Where the Warriors rank among the NBA’s 50 greatest teams of all time

Which group is your best of all time? To answer that question with more rigor than it is typically debated in sports bars, in 2015 I ranked every group since moments played were tracked in 1951-52 (sorry to the 1949-50 Minneapolis Lakers) based on their performance in both the regular season and playoffs.
Three years later, it’s time for an upgrade with a new No. 1, plus several other newcomers to the record thanks to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors dominating the competition in their respective conventions.
The method
For champions, I took the average of the stage differential during the regular season and their stage differential in the playoffs plus the point differential of the opponents. That tells us just how many points per game better than an ordinary team each winner was, giving equal weight to the postseason as the regular season to reward the most significant games.
For non-champions, the starting point is the same, but their playoff differential was also adjusted by effectively giving them a five-point loss for every game they came up short of the title. That has little impact on teams such as the 2012-13 San Antonio Spurs, who lost in Game 7 of the Finals, but it harshly penalizes teams that wrapped up large success margins early in the playoffs before falling short in the conference finals.
The adjustment deals with quality of drama. It’s no surprise that some of the greatest single-season team performances in NBA history arrived from the early 1970s, when the league had expanded quickly and battled with the ABA for incoming draft picks. The redistribution of gift allowed stars to shine even more brightly. For every season, I quantified how gamers watched their minutes per game increase or decrease the subsequent season compared to what we’d expect given their age. More minutes indicates a weaker league, while fewer moments indicates one that has gotten more powerful.
Each season is rated relative to 2017-18, from a high of 21 percent stronger in 1965-66, the previous year that the NBA had just nine teams, to a low of 10 percent poorer in 2004-05, the last time that the league expanded. That adjustment is multiplied by the group’s average regular-season and playoff scores to provide a last score greater than an average team this season.