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 to 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 traditional standings would.

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