While the Boston Celtics are taking a step back with the departures of center Al Horford and point guard Kyrie Irving in free agency, the number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com are surprisingly optimistic about the team’s 2019-20 prospects.
That is likely in no small part due to Boston landing Kemba Walker in free agency along with a solid supporting cast of young players and free agent big man Enes Kanter.
Despite losing two top-20 players, FiveThirtyEight projects the Celtics to win 46 games next season, good enough for third in the East. That leaves Boston behind only the projected league-leading Philadelphia 76ers and Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Milwaukee Bucks, penciled in for 59 and 54 wins respectively.
Across the league, the site expects only the Houston Rockets, Los Angeles Lakers, Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers, and Denver Nuggets to finish with a better record than Boston, who FiveThirtyEight expects to have a 91-percent chance of making the postseason — better odds than the Lakers (87 percent), Warriors (84 percent), Clippers (78 percent) and Nuggets (89 percent) are being granted.
For those West Coast teams, a combination of that conference’s steeper talent curve and potentially weak benches that can come with dedicating much of a team’s cap space to only a few star players likely accounts for most of the difference in playoff expectation odds. Still, the methodology used to generate the projection could play a role as well.
According to FiveThirtyEight, the rankings were created through 50,000 computer simulations of the 2019-20 NBA season based on the composite effects of individual CARMELO ratings, itself a projection of player development based on what was seen from similar players in past seasons.
The Celtics are also seen as having a small if not impossible chance of making the NBA Finals, with a 6 percent chance of making it to the championship round. Don’t go booking any travel just yet, though.
That’s hardly better than 1-in-20 odds and FiveThirtyEight gives the team just a 2 percent chance of winning it all.
