I Know Which Team Is Going To Win The 2023 NBA Championship

What if I told you that I knew which team was going to win the NBA championship this season, that I somehow could see and predict the future like some sort of basketball prophet? Well then I'd be a filthy liar, because I don't know who's going to win the NBA title this season. But what if we could use numbers and data collected over decades of NBA games to make an accurate prediction as to which team will be crowned the 2023 NBA champions? That'd be pretty cool, right? Well, let's give it a shot. Today's video is brought to you by SeatGeek. With the NBA playoffs in full swing, there is no better time to see your favorite team live and in person. And SeatGeek is here to get you in on the action. Check this out. Just download the SeatGeek app and use the promo code JIMMY to get $20 off your first order. SeatGeek makes buying tickets easier than ever before with a rating system that lets you know which tickets are a good deal and which tickets are a bad deal. If it's green, that's a banger. You're getting a good deal there. Red? Not so much. I've been using SeatGeek for years. It's simple, it's easy, and it's a surefire way to get the best deal for your tickets. Whether it's a concert, basketball game, football, baseball, festival, SeatGeek's got it all. Download the app, use promo code JIMMY, and get $20 off your first order today. And that's why according to the numbers, the Boston Celtics will be the 2022 NBA champions. They check all the boxes for a potential championship team. They have the regular season resume to back it up, and all the numbers suggest they will be crowned as champions at the end of the season. Two games. That's how close we were last season to accurately predicting the winner of the 2022 NBA Finals before the playoffs even began. According to the resume and the numbers and every variable we could possibly take into account, the Celtics were destined to become champions last season. But what I forgot to take into consideration is that Steph Curry is a god in a pair of underarmors, and so our prediction fell short. In fact, after this heart-wrenching defeat, I went back and looked at playoff predictions from some of the industry's leading experts and outlets, and out of the 50 predictions that I came across, two of them had the Warriors winning the finals. And in the most ironic way possible, one of those picks was from Stephen A. Smith. But has last year's shortcomings deterred me from attempting to beat insurmountable odds by trying to predict this year's NBA champions and looking like a fool in the process? Absolutely not. So let's give this another shot. When looking at some predictions for this year's playoffs, there really is no general consensus. In a recent survey conducted by SB Nation, fans overwhelmingly predicted the Milwaukee Bucks winning this year's championship, with the Suns and Celtics trailing with just half as many votes. But if there's anything I've learned throughout these experiments, it's that everyone can be completely wrong all at the same time. Looking into some of the more insightful predictions of this year's NBA playoffs, FiveThirtyEight has crunched the numbers and has the Celtics as the overall favorite to win this year's finals. But some interesting things to note is that despite factoring in the addition of Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns still retain just the 7th best chance of winning the finals, behind three other Western Conference teams. And three of the top four teams are Eastern Conference teams, which might mean that whoever comes out of the East will inevitably be crowned champions. And this may just be the case. But then it hit me. What if instead of using data to predict who the champions will be, we ask the data who the champions will be? In a disgusting display of AI supremacy, last season an artificial intelligence program by the name of Swarm managed to accurately predict the winner of the 2022 NBA Finals. Appalling, right? But if that wasn't crazy enough, Swarm also predicted that the Warriors would win the series in six games. In fact, this Swarm AI program was used throughout last season's regular season to try and predict outcomes of regular season games. And not only did it do really well, it managed to outperform 96% of bettors in the process. So in a desperate attempt to get this thing right, I've put aside my knowledge, research, and years of watching the NBA to ask a bot. It's groundbreaking. Genius, even. Why didn't I think of this before? Who will win the 2023 NBA Finals? The pinnacle of AI technology. The exponentially powerful tool of peak human advancement. The... You're useless to me. We have to take another route here. And I think I've got it. While researching for this experiment, I stumbled across this article published last summer on Medium.com from a data scientist and NBA fan who goes by the name of TheJK. His article goes into great detail regarding a machine learning model that uses data to correctly predict which team will win the NBA championship. The article is incredible. I've left a link in the description and highly recommend checking it out. And while creating this model, TheJK sifted through countless NBA stats and data to find which variables are important to postseason success and which variables aren't. And according to his research, the factors that have the strongest correlation to playoff success are the following. If a team finished top 3 in their conference. The extent of a roster's playoff experience. If a team has a player or multiple players who have received MVP votes. A team's SRS score and margin of victory throughout the regular season. And, oddly enough, if the team has performed well in past playoffs. And with this data, TheJK defied all odds and correctly predicted the eventual championship team 3 seasons in a row. And just like that, just a glimmer of hope shined upon my experiment. Maybe, just maybe, we can use numbers and data to predict this year's NBA champions. So, let's see if we can do this. As we already determined last season, preseason favorites and Vegas odds provide about zero assistance here since they never seem to get it right. I mean, for some