The Ringer’s Zach Kram recently published an article introducing a new metric — expected titles. He describes the math behind it here:
To get our results, we’ll weigh a variety of factors: the aforementioned team quality, opponent quality, and homecourt advantage, plus others like series length and byes. Using teams’ Pythagorean records — which are based on their point differentials, rather than straight wins and losses, and are thus a better predictor of future success — and the Log5 method pioneered by Bill James, we determined the chance that every team would win every playoff series against its opponents (or the potential opponents it would have played, for a team that lost before the Finals).