1/24/2016 · originally published on uselessanalysis.com

The Spurs and Warriors are both making history

Tomorrow, January 25th, is two very important things:

1. It's my son's birthday
2. It's the first meeting of the year between the Golden State Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs, two teams that have demolished the league through the first half of the season

We decided to update this analysis in advance of tomorrow's Spurs-Warriors matchup:

Incredible! The Spurs, Warriors, and the 95-96 and 96-97 Bulls clearly separate from the rest of the crowd through 44 games, and this is a competitive set made up of the best NBA teams in the past 35 years.

The Spurs point differential of +638 is so video game absurd that if they were to finish the rest of the season even, that +638 would be the 24th-best in the 3-point era. Meanwhile, the Warriors still have the 2nd-best record at this point in NBA history, just one game shy of the 95-96 Bulls.

We took a look at the stats and found that, once again, point differential is more predictive of future wins than current wins when looking at this dataset. However, unlike previous analyses, the correlations are low. Some of these squads rested their starters when they clinched top seeds, and their end-of-season win totals ended up lower than you'd expect as a result.

The teams with the best record in games 45-82 were actually the 99-00 Lakers and 96-97 Jazz, as they each went 33-5 over their final 38 contests. The 95-96 Bulls and 96-97 Bulls won 31 and 30 games respectively in the same time period.

All of this is to say that if the Spurs and Warriors remain healthy, motivated, and on pace, they are both on track to make history. The all-time wins record of 72 and the 3-pt-era point differential record of +1,004 better look out!

Now let's hope the Spurs give my son a birthday win tomorrow. Go, Spurs, Go!

​-rj