The Spurs have been a given for the playoffs for a long time, but they now sit on the outside looking in. How is that reflected in our rankings?
The NBA standings do not always tell the whole story when it comes to determining which teams are truly playing the best brand of basketball.
Simple win-loss records don't factor in things like strength of schedule, efficiency, average margin of victory, and so on. That's where our power rankings come in.
Using our proprietary metric, nERD -- a ranking on a scale from 0-100, with 50 as the league average, which is predictive of a team's ultimate winning percentage based on its efficiency -- we put teams in order of how well they've actually been performing this season, regardless of their number of wins and losses.