NBA

NBA Power Rankings Update: The Cleveland Cavaliers Continue to Plummet

Russell Peddle  —  @rustypedalbike Jan 25th, 2018
The Cavaliers have lost 11 of 15 and have the NBA's worst net rating since Christmas. Just how far do they slide down our rankings?

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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