2021 NBA Playoffs Update: June 1, 2021

While the first round hasn’t been as exciting as I had hoped so far, there have been no shortage of great games. Sure, the Knicks and Hawks first two games were exciting and the Lakers-Suns series has been everything we all hoped for, but most of the rest has been, well, blasé.

The two main stories that summarize what you need to know going forward in these 2021 NBA playoffs is the injuries throughout the league and the Bucks looking really good. So, I’ll try to touch on both these subjects at length in the remainder of this article as I go through updated team rankings, championship probabilities, injury considerations, and probabilities for the remaining first round series.

To see how our pre-tournament picks have stacked up, be sure to check back to our round 1 preview. Use the included links here to skip ahead to a discussion of the impact of injuries or an update on the status of each first round series.

Playoff Team Rankings and 2021 NBA Championship Probabilities

We’ve run our model again with just a few changes since last time. Last time, we put 50% of the weight on Vegas data and 50% of the weight on recent games played. We’ve shifted those probabilities just a bit in order to put more emphasis on actual performance instead of groupthink. However, we still keep Vegas’ weighting at about 40% because otherwise there is no way for our model to take into account the injuries of Anthony Davis and (maybe) Joel Embiid. We weight games played since the start of the playoffs 4x more than the regular season games.

In the table below, you’ll find each team’s ranking and championship probability.

Team	Rating	Championship Probability
Milwaukee Bucks	9.6	22.8%
Philadelphia 76ers	8.9	26.7%
Brooklyn Nets	8.6	13.1%
Utah Jazz	8.4	23.2%
Los Angeles Clippers	7.4	6.6%
Phoenix Suns	5.9	2.5%
Portland Trail Blazers	5.8	2.1%
Los Angeles Lakers	5.6	1.6%
Denver Nuggets	4.7	0.7%
Atlanta Hawks	4.6	0.5%
Dallas Mavericks	3.8	0.2%
New York Knicks	2.9	0%
Boston Celtics	2.3	0%
Memphis Grizzlies	2.3	0%
Washington Wizards	0.9	0%

By far the biggest changes from our pre-tournament rankings and championship probabilities are the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. Our model now thinks the Bucks are 2.5 points better than it thought 10 days ago. Similarly, the model now thinks the Lakers are about 1.9 points worse than it thought they were 10 days ago.

While these changes are evident and understandable, we have rarely missed a series as badly as we did the Knicks-Hawks series. Because the model is a reflection of what has happened recently, the Knicks and the Hawks matchup has shifted from Knicks -3.4 to Hawks -1.7 on a neutral court. This 5 point shift in the series spread is massive and is extremely reflective of how much the Knicks over-performed in the regular season and how good the Hawks look now. When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.

The Effect of Three Major Injuries

In the last few days, there have been three significant injuries on championship contenders. Two of these: Anthony Davis and potentially Joel Embiid, would be playoff-altering. The third, Donte Divincenzo, certainly will have a negative impact on the Bucks but won’t completely obliterate their chances.

To attempt to determine how much these injuries will affect everything, we’ll repeat some of the previous simulations to understand some of the scenarios at play. To put a point value on each player’s absence, we will use 538’s RAPTOR metric.

RAPTOR is a statistic which estimates ‘how many points this player is worth relative to a league average player over the course of 100 possessions’. If we replace a 5 RAPTOR player with a -1 RAPTOR player, then we might expect the team to be 6 points worse per 100 possessions.

Impact of the Donte DiVincenzo Injury

Donte’s minutes seem to be being soaked up by a heavier dose of Bryn Forbes, Pat Connaughton, and PJ Tucker. Forbes is a -2.5 and Tucker is a -5 BUT Connaughton has been about a +1.4 this year. Taking all this with a rather large grain of salt, the average replacement for Donte is a player worth -2.0 per 100 possessions. Now, the Bucks play at a pace of 114 possessions/48 and DiVincenzo (for the sake of simplicity) plays about 24 minutes per game. That means DiVincenzo is on the court for about 57 possessions per game.

Thus, replacing a +0.7 with a -2.0 for roughly 57 possessions/game results in a net decrease by about 1.5 points per game. What happens if the Bucks rating drops by 1.5 points? For perspective: this is the same shift as moving from a home game to a neutral court game.

