nurkic at the trade deadline. They aren’t interested in coming up with answers for Nikola Jokic since they’re still working out their Jayson Tatum and Jimmy Butler problems. Similarly, the Celtics didn’t trade for Kristaps Porzingis because he matches up well in switches against Aaron Gordon. They got him to overwhelm smaller Eastern Conference front lines or to provide some rim protection against Giannis Antetokounmpo.

On balance—and on Friday, March 8 specifically—the Celtics simply have a better chance of actually making it to the NBA Finals than the Nuggets do. The Celtics match up better against the rest of the East than the Nuggets do against the West. For a 43-20 team, Denver is a casual 16th in points per game. That’s susceptible to high volume offensive teams like the Suns or the Clippers, as well as explosive variance monsters like the Oklahoma City Thunder, who boast seven rotation players shooting over 39 percent from deep.

Hopefully the explanation for my bombastic title was sufficient for a 5-Star Yelp review, but if you’re still not convinced, let’s ask the people with by far the most money riding on this: sportsbooks. After the Celtics’ loss to the Nuggets, Fanduel Sportsbook is giving the Celtics roughly 2:1 odds to win the Championship and the Nuggets 4:1 odds, the difference roughly representing the aforementioned conference advantage.

Clearly, we can’t just lock in a Celtics-Nuggets Finals, no matter how likely it may seem. The Nuggets are the best team, but we don’t give out awards for being the best. The two months between April and June will separate fact from reality, but the Celtics are still the favorites to win it all. Whether you’d rather be the best or have the best odds is up to personal preference.

Just for fun, here’s my non-exhaustive list of advantages in a potential Celtics-Nuggets series:

Nuggets:

Blatantly cheater home court. No team should be allowed to have a chemistry-backed altitude advantage
The best player in the world, Nikola Jokic, getting amazing shots over and over
Jamal Murray heat checks spiraling out of control
Overpowered Jokic-Gordon lobs that need to be studied by a lab

Celtics: