The honesty section comes first tonight.
This Western Conference Finals has been a disaster for us.
After a brutal 0-3 showing Friday night, our postseason heater has officially crashed into a wall. We’re now sitting at a miserable 2-7 through the first three games of the series between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the San Antonio Spurs.
And frankly, that matters.
Because if you’re going to handicap playoff basketball publicly, you don’t get to celebrate the wins without owning the cold streaks too.
The Thunder’s 123-108 victory in Game 3 exposed nearly every flaw in the V3.0 model’s assumptions. We trusted San Antonio’s home floor. We trusted regression from Oklahoma City’s role players. We trusted the Spurs’ size advantage to eventually tilt the series back toward half-court basketball.
Instead, Oklahoma City turned the series into pure pace-and-pressure chaos again.
Now comes Game 4 tonight in San Antonio, with the Spurs suddenly staring at a near must-win situation while Oklahoma City has an opportunity to seize total control of the Western Conference Finals before heading back home.
Oddsmakers currently list San Antonio as a 3-point home favorite with the total sitting at 218.5.
And despite everything that has happened the last week, the algorithm still believes the value sits with the Spurs tonight.
That doesn’t mean certainty.
At this point in the series, certainty is gone.
But the underlying math still suggests San Antonio has one more punch left.
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