“I’m concerned that we haven’t been winning,” Cavaliers General Manager David Griffin told Daryl Ruiter of CBS Cleveland. “Certainly you want to be doing more of that. But I’m not concerned in terms of what it means for us long term at all.”

The oddsmakers in Vegas and the betting markets would agree. The Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook lists the Cavaliers as the second choice to win the 2017 NBA title (9-to-4 odds) behind the Golden State Warriors (4-to-7 odds); PredictWise, a market-based site generated from real-money markets that trade contracts on upcoming events, gives Cleveland a 20 percent chance to win back-to-back championships, again trailing the Warriors (56 percent).

But you have to wonder if LeBron James and the Cavaliers possess that position more as a function of geography than their play this season. Just one look at the Eastern Conference and it’s clear the overall quality of competition is significantly weaker compared to the West. And that directly impacts the degree of difficulty for LeBron and Co. to become back-to-back champions.

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If the regular season ended today, the Cavaliers would play the Miami Heat in the first round. According to the Simple Rating System, a metric that adjusts margin of victory for strength of schedule, Cleveland (3.69 SRS) should be favored by three points over Miami (0.62 SRS), giving the Cavaliers a 74 percent win probability for a game at home. That, in turn, projects Cleveland to win a seven-game series 79.8 percent of the time in the current 2-2-1-1-1 NBA playoff format. And this projection holds up with historical averages. According to whowins.com, the home team has a first-round series record of 61-15 (80.3 percent) when it wins Game 1.

However, if the Cavaliers played in the West, they would be the fourth-best team, leading to a first-round matchup with the Utah Jazz (3.57 SRS), giving them less than a one-point edge on a neutral court. In this scenario, Cleveland would move on to the second-round just 60 percent of the time.

Extrapolating this for the rest of the playoffs, the Cavaliers would have a 41 percent chance of reaching the NBA Finals as a member of the East, compared to an 18 percent chance if they had to navigate their way through the West — and that’s assuming the toughest possible matchups in the East as a No. 1 seed compared to the easiest road in the West as a No. 4.

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In other words, that 18 percent chance is based on having to play the Jazz in Round 1, the Denver Nuggets — who would have beaten the Warriors in an upset — in Round 2 and the Houston Rockets on the road (rather than the Spurs) in the conference finals. If Cleveland would have to face the Warriors in Round 2 their chances of making the NBA Finals drops to four percent.

Before you balk at those projections consider the Cavaliers have outscored opponents by 3.6 net points per 100 possessions this season, ranking them sixth in the NBA. Four of the five teams ahead of them are in the West, with the Toronto Raptors the lone exception. Cleveland’s net rating ticks up to plus-4.4 if you look at the games from the start of the season leading up to Kevin Love’s injury on Feb. 14, but that would still be the sixth-best net rating in the league. With the “Big Three” of James, Love and Kyrie Irving on the floor, the Cavaliers’ net rating increases to plus-9.3, worse than the Warriors’ full-season results (plus-11.8) and only slightly ahead of the San Antonio Spurs (plus-8.6). But James, Love and Irving only share the court for 23.1 minutes per game — 24.9 minutes per game in the playoffs — making it unreasonable to argue this team is going to suddenly and markedly outperform what we have seen so far this season.

And yes, having James on the roster could be a game-changer, yet based on the team’s points scored and allowed, the Cavaliers have won three more games than expected. So let’s say James by himself is worth three wins over the course of a season, that still only equates to less than a third of a game when condensed from a full season into a seven-game series. So even an improved James won’t win you an extra game or two in a series.