How the 2024 conference finalists mirror past NBA champions : During the 2024 NBA playoffs, fans have daydreamed that Minnesota Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards is the next Michael Jordan, compared Nikola Jokic to three-time NBA MVPs, and compared the 1994 and 2024 New York Knicks. We often live in the moment, but we often utilise history to contextualise it.
Let’s use the same method as when we compared the NHL’s top contenders to Stanley Cup winners to find the most similar NBA champions to each of this season’s “final four” clubs.
How the 2024 conference finalists mirror past NBA champions
Our method considers both the regular season and playoffs, with playoff games given more weight, and uses several layers of statistics, starting with winning percentage and offensive efficiency, moving through the Four Factors on both sides of the ball, and also considering a team’s average age (penalising it for being too young or too old) and its best player. We selected the NBA champ for each conference finalist with the least variances across all our criteria after applying percentiles to scale each of these factors compared to all other playoff teams and weighting them for importance.
Championship calling card: Potent offense
The Spurs’ 2014 NBA Finals win over LeBron James and the Miami Heat may have been the sharpest ever. In the five-game series, San Antonio had the best net rating (+17.2) and second-best offensive rating (118.5) in the Finals since 1997, humiliating Miami with efficient and unselfish basketball. The 2024 Celtics can beat teams in various ways with many contributors. They had the highest single-season points per 100 possessions (123.2) in NBA history and are averaging nearly that in the playoffs (118.3). Boston easily leads all teams in 3s per 100 possessions and has five players with an assist rate in the double digits but below 30%, spreading the ballhandling like San Antonio did in the 2014 playoffs.
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Biggest question for Celtics: Who’s their Kawhi Leonard?
Surprisingly, one of the most notable distinctions between the Spurs of that era and the Celtics of today was the calibre of their star player. It was during the 2013–14 season that Leonard truly became a star in the NBA, as San Antonio easily defeated the Heat while he won Finals MVP for his all-around skill. Leonard’s RAPTOR during the regular season and postseason ranked in the top 25% of all players who have led their teams to championships since 1984. Instead of being the team’s star player, Jayson Tatum is more akin to the median top player on a championship team for the Celtics. That’s still nothing to sneeze at, but it shows how Tatum leads an ensemble cast rather than being the team’s main driver of success. (And it becomes even more evident when we examine Tatum’s clutch statistics, which may use some Kawhi-like adjustments.)
Championship calling card: Suffocating defense
Karl-Anthony Towns isn’t far behind, scoring almost 19 points a night, while Anthony Edwards, who ranks fourth among all eligible players with 28.9 points per game, has been one of the most explosive offensive forces of the postseason. Without a doubt, though, the Timberwolves’ strength lies on the other side of the court, where Rudy Gobert, the current NBA Defensive Player of the Year, led all teams in defensive rating throughout the regular season. It is therefore not surprising that the teams that most closely resemble Minnesota’s champions are a group of defensive powerhouses, which includes three of the best examples of winning defensive teams in modern times: Tim Duncan and the 2003 Spurs, Kevin Garnett and the 2008 Celtics, and Ben Wallace and the 2004 Detroit Pistons. If the Wolves win the championship, they will be relocating to a neighbourhood similar to that one.
Biggest question for the Wolves: Can they pull off the defense-over-offense formula?
A few teams who prioritised defence have emerged victorious in recent years, like the 2022 Golden State Warriors (who, yes, finished first in defence and 17th in offence) and the 2019 Toronto Raptors. But it’s indisputable that the majority of those teams who followed that route to success came from earlier eras of the sport; if we had extended our list above to the top 10, that list would have included the 1990 “Bad Boy” Pistons. Not that top-two defences haven’t won rings recently—the Warriors finished in the top two in both 2015 and 2017—but those performances have typically been paired with elite offences (Golden State was among the top two on offence in both of those seasons). In contrast, Minnesota’s offensive rating during the previous regular season was 16th. Even though the Wolves are now fourth out of the 16 playoff teams, they would be the second-lowest regular-season offence to win a championship since the 2004 Pistons, who finished 18th.
