He wasn’t alone in that belief, either.
Fred Hoiberg and Billy Donovan weren’t exactly disciples of analytics, but both have had off-the-record discussions of the importance of a team’s regular-season point differential.
It’s not the end-all-be-all of determining who will represent each conference in the NBA Finals, just because there are always outliers or injured players coming back to change a team’s momentum, but it does carry some heavy force behind it.
In the 2015-16 Finals between Cleveland and Golden State, both teams led their conferences in point differential in the regular season. The Warriors led the West in differential the 2016-17 season and won it, and then in their repeat year were second in differential in the West.