Re-running our model with the bucks a full point and a half lower than before results in the Bucks having only an 11.5% championship probability. Pretty much each of the other three big favorites – the Jazz, Nets, and Sixers – gain about 4% in their championship probabilities. In this scenario, the Sixers finally eclipse 30% to win the title. The Jazz move up to 26% while the Nets are at 16.5%. All because of Donte Divincenzo. Let us see what happens when some more significant players go out.

Impact of the Anthony Davis Injury

Using the same technique as last time, Anthony Davis is worth about 3.5 points. It is difficult to project who will soak up AD’s minutes, but let us assume that his replacement is worth a net -1 points (this is the average of Gasol and Morris). AD played for about 40 minutes at a pace of 107 possessions/48 minutes which comes out to a total of90 possessions. All told, we can expect the Lakers net rating to drop by about 4 full points if AD is out.

The biggest difference here is that the Lakers’ championship probabilities drop to almost 0. Literally the Lakers won the Larry O’Brien 1 time in the 10,000 simulations I ran. The biggest beneficiaries? While their championship probabilities didn’t change dramatically, the big winners were the Jazz and Suns, as you would expect. The Suns title odds jump to 3.5% and the Jazz also pick up a point.

Impact of the (potential) Joel Embiid Injury

This is almost certainly going to be the most dramatic of the injuries. To me, Joel Embiid is the MVP of the league. Outside of the presence of Nikola Jokic, RAPTOR agrees. Joel Embiid is worth a whopping 8.8 points per 100 possessions. Again, as was the case with Anthony Davis, it is hard to project how the minutes will split going forward. Let us just assume that Embiid will play 35 minutes at a pace of 110 and is replaced by a 0.0 rating ensemble of other players. This leads to the Sixers dropping in rating by a whopping 7 points.

Not only does Joel Embiid’s absence drop the Sixers championship probabilities to 0.2%, it brings into question the outcome of the Wizards series. The Wizards chance of winning each of the three remaining games jumps all the way up to 10% if Joel sits these games out. Even worse for the Philly fans, this is all assuming that Joel’s replacements can play at replacement level.

Pretty much the only beneficiaries from this injury are the Nets and the Bucks. Each of these teams gains about 11.5% in their championship probabilities if Embiid remains out. In fact, the Bucks become the title favorites with a 35% win probability if Embiid can’t play. This is certainly an injury to watch.

Remaining Series Outlooks

Just like before, I want to give probabilities and potential outcomes for the current series. I won’t offer a ton of commentary on each of these, I’ll simply present the winning probabilities and distributions for each team involved.

First, in the Jazz-Grizzlies series, the Jazz are favored to win in 5 games. The probability the Jazz win the series is 98.5%. The distribution of outcomes is below.

The Clippers-Mavs series is becoming very intriguing. The model really seems to like the Clippers, having them win the series (with home court advantage, recall) about 73% of the time!

The Blazers are actually favored against the home-court Nuggets, though very slightly. Expect this series to go to 7 games. The Blazers win about 53% of the time.

The Suns-Lakers series has been a treat. Our model predictions below do not include any injury information about Anthony Davis. I only present numerical data, not opinion, and as I do not have a robust way of measuring the impact of his injury, I have to ignore it and assume that the Vegas prior will appropriately capture it. The Suns win the series about 56% of the time, though if I were a betting man I would say this number is low.

Out East, the Sixers v. Wizards matchup is particularly interesting. Opinion: I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wizards pick off another game before the series ending. Numbers-wise, without any adjustments for Embiid’s injury the Sixers win the series in 5 games something like 85% of the time. Overall, the Sixers are 99.5% to win the series. If Embiid is out, watch out.

The Hawks and the Knicks have not put up as interesting a series as I had hoped. The Hawks have pulled ahead as the clear favorite, winning the series 91% of the time. Sorry to the Knicks fans who read my blog.

The Bucks series is finished with Milwaukee having swept the Heat, so our final series is Nets-Celtics. The Nets have looked strong, and the model agrees. The Nets win the series about 83% of the time in our simulations.

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