Will Golden State Warriors Have More Wins Than Philadelphia 76ers Have Losses?
The Golden State Warriors are good at being great. The Philadelphia 76ers are good at being terrible.
But which team is better at owning its respective niche?
It's recently become difficult to overstate Golden State's dominance. It's off to the absolute best start in NBA history and, in the grand scheme of things, looks like the best professional basketball team to ever grace the hardwood.
Comparing the Warriors to the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, owners of a best-ever 72-10 regular-season record, doesn't even seem fair anymore—to the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls.
That's how great, how incomparably incredible, these 2015-16 Warriors are: Peers do not exist. And in the absence of competitive companions, historical or otherwise, it takes traveling to the other end of the spectrum to find a truer test for their triumphs.
Are these Warriors better at winning than the deliberately dreadful Sixers are at losing?
Just How Bad Is Philly?
Calling the Sixers atrocious would be insulting to sporting atrocities. They are pacing themselves toward the worst start in league history and have won as many games since the beginning of last season as the Warriors have notched in 2015-16.
A championship contender is supposed to emerge from Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie's self-detonated wreckage eventually. Philly has three top-seven prospects in Joel Embiid (who has yet to make his NBA debut), Nerlens Noel and Jahlil Okafor. Hinkie could have up to four first-round picks at his disposal this summer—two of them lottery selections—and the team will enjoy enough cap space in the coming offseasons to chase whichever free agents it pleases.
For now, though, the Sixers are a categorical disaster. And regardless of whether their contrived collapse is supposed to be this comprehensive, they're immediately trapped.
Not only are they fielding the Association's worst offense, but they're on course to post the fifth-worst offensive rating ever. Last season's defense, by far and away the bright spot of the Hinkie regime, has devolved into a recurring turnstile. The team is hovering around the bottom 10 in points allowed per 100 possessions and seems destined to stand pat, if not regress, on the back end of another midseason personnel purge.
Noel and Okafor, the Sixers' two best players by name, have no measurable chemistry. The spacing is impossible to work around when both share the floor, and Philly is, statistically, more than twice as bad as usual when they're both in the game.
Head coach Brett Brown has resorted to staggering their minutes in light of collective struggles, which is never a good sign as it pertains to franchise cornerstones. Meanwhile, Dario Saric, the 12th overall pick in 2014, has yet to come stateside, the Nik Stauskas experiment is failing fantastically, and the Sixers still only employ makeshift stopgaps at the point guard position.
Wins will be recorded, of course. That's the luxury of an 82-game schedule, and there have been plenty of almosts already this season.
Eleven of the Sixers' first 18 losses came by single digits. They've held fourth-quarter leads in each of their last five games. Victories are going to come. Philly might even enjoy a miniature winning streak or two as the year progresses.
But even with the close calls, and even with the Los(t) Angeles Lakers visiting Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday night, the Sixers are a special kind of bad. As Dan Gelston of the Associated Press put it when prompted by SI.com's Richard Deitsch:
"I think they can hit the losing streak trifecta this season. They already have longest overall losing streak (over two seasons) and can hit longest to start a season and longest single season.
I think they can win Tuesday at home against the Lakers unless Kobe beats Father Time and puts on a show in his last game in front of his hometown fans. If you told me the losing streak reached 30, 40 games, I wouldn’t be surprised.
"
Zero-for-Christmas. Zero-for-2015. Matching or setting the worst record for an 82-game season (9-73). Claiming the lowest winning percentage in league history by going 8-74. It's all on the table in Philadelphia.
The Sixers are, by design or by chance, that bad.
The Warriors' Golden State of Mind
If the Sixers have a legitimate shot at being the worst team ever—by record—then realistically, the Warriors must be capable of winning 74 games to unequivocally secure more victories than Philly has losses.
And if that seems impossible, it's for reasons other than Golden State's basketball abilities.
Through their first 18 games, the Warriors have outscored opponents by 288 total points. That's more than 125 points better than the 1995-96 Bulls' opening performance (plus-163) and head and shoulders above any other start in NBA history:
Relative to today's landscape—the one they must navigate—the Warriors are even better.
Only six teams were a plus-288 or better all of last season. On average, the Warriors are outscoring opponents by 16.1 points per 100 possessions. That's 5.8 points more than the second-place San Antonio Spurs—the exact net rating of the 2014-15, 60-win Atlanta Hawks.
In other words: Golden State is the 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks better than the rest of the league.
The Warriors' biggest threat to slowing down, then, has nothing to do with basketball. It has everything to do with their interest in chasing history, in finding something to prove at a time when they don't need to prove anything.
And if that's the most imminent danger they face, well, they're going to be just fine.
"Absolutely not 'cause if we get 16-0 tattooed in there and we don't win an NBA championship, who cares about them 16 games?" Draymond Green said of commemorating Golden's blistering beginnings, per the Associated Press' Janie McCauley. "At the end of the day it's 16 wins in the month of November."
"There is no championship hangover for us," reigning MVP Stephen Curry said, per CSNBayArea.com's Monte Poole. "We're trying to get better and we're focused. We're staying in the moment, so we feel like if we come to play every night, we should be in good shape."
Still engaged, still hungry and still playing at a level that, while insane, is only an extension of everything they did last season, the Warriors have a firm grip on reality.
| 2014-15 | 115.6 | 99.7 | 16.1 |
| 2015-16 | 111.6 | 101.4 | 10.2 |
And the reality is, what they're doing now, though it seems too good to be true, is sustainable.
An Unlikely Battle with a Likely Result
Poking holes in the Warriors' unofficial race to win more than the Sixers lose shouldn't be difficult—not given how bad Philly actually is.
Somehow, though, it's overwhelmingly hard. Every potential mark against them turns out not to be one at all.
Harrison Barnes is expected to miss at least a few games as he tends to a sprained left ankle, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's Rusty Simmons.
The Warriors still have a league-best net rating without him.
Andrew Bogut is still a magnet for missed time and minutes caps.
Festus Ezeli's net rating is higher than Bogut's.
Interim head coach Luke Walton and actual head coach Steve Kerr could decide to rest key players.
Possible, yet unlikely, with Golden State overtly aware of the opportunity at hand.
There is nothing to nitpick, nothing to doubt, nothing that suggests the Warriors won't finish with more wins than the Sixers have losses, irrespective of how many losses they tally.
And that's not because the Sixers, on some level, really aren't that bad.
The Warriors are just that good at being great.
Stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and are accurate leading into games on Nov. 29.
Dan Favale covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, @danfavale.
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