NBA Power Rankings: The Warriors stay on top despite the Christmas loss to the Cavaliers

Imagine the perfect NBA team. They would have the No. 1 offense in the league and the No. 1 defense in the league.

Our new power ranking metric, Rating +, puts that concept into action.

We take teams’ Offensive Rating (points per 100 possessions) and subtract that from the highest team Offensive Rating in the league (currently Toronto’s 114.1 mark). We capture the difference between a team’s Defensive Rating and the best in the league (currently the Grizzlies’ 100.7 mark). Then, we add those differences together.

The sum is a team’s Rating +. The lower, the better. (Shout out to golf.) The perfect team — one with the league’s best offense and defense — would have a Rating + of 0. (We’re using NBA.com figures, by the way. Basketball-Reference.com estimates possessions differently, and their numbers may look different if that’s your go-to stats site.)

What kind of teams does Rating + favor? It likes balance and penalizes teams really bad at one end, no matter how good they are on the other end.

Memphis and Toronto are perfect illustrative examples. Toronto has the best offense and an average defense. Memphis has the best defense and a disastrous offense. The Raptors rank No. 2 in Rating + (as you’ll see below) and Memphis is No. 13, below a few teams with slightly worse win-loss records. (That’s also a function of the Grizzlies winning an extraordinary share of their close games, which boosts their win total. No metric based on points per game/possession measures will line up with their win-loss record.)

With no further ado, here are this week’s NBA Power Rankings.

The Warriors are the best team in the league, even though they lost to the Cavaliers on Christmas Day. That doesn’t mean the Warriors will beat the Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Golden State is just consistently great, as the 28-5 record indicates. Cleveland has been far less trustworthy in the regular season, and will likely continue to be as the J.R. Smith injury weighs on the team.

The Warriors are No. 2 in both offense and defense, each by just a shade. It’s conceivable that they could reach No. 1 in both categories quite soon. And while we’re talking about matchups, remember that they only lost to the Cavaliers in Cleveland by one point.

Toronto is No. 2 in our Power Rankings, and they make for an interesting case. The Raptors are 0-5 against the Warriors and Cavaliers. They are (a bit shockingly) 0-2 against Sacramento. (One of those games ended quite weirdly.) They lost to the Clippers in the second game of a back-to-back on the road (also a third game in four nights). And they lost to the Hawks at home due to being shredded by Dwight Howard and Dennis Schroder.

They’ve won everything else. They have five losses to the previous two champs, one schedule loss to a good team (that was then rolling and healthy), and three bad losses. The losses to Golden State and Cleveland make us think the Raptors can’t hang with the elite. But the rest of their performance this season says that if anyone can peel games off of the last two champs, it might be Toronto. They are just very consistent, and that offense is something else.

The Cavaliers are the kind of team that can sweep the Raptors and beat the Warriors under bright lights and then lose to the Pistons by 16. They are incredible when they want to be (see: Christmas) and will in all likelihood crank it up in the playoffs and represent the East in the Finals again. Even coasting to the degree they are coasting, they are still excellent (No. 6 in Rating +).

But they can lose literally any given night, and if you’re going to rank teams in the regular season, that matters.