By almost any measure, this has been a strange NBA season.
Aside from the fact that Harrison Barnes was looking like more of an early MVP candidate than Damian Lillard, there’s also the fact that Cleveland—Cleveland!—is 7–5 through 12 games. You have to go back 21 years to find the last time the Cavaliers were this far above .500 this late in a campaign without a man named LeBron on their roster.
It requires going back much further than that, to 1975, to find the last time Washington finished with the most wins in the Eastern Conference.