High Quality Sports

Attached to this post is a sheet with the data for the 2025 playoffs. Here’s what all the numbers mean:

Playoffs Scoring tab – This is a players adjusted scoring against their playoff opponents. It is not enough to take 20 ppg for one player and compare it to 20ppg for another player. If you’re playing the best defense ever vs the worst defense ever, 20 ppg will mean a very different thing. The pace of the game is also normalized here. So the defensive rating of the opponent and the pace of the series give us a players adjusted points per 75 possessions. I use per 75 possessions because thats typically how many possessions a star player plays throughout NBA history. It’s a little more easy to digest vs points per 100 but its the same principle of putting everyone on even ground.

I’ve also included aTS% – this is adjusted true shooting percentage. Again, its adjusted for who they play so if their first round opponent allowed 60% true shooting to the league this year and a player shoots 62% against them, that is +2, likewise if they shot 57% against them it will be -3.

You will then see two columns that show the difference between what they are doing in the playoffs and what they did in the regular season, for both scoring and efficiency.

There are also team tabs for Offense, Defense, and Net rating.

Offense and defense I look at both how a team is doing adjusted for their opponent, and compared to how they did in the regular season. If a team advances past the first round I simply average the numbers, weighing each round equally. It does not make sense to weight it on a per game basis because you are then penalizing teams for blowing out/sweeping their opponent because they only have 4 games with their great numbers vs 6 or 7 if its a tough loss or close series. The same is done for individual player numbers.

Net rating is simply the sum of the offense and defense. At year end I will update my Greatest Teams Ever data and my Greatest Team Ever post and we will see where the champion compares to other champions. I’m quite excited to see what OKC and/or Cleveland can do. I’m not excited about Boston but I will give them credit either way. Those three teams had a 12.7, 8.8, 8.3 SRS respectively during the regular season so they are already in rare air. I’m also on the look out for who will win the Game of the Year.

2025 playoff data is Here: 2025 Playoff Data