NBA playoffs preview with Neil Paine 🎧

Do we really trust the Celtics? And the Thunder?

Neil Paine is my friend and former FiveThirtyEight colleague who now writes at the excellent — albeit not very creatively-named¹ — Neil’s Substack, where he also runs Elo/FiveThirtyEight-type models for the NBA and other sports. The NBA playoffs start tomorrow — for reasons that mostly seem dumb to me and Neil, the league doesn’t consider the play-in tournament to be the “playoffs” — and we talked about every first-round matchup.

I’m hoping to do a review of my NBA preseason predictions at some point soon — short version: my Eastern Conference predictions make me look brilliant, while my Western Conference predictions make me look like Ippei Mizuhara — but I hope this chat with Neil is a fun treat heading into the weekend. And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Neil’s Substack — and maybe to mine?

Due to a bad airplane Wi-Fi connection, it isn’t really feasible to publish a nicely-edited transcript in a timely fashion, so I’m just going to stick with the audio version for this one. For what it’s worth, the only two bets I have at this point: the Celtics at -190 to win the Eastern Conference, and the Thunder at +1900 (I got this price several weeks ago it isn’t available now) to defy a lot of history and win the title as a very young team. Neil is also a buyer of Timberwolves stock whereas I am not.

Please also free to use the comments for general-purpose NBA discussion.

1. Although I have no right to criticize given the name of this newsletter.