Golden State Of Mind, a Golden State Warriors community

From Basketball Prospectus: 4. 2008-09 Cleveland Cavaliers (10.0 rating | +8.9 regular-season differential | +11.1 adjusted playoff differential) Because it ended in the Eastern Conference Finals, last year's Cavaliers team will be remembered by history as a disappointment. Still, from a purely statistical standpoint, Cleveland was a great team. The Cavaliers posted the second-best regular-season differential of the decade en route to winning 66 games, then rampaged through the first two rounds of the playoffs, sweeping overmatched Detroit and Atlanta teams. Then everything went wrong in the Eastern Conference Finals, but Cleveland was still barely outplayed by a very good Orlando team in a series that turned on matchups and poorly timed shooting slumps for the Cavaliers' guards. I'm willing to believe that, despite not reaching the NBA Finals, Cleveland was the best non-champion of the decade. Were the Cavaliers better than several champions? I'm not sure I agree with that.

No, they did not ask me to do a tempo-free writeup of Klay Thompson's awesomeness, or Reggie Moore's freakish free throw rate. (Yet.) Instead, John Gasaway just referred to one of my tweets at the bottom of this post. Hey, it's a start. I know a staff writing position can't be far behind.

Good discussion of the huge gap in player usage rate on offense of Memphis (very high) and Houston (very low w/o Yao, TMac). For the stats oriented amongst us, this is the defining question of Houston's 2009-2010 season.

Basketball Prospectus has done some awesome, awesome work since Selection Sunday, and if you're not reading their stuff, you should be. The link above goes to previews of all the Sweet 16 games by John Gasaway, while this story by Ken Pomeroy evaluates the statistical probabilities of each of the remaining teams to advance and perhaps win the tournament. It also includes fun (read: awesomely obscure) statistical facts about each team.