The New York Knicks are in the midst of a pursuit of the NBA Championship, which 29 teams fail at every single season. It's a hard goal to accomplish after a long season, which makes it a hard outcome to predict for fans, pundits, and figures around the league itself. That said, there's one statistical indicator that could provide some form of clarity with regard to the teams that have the potential to go all the way: since 2015, teams that made the NBA Finals (two per season, a winner and loser) finished 3.5 in 'LEBRON.' The Knicks are currently second.
What does this actually mean for Knicks' title shot?
The metric created by BBall Index's self-admittedly forced acronym came from its full name: Luck-adjusted player Estimate using a Box prior Regularized ON-off. After the league's Christmas Day slate, the Knicks ranked second among all 30 teams in the metric.
As for individual players, the top five in the league this season are Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, Victor Wembanyama, and Cade Cunningham. With regard to measuring entire teams, BBall Index shared that Finals matchups since 2015 have finished with an average rank of 3.5 in LEBRON for that given season.
The defending-champion Oklahoma City Thunder were unsurprisingly first, with the Knicks behind them. The Boston Celtics, Denver Nuggets, and San Antonio Spurs rounded out the rest of the list. The Knicks and Spurs' rankings, if they held through the rest of the season, would average out to 3.5. So would those of the Celtics and Nuggets, though.
Knicks are working to sustain early success
It's clear that this season, the Knicks are taking early steps toward ensuring that their entire core will be ready and healthy for postseason play. Head coach Mike Brown has seemed quite amenable to working with the team's medical staff, holding center Mitchell Robinson out of a leg of every back-to-back.
If LEBRON has any ability to predict what's going to happen in the postseason, the Knicks will need to remain in the top five for this to matter when the games do. Maybe they fall all the way down to sixth and still end up beating the team in first place, matching the average of 3.5.
But the ten-year average certainly has outliers of its own: anyone familiar with statistics knows that averages don't repeat themselves annually, they develop over time.
This isn't a sure predictor of any team's potential success. It is a good sign for the Knicks early on that they were top-five in LEBRON through 30 games. We'll see if they can keep it up – and if it matters – as the year goes on.