The Golden State Warriors spent most of this season chasing history, battling with the 1995-96 Chicago for the title of greatest NBA team of all time. With a Game 7 finals loss to the Cavaliers, it’s clear that they came up short. But how far down the rankings did they fall?
A month ago, we took a slightly premature look at Golden State’s all-time ranking using Elo ratings, a simple measure of relative team strength based on head-to-head results (we use it here a lot). We generated a single value for each season in NBA history by blending each team’s peak, average and final Elo rating (since these ratings are based only on game-by-game results, they don’t take into account whether a team actually won or lost the title).