Kevin Durant's injury -- a Grade 2 MCL sprain and bone bruise of his left knee, an MRI revealed Wednesday -- has the potential to shake up the Western Conference playoff race.
How will Durant's absence affect the Golden State Warriors' chances of claiming home-court advantage throughout the playoffs? Let's take a look.
Projecting the Warriors without Durant
It's difficult to predict how coach Steve Kerr will divvy up the 34 minutes per game Durant was playing before his injury because Durant had missed just one game this season. The Warriors also will apparently add a new wing to the mix, as they plan to sign Matt Barnes after Durant's injury, according to ESPN's Chris Haynes and Marc Stein.
Taking that into account, this is how I think Golden State's rotation will look like in Durant's absence, along with each player's rating in the predictive multiyear version of ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM).
RPM projects Golden State to play at a 56-win level over the course of a full season, which is better than it sounds, given the conservative nature of RPM projections (RPM projected 66.7 wins for the Warriors in October). That puts the Warriors essentially even with the San Antonio Spurs the rest of the season.
While Golden State doesn't figure to be as good as last year's team without Durant because of the loss of starting small forward Harrison Barnes, RPM still projects the Warriors with the league's third-best offensive and defensive ratings the remainder of the season, barring additional serious injuries.
Will the Warriors still finish first in the West?
Using the new projection for Golden State, along with ones taking into account the current rotations for other teams after the trade deadline, I simulated the remainder of the schedule 1,000 times. Those projections suggest that the Warriors should still be considered solid favorites to finish with the best record in the Western Conference.
Golden State finishes with an average of about 65 wins, as compared to an average between 61 and 62 wins for the Spurs. No other team in the league averages more than 55 wins.
Because of the variability in those projections, the Warriors don't always finish first in the West. They still have two of their three regular-season matchups with the Spurs remaining, and San Antonio will claim the head-to-head tiebreaker by winning one of those two games. So there's an opening for the Spurs (currently four games back of No. 1).
San Antonio finishes first in the West in about 20 percent of simulations, with Golden State taking first in virtually all of the remaining 80 percent. (The Houston Rockets made a late run at first in one of the 1,000 simulations.)
Will Durant's injury have an impact on the playoffs?
In addition to likely missing the remainder of the regular season, Durant might miss some of the Warriors' playoff run. That could end up having a greater impact than the team's seeding.
Golden State should be heavily favored over any possible first-round opponent without Durant, even if the Warriors slip to the No. 2 seed and face a tougher foe. But a second-round matchup against most likely the LA Clippers or the Utah Jazz could be trickier without Durant.
The Warriors demonstrated that they can win at less than full strength in last year's postseason, when they finished off the Rockets and took a 2-1 series lead over the Portland Trail Blazers without MVP Stephen Curry. And of course they didn't even have Durant a year ago. (It should be noted that his arrival led to the departure of two starters, so it was in some ways a different team.)
No matter how good the Warriors might look at times without Durant in the coming weeks, they will still want him in the lineup to survive the toughest tests that await them in the playoffs.