All it took was a complete overhaul of the Cleveland Cavaliers' roster for them to start climbing back up our power rankings. How is the rest of the league performing now that we're heading into the final stretch of the regular season?
The NBA standings do not always tell the whole story when it comes to determining which teams are truly playing the best brand of basketball.
Simple win-loss records don't factor in things like strength of schedule, efficiency, average margin of victory, and so on. That's where our power rankings come in.
Using our proprietary metric, nERD -- a ranking on a scale from 0-100, with 50 as the league average, which is predictive of a team's ultimate winning percentage based on its efficiency -- we put teams in order of how well they've actually been performing this season, regardless of their number of wins and losses.