NBA Power Rankings Week 21: Are the Philadelphia 76ers the best bet to win it all?

We have finally made it to the end of the NBA regular season. While 72 games made for a shorter season than we are used to, with how quick the break was between last season’s championship and the start to this season it feels that basketball has been here nonstop since July. This marathon has led to plenty of change and that gives an opportunity to check ourselves and see just how much different the end of the season looks than from the beginning.

For this final NBA power ranking of the regular season, we will call back to the over/under predictions at the beginning of the season.

Looking back to the beginning of the year predictions will provide an opportunity to look back at the season as a whole and project what is to come. We will look forward to the play-in and playoffs for those who have made it and consider what that means for them in the coming weeks. For the teams that did not make the postseason, the focus will be on what is next.

As negative as the first section may have seemed, it is hard to suggest that this season has been anything less than a success. The play-in tournament made it so that almost every team in the top 20 were playing meaningful games into the final day of the season. Of the remaining 10 teams, almost half of those were pushing for wins into the final week of the season. For a league that has been dealing with a tanking issue that made much of the last quarter of the season mostly meaningless for years this is a huge improvement.

For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll compare how each team finished with the season’s first NBA power ranking predictions, found here.

Now let’s start the Week 21 Power Rankings.