What a 60-Win Pace Means Historically & Other Postseason Predictors

The Jazz are celebrating a hugely successful regular season run. What does that mean for the playoffs? (Star Tribune)

The Jazz are on pace to finish the season with a winning record equivalent to a 60-win team¹ over the course of a typical NBA season. As is also true of our fascination with triple doubles, 60 is a round but ultimately arbitrary number, and a winning percentage in that realm equates to a really successful regular season.

To be more precise, the Jazz currently have a .741 winning percentage, and 60 wins in a regular 82-game season requires a .732 winning percentage. Since the Jazz have a very easy remaining schedule, they should be able to finish above that threshold.

This would put them in rarified company: only 70 teams in the 3-point era have finished the regular season at or above .732. This is an accomplishment worth celebrating, no matter what happens in the playoffs. This Jazz team is one of the best regular season teams in franchise history and it turns out that winning all the time is a lot of fun.

Luck is a big component of the playoffs. Health, matchups, and a greater degree of variance due to fewer games all play their part. So a deep postseason run shouldn’t be the sole measurement of a great basketball team.

But sports fandom is often irrational, and playoff success (or lack thereof) is valued disproportionately. For example, last season’s Bucks and the ’14–15 Hawks are remembered more for losing early in the playoffs than for how dominant they were all season.

So let’s see how this year’s Jazz fit in with those other 60-win teams and parse what other indicators may lead to winning playoff series.

Playoff success

First it should be noted that being a 60-win team is not at all a requirement for winning an NBA championship. Roughly half of the title winners were not 60-win teams.

Here’s how 60-win teams have performed:

• 36% won the NBA Finals
• 11% won the Conference Finals
• 36% won the Conference Semi-Finals
• 13% won the First Round
• 4% did not win any playoff series

So the Jazz could claim a 1-in-3 chance of winning the Finals, but also a 1-in-6 chance of winning a playoff round or less. If making the Western Conference Finals is a win, the Jazz have a 1-in-2 chance of being disappointed. That’s a lot of variance.

Let’s get a little more precise and see how a higher winning percentage correlates with playoff success. We’ll break down the data into groups:

So we have a pretty clear pattern: teams with a .805 or better winning percentage (66-win pace) have a dramatically better chance of making it to the Finals. Otherwise there’s a slight, but not huge differentiation between teams with wins in the lower 60s. The Jazz are currently in that mix, so the average team in the Jazz’s range would win somewhere between two and three rounds.

This is where luck should be considered. Much of playoff success boils down to seeding, matchups, and which team gets rolling at the right time. The Lakers could very well be a second round opponent, and that’s a significant hurdle despite what the numbers suggest.

Other stats

Winning percentage is only so helpful as a predictor of playoff success. Luckily there are some other stats that we can use to compare this year’s Jazz with other 60-win teams, and see how they correlate to playoff success. Utah is currently ranked:

• 1st in simple rating system (9.6)
• 1st in net rating (9.6)
• 3rd in offensive rating
• 4th in defensive rating

Simple rating system

Simple rating system (SRS) takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule. So we get a little more context and normalizing across different seasons. Utah’s current rating of 9.6 is really good. It would be ranked the 11th best SRS rating in NBA history.

Among the seventy 60-win teams:

• Only 7 had an SRS better than 9.6, and 5 of them won the championship
• The average SRS of title winners is 7.8

Net rating

Net rating is another useful metric for projecting playoff success among 60-win teams. Good news: Utah’s current rating of 9.6 is also really good.

Among the seventy 60-win teams:

• Only 11 had a net rating better than 9.6, and 6 of them won the championship
• The average net rating of title winners is 8.5

Offensive ranking

There’s some noise here. For example, almost all the teams with 5th and 7th best offenses won the Finals. Perhaps the only takeaway is that a little less than a third of the 60-win teams had the league’s best offense, and those teams averaged a Finals appearance. For the rest, ranking 2nd or 10th didn’t have a lot of bearing on playoff success.

The Jazz currently rank third. The average ranking among 60-win title winners is 4th.

Defensive ranking

Again, a little less than a third of the 60-win teams had the league’s best defense which averaged to about a Finals appearance. Everything else is scatter-shot, even more so than offense. While it’s obvious, the numbers support that having a top-5 defense helps your chances at playoff success.

The Jazz currently rank 4th. The average ranking among 60-win title winners is also 4th.

Takeaways

At the end of the day, these numbers reinforce some obvious facts:

• Winning 60+ games gives a team good, but still varied playoff success rates
• 60-win teams tend to have top-10 offenses and defenses, but there wasn’t a big correlation between where in the top-10 they ranked and playoff success.
• But having elite numbers (e.g. 1st ranked SRS, offense, or defense ratings; or a 9+ net rating; or a 66+ win pace) do give a team a solid chance of making the Finals
• A significant number of 60+ win teams fall flat
• A significant number of 60+ win teams with lower rankings overachieve

As far as the Jazz go: their numbers place them in the upper half of the 60-win teams, but not quite in the upper echelons. If you want to pair your expectations to the numbers, prepare yourself for any outcome come playoff time. It’s more likely they’ll advance a few rounds, but there’s plenty of historical precedent that they could also lose in the first round or two.

But — if the Jazz finish the season on a tear, and join the elite net rating or win percentage teams, fans would be fair to expect at least a Conference Finals appearance (as most currently do anyway).

The superstar question

One wrinkle these numbers don’t account for is how far can a team go without a superstar (however you define that)? To take that question a step further, does a 60-win team win so much because they have a superstar? How rare is a 60-win team with no superstars? We’ll explore these questions later this season.