THE 2015-16 National Basketball Association (NBA) post-season was supposed to be more of a coronation than a competition. The Golden State Warriors broke the 20-year-old record held by Michael Jordan’s best Chicago Bulls team for wins in a regular season, and marched through the first two rounds of the playoffs with relative ease—even though Stephen Curry, who on May 11th became the first player in league history to win the Most Valuable Player award by a unanimous vote, missed most of the post-season games with injuries. Moreover, Golden State’s most formidable rival, the San Antonio Spurs, suffered an upset loss in the second round, ensuring that the Warriors would not have to face another juggernaut before reaching the finals. The Golden State steamroller hit what looked like a small speed bump on May 16th, when they lost the first game of their third-round series against the Oklahoma City Thunder by a score of 108-102. The Warriors had a commanding lead in the first half, and were cheated out of a chance for a game-tying shot as the clock wound down when a referee missed a travelling call on Russell Westbrook, Oklahoma’s superstar point guard (pictured, right). The loss certainly stung Golden State, particularly since it occurred on their home court. But great teams bounce back—the Warriors also fell behind by two games to one during last year’s championship series, and then reeled off three straight wins. A single tough defeat shouldn’t represent much more than a quick detour on their beeline to a successful title defence. Right?

Not according to CARM-ELO, the basketball prediction model developed by the statistical website FiveThirtyEight. For the first time since the season’s second week, the system no longer projects the Warriors as the favourite to win the 2015-16 title. Instead, it finds that the Thunder now have an infinitesimally better chance, though both clubs are right around 36%. Offering this opinion as your own would surely get you laughed out of any sports bar in America, and bookmakers would be delighted to take your wager: Bovada, a popular betting site, is currently pricing Oklahoma’s odds of a championship at less than half of the Warriors’. In most fans’ minds, the Thunder were barely an afterthought to contend this year: their best opportunity seemed to have come and gone in 2011-12, when they lost the finals to LeBron James’s Miami Heat, and for the entire season they have had to crane their necks upwards in order to see the Spurs and Warriors far above them in the standings. Nonetheless, after close scrutiny, CARM-ELO’s forecast does not look like an algorithm gone haywire. The smart money may really lie on the underappreciated Thunder.

It would be easy to misunderstand CARM-ELO’s projection as a claim that Oklahoma City are actually a better team than Golden State. They’re not, and CARM-ELO knows it: the model assigns 41 fewer Elo points to the Thunder than it does to the Warriors, implying that Mr Curry and friends should be expected to prevail 56% of the time against Oklahoma City on a neutral court. However, the Thunder don’t have to be a superior club to be a better bet: because they won Game One, they only need to win three more contests to advance, whereas Golden State must win four. Moreover, since Oklahoma secured their victory on the road, the Warriors no longer enjoy home-court advantage. Because Golden State is now playing from behind, they need to be much better than their rivals, not just a little better, in order to overcome their deficit.

Fair enough, a Warriors fan might retort, but Golden State clearly is a far stronger club. After all