inexplicable reason, oddsmakers can narrow the line of a game down to one freaking point, but they can't pick a correct championship winning team worth a lick. So let's stick to the information that we know matters most. Here is the criteria we will use to help us determine which teams are truly contenders for this year's championship. Simple rating system, or SRS score, margin of victory, regular season standings, and roster playoff experience. Now, the SRS score is a rating given to each NBA team based on factors like point differential, net rating, and strength of schedule. And of the last 25 championship winning teams, 24 of them had an SRS score that ranked among the top 6 in the NBA. The only team that managed to win a title outside of the top 6 were the Mavericks in 2011. So based on this information, being a top 6 SRS team is virtually a requirement. The top 6 teams in terms of SRS score this season are the Celtics, the Cavaliers, the 76ers, the Bucks, the Grizzlies, and the Nuggets. Now let's take a look at regular season standings. Possibly the most obvious indicator of potential playoff success is simply how good a team was throughout the regular season. And as much as we like to cheer for the underdog, the odds of a team winning a championship if they did not dominate the entire season are somewhere between slim and none. Because out of the last 25 championship winning teams, 23 of them finished the season with a top 5 record in the entire NBA. The top 5 teams in terms of overall record this season are the Bucks, the Celtics, 76ers, Nuggets, and tied for 5th are the Cavaliers and Grizzlies. Now let's take a look at margin of victory. Since 1998, 25 seasons, there has only been 1 team that finished outside of the top 6 in terms of margin of victory and still went on to win a championship. So once again, if you want a real shot at winning the title, you really need to be inside the top 6 league wide in this statistic. And this season, those top 6 teams are the Celtics, Cavaliers, 76ers, Grizzlies, Bucks, and Nuggets. Now if we take a look at the 3 metrics we've covered, and the qualifying teams for each one, we'll see that the same exact 6 teams appear in every single one. And this information is remarkable. Our data has not only narrowed down the contenders to these 6 teams, but it also shows us that the top teams in the NBA this season are unanimously these 6 teams. But this is where I think we fell short last season, because we forgot to factor in a crucial variable. Experience. Going into the 2022 playoffs, the Warriors were projected to do well, but hardly anyone had them as the favorite to win it all. But what I greatly underestimated was their championship pedigree, and the sheer amount of reps they've had on the big stage. In the JK's predictive model that we discussed earlier, playoff experience had the 2nd strongest correlation to future playoff success. And among the 6 teams that stand above the rest, here are the total career playoff games for their 8-man rotation. The Cavaliers have just 71 career playoff games played in total amongst their 8-man rotation. The Grizzlies have just 179 playoff games under their belt. The Nuggets have 268. And the 76ers, Bucs, and Celtics all dwarf these teams with combined total career playoff games all above 400. Which, if history tells us anything, eliminates the Cavaliers, Grizzlies, and Nuggets from contention, and leaves us with these 3 powerhouse teams. So, where do we go from here? Across all metrics, star power, pace, efficiency, experience, these 3 teams are almost identical. Our data has come to the end of the road. But, there are patterns and consistent themes of past championship teams that we can use to Over the last 15 seasons, there has only been one team that didn't feature at least one All-NBA defender that went on to win an NBA championship, and it took a once-in-a-lifetime performance to pull it off. So, if we look at our 3 remaining teams, the Bucs have a really good shot at having multiple players make the All-Defensive team, and so do the Celtics. The 76ers do not. Which narrows our contenders down to the Bucs and the Celtics. Now, we've seen the Celtics and Bucs face each other on 3 separate occasions this season, and if those games are any indication of what's to come in the playoffs, the future NBA champions are clear as day. The Bucs and Celtics faced off for the first time on Christmas Day, which resulted in a 21 point blowout Celtics win, and Tatum and Brown combining for 70 points. The next time these teams faced off was in February, where Boston sat 4 of their 5 starters and still nearly won in overtime with the junior varsity squad. And the 3rd and final matchup was just a couple weeks ago, where Tatum and Brown combined for 70 points again and handed the Bucs their 2nd largest loss in nearly a decade. The Bucs have no answer for the Celtics' firepower and depth, and when Boston is at capacity, they don't just beat Milwaukee, they destroy Milwaukee. And that's why according to the numbers, the Boston Celtics will be the 2023 NBA champions. They have the star power, the defense, the experience, they've been here before, and they know what it's going to take to win it all. This team not only checks all the boxes for what it takes to be a championship team, they exceed every metric for a potential championship team. Of course, the numbers can only tell us so much. It's impossible to quantify a lot of things that happen on a basketball court, like the fact that come the playoffs Giannis levels up and becomes one of the most unstoppable forces the game has ever seen. And it would be naive to count out the championship pedigree of the Warriors, something that I've fell victim to in the past and something that just doesn't show up in the numbers. It would be an impossible task to forecast series altering changes that may occur throughout the playoffs, like injuries, adjustments, players coming in and out of the rotation, and about a million other variables. This entire video could be dead wrong, and my finals prediction record could fall from 0% to 0%. But that won't stop me from trying, and there's only one way to find out. Until then, hope you all enjoyed, and as always, until next time.