How might the atypical format for this year's NBA playoffs affect teams' championship odds if the season resumes this summer?
While the NBA hasn't yet made any decisions on how the postseason might unfold, we do know one thing for certain: Traditional home-court advantage won't apply with the league in negotiations to play all games at Disney's ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida. That could affect the teams that worked hard throughout the first five-plus months of the season to secure home court.
Which teams might benefit the most? And which teams will be hurt? Let's run some projections to find out.
Projecting a traditional postseason
Naturally, the kind of playoff format we're used to, with travel between games and 20,000 fans providing a boost to their team, won't be possible this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. However, let's take a look at how it might have played out to offer a starting point for this discussion.
To project teams based on the current playoff bracket, I utilized their median generic points favored by gambling lines over the week before the shutdown, as tracked by Inpredictable.com, in conjunction with the typical home-court advantage teams have in the playoffs -- with a slightly larger home-court factor for possible Game 7s.
Because this doesn't factor in subsequent injuries (such as Utah Jazz forward Bojan Bogdanovic undergoing season-ending wrist surgery) or teams' ability to improve in the playoffs by tightening their rotations, it shouldn't be regarded as an actual playoff projection for them. Still, it gives us a good idea of the possible impact of format changes.
Based on this model, the Milwaukee Bucks would have been favored over the field in a traditional postseason because of their dominant regular season and the benefit of home-court advantage throughout the playoffs. How much does that change without the latter benefit?
Projecting neutral-site playoffs
Now let's account for the fact that all games will take place at a neutral site if the NBA returns, with neither travel nor home crowds. Naturally, this makes the biggest difference in close series, in which home-court advantage is most likely to swing things.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but big favorites are actually favored even more on a neutral site because their chances of winning at home don't benefit as much from home court as underdogs' chances of pulling an upset do. (Consider that in the eight series since 2006 in which the team pulling the upset had at least 10 fewer wins during the regular season, the underdogs went a combined 21-3 at home.)
With that noted, let's take a look at the results:
At the championship level, the biggest loser is the Bucks, who see their chances at a title decline by 3% simply by virtue of losing home court. The Los Angeles Lakers' championship odds also are slightly down, largely because they're less likely to reach the NBA Finals, though this is offset in part by their superior chances of beating Milwaukee once there.
The big winner, meanwhile, is the LA Clippers. If anything, it's possible this understates how much benefit the Clippers could see from playing on a neutral site. While this model still has the Lakers as a slightly better team, other metrics -- notably FiveThirtyEight's RAPTOR projections -- see the Clippers as slightly better at full strength.
Additionally, a "Hallway Series" in the conference finals at the Staples Center probably would have featured crowds split between Clippers and Lakers fans during nominal Clippers home games, though in practice that hasn't helped the Lakers much in recent years. In fact, the Clippers have a better point differential in "road" games at Staples than home games since 2011-12.
Elsewhere, the No. 5 and No. 6 seeds in both conferences predictably have a far better chance of winning their first-round series without home court as a disadvantage. Nobody is likely to benefit more than the Philadelphia 76ers, who have famously struggled on the road this season, going 10-24. While there was no particular reason to expect the Sixers to have the same kind of imbalanced home/road performance in the playoffs, they're far more talented than the typical No. 6 seed and therefore benefit from playing all games on a neutral site.
Meanwhile, in the West's 3-6 matchup, the Denver Nuggets go from a slight favorite over the Houston Rockets by virtue of home-court advantage to a slight underdog without it.
Projecting a 1-16 playoffs
One intriguing possibility for the 2020 NBA playoffs is that the NBA might choose to seed the top 16 seeds without regard to conference. Playing all the games in the same site removes concerns about TV scheduling and travel that have been obstacles to a single playoff tournament without regard to conferences.
My ESPN colleague Brian Windhorst discussed that possibility on Get Up on Monday, saying he expected NBA commissioner Adam Silver to propose the change, though he indicated East owners are unlikely to agree to it.
That shouldn't stop us from considering the implications. Let's take a look at the projections for 1-16 seeding based on the current bracket:
While the imbalance between the East and West hasn't been as large in 2019-20 as in past seasons, a 1-16 format would still further drop the Bucks' title chances because the Clippers would become their most likely opponent in the semifinals. Milwaukee would hypothetically have to beat both L.A. teams to win the title, a more challenging path.
Conversely, the Lakers benefit from swapping the Clippers out of their side of the bracket. The net result is a wash for the Clippers, who would likely have to beat both the Bucks and Lakers to win the title either way.
In the early rounds, the winners are the West teams that would get to face relatively weaker East foes: The Nuggets improve their chances of advancing by 24 percentage points, the Memphis Grizzlies do so by 14 points and the Oklahoma City Thunder also improve by double digits. Denver suddenly has a reasonable path to the semifinals, likely facing the Toronto Raptors instead of the Clippers in Round 2. The big losers are the Rockets and Jazz, now slated to play each other for a third consecutive postseason, as well as the Brooklyn Nets and Miami Heat.
No matter the format, the NBA's best-of-seven series are likely to favor the best teams. That's why I don't think I would want an asterisk beside a champion crowned in quarantine, barring something like a key player contracting COVID-19 and missing a series because of it.
At the same time, comparing the projections for a 1-16 bracket with the traditional playoff setup shows just how much impact these changes can make. Between them, the Bucks project to win the championship 10 percentage points less often, a 1 in 10 chance of swinging the title from them to someone else.
Fortunately, the differences due merely to playing at a neutral site aren't nearly as extreme, and they might even be appropriate in some cases when considering that teams might not get a full 82 games to decide seeding.