NBA

NBA Power Rankings Update: The Toronto Raptors Continue Their Climb

Russell Peddle  —  @rustypedalbike Jan 11th, 2018
The Raptors are the only team in the NBA to rank in the top-four in both offensive and defensive efficiency. Are they for real as a title contender?

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.

The idea is that this list will give you a better picture of how things are likely to shake out by season's end than the plain and simple standings would.

Without further ado, let's count the teams down from worst to best.

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