Will the Bucks or the Lakers Win the NBA Championship?
The bubble has not been kind to the NBA’s two top two teams. The Bucks have a 2–3 record and the Lakers a 2–4 record since they began their Disney play-cation. Both teams, however, already clinched their conference victories and top seeds for the playoffs. This would normally give them home court advantage in their respective division playoff rounds, but COVID-19 stripped them of the ability to play any games with their home crowd.
Top teams spend all season fighting for the top conference seed. The top seed gives them home court advantage and confidence heading into the playoffs. Of course, lots of wins afford other perks such as win records that go in the basketball history books. Are we really certain that the champion this year will be a top seed? How could we calculate that?
Over two hundred years ago, Pierre-Simon Laplace had a similar question — how likely is it that the sun will rise tomorrow? This is a larger problem called “succession.” Laplace solved it — it is simply (s+1)/(n+2). When you want to know A will happen for B event, s is the number of times A happened and n is the number of times B happened. So, if you are a 35 year old, you have experienced roughly 13,000 days, and the sun has risen all 13,000. I know there was that one wild night that caused you to miss the day altogether, but let us ignore that one for now. With the data you have, you can be 99.9923% certain that the sun will rise tomorrow.
How does this help us with the Lakers and Bucks? Well, in the last 10 NBA seasons, a #1 seed has won the NBA finals 6 times. So our calculation is: (6+1)/(10+2)=0.583. Based on the last 10 seasons, we can estimate that there is a 58.3% chance that LeBron or Giannis will hold the O’Brien Trophy. If we look at the last 20 seasons, the probability shrinks some to a 50.0% of the Lakers or Bucks winning.
While the commentators are ready to hand LeBron his next ring, this calculation does not point to that level of certainty. If the Lakers keep playing like they have been in the Bubble, they might not even see the second round.
