Trivia question: Which NBA team has had the most postseason success since the last league expansion?
If you're like me, you probably assumed it was the Los Angeles Lakers. Since 2004-05, the season the league added the Charlotte Bobcats and swelled to its current 30-team roster, the Lakers have won a pair of NBA championships, lost to the Celtics in the Finals and made the Western Conference semifinals in two other seasons. To many observers, they certainly seem like the defining team since the 2004-05 season.
But that's not the case.
OK, so now you're probably guessing the San Antonio Spurs is the right answer. Though the 2005-12 timespan excludes the franchise's titles in 1998-99 and 2002-03, it does encompass its championships in 2004-05 and 2006-07, plus two Western Conference finals losses and a couple of conference semifinal berths. If it's not the Lakers, then the Spurs have to claim the most successful postseason résumeé of any team since 2004-05, right?
Wrong again.
By now, some of you may be scrambling for a team like the Celtics (one Finals win, one Finals loss, two other semi-deep runs) or maybe even the Mavericks as a long shot.
The correct answer is none of the above. It's the Miami Heat -- owners of two championships, one Finals loss, one Eastern Conference finals loss and two other playoff appearances. Since the previous expansion, no other team can match Miami's playoff accomplishments, though the Lakers and Spurs do come reasonably close.
How did I determine this? Through a system first thought up by Basketball-Reference.com founder (and Insider contributor) Justin Kubatko. The idea is to reward teams for increasing their championship probability by winning playoff series. In the current NBA, for instance, every team starts with 33.3 initial points, or 1,000 times one-thirtieth (there are 30 NBA teams, so at the beginning of the season every team has a 1-in-30 chance of winning the championship). By making the playoffs, a team has increased its chances from 1-in-30 to 1-in-16, so it gets a 29.2-point bonus for qualifying for the postseason.
From there, teams get credit for winning series and advancing deeper into the playoffs. Win a first-round series? Get a bonus of 62.5 points. Advance to the conference finals? Tack on 125 more points. Move on to the NBA Finals? Grab 250 points. And win the title? That's a 500-point cherry on top of your championship season.
The virtue of this methodology is that it's a simple system that is directly tied to the number of teams in the league, as well as the amount of competition a team has left behind by advancing through each stage of the season. Using this scoring system, let's take a look at the most successful playoff franchises of the past eight seasons (outlined in the chart below).
Ranking NBA playoff franchises, 2005-12
Rank Team Playoffs Won Conf NBA Champs Points
1 Miami Heat 7 3 2 2970.8
2 Los Angeles Lakers 7 3 2 2908.3
3 San Antonio Spurs 8 2 2 2875.0
4 Boston Celtics 6 2 1 2129.2
5 Dallas Mavericks 8 2 1 2000.0
6 Detroit Pistons 5 1 0 1412.5
7 Cleveland Cavaliers 5 1 0 1225.0
8 Orlando Magic 6 1 0 1129.2
9 Thunder/Sonics 4 1 0 1070.8
10 Phoenix Suns 5 0 0 1037.5
11 Utah Jazz 5 0 0 725.0
12 Chicago Bulls 7 0 0 720.8
13 Denver Nuggets 8 0 0 687.5
14 Atlanta Hawks 5 0 0 600.0
15 Indiana Pacers 4 0 0 508.3
16 New Jersey Nets 3 0 0 479.2
17 Philadelphia 76ers 5 0 0 475.0
18 Los Angeles Clippers 2 0 0 450.0
19 Washington Wizards 4 0 0 445.8
20 Houston Rockets 4 0 0 445.8
20 Memphis Grizzlies 4 0 0 445.8
22 New Orleans Hornets 3 0 0 416.7
23 Golden State Warriors 1 0 0 358.3
24 Portland Trail Blazers 3 0 0 354.2
25 Milwaukee Bucks 2 0 0 325.0
26 New York Knicks 2 0 0 325.0
26 Sacramento Kings 2 0 0 325.0
26 Toronto Raptors 2 0 0 325.0
29 Charlotte Bobcats 1 0 0 295.8
30 Minnesota T-Wolves 0 0 0 266.7
We tend not to think of the Heat as being the best postseason franchise of the past eight seasons because they've gone through three distinct eras during that stretch: one with Shaquille O'Neal and Dwyane Wade spearheading the team to 1,250 points in 2004-05 and 2005-06, followed by four seasons of very little playoff success (three postseason berths, but no series wins) and finally the current "Big Three" era of Wade, LeBron James, and Chris Bosh, which has yielded 1,500 points thus far. Miami's runs have come in disjointed fragments, but we're more prone to admire a team's success when it's bunched into consecutive seasons without big gaps in between.
Further, as far as the best teams in any eight-season stretch in NBA history, the Heat's 2,970.8-point total is not very notable. The best eight-season run belongs to the 1959-66 Boston Celtics, who put up the maximum possible score a team can have in eight seasons: eight championships for 8,000 points. (They are the only team to post a perfect eight-season stretch.) By contrast, the 2005-12 Heat's total represents only the 104th-best eight-year run in NBA history. It's the lowest point total any team has had to lead an eight-season stretch since the 1975-82 Celtics put up just 2,965.9 points, and the fourth-worst league-leading total in any eight-year span in the NBA's history. That the rest all came around the NBA-ABA merger, a period of parity in pro basketball, only underscores the unimpressive nature of Miami's past eight seasons in a historical context.
The final reason those eight seasons don't seem as successful as they actually are is the weight of the expectations established by James before the 2010-11 season. Shortly after going to the Heat, James infamously boasted that Miami would win as many as eight titles with his new team, an absurd prediction by any historical standard.
Consider once again the Celtics' eight titles and 8,000 points with Bill Russell as the classic exemplar of championship greatness. Since then, the next-best distinct eight-season runs -- i.e., not overlapping with other segments of the same run -- belong to Magic Johnson's 1982-89 Lakers (5,750 points); Michael Jordan and the 1991-98 Chicago Bulls (with 6,250 points); Larry Bird's 1981-88 Celtics (4,625 points); and the Kobe Bryant/O'Neal-led 1997-2004 Lakers (4,125 points). As previously mentioned, James, Wade and Bosh already have 1,500 points in the bag, but they would need a combined 2,625 more points in the next six seasons just to match the Lakers from the early 2000s -- or the same number of points the peak of the Spurs' quasi-dynasty put up from 2001 to 2006.
If that sounds somewhat unlikely, it's because it is. Based on historical trends, even a team that starts an eight-season run with 1,500 points in the first two seasons can expect to finish that stretch with an average of 3,800 points, which would be more on the order of the 2001-08 Spurs (3,875 points).
But even though these Miami Heat aren't likely to live up to James' prediction, they're still the best we've seen the past eight postseasons. Now, let's see what they can add this postseason.
espn stats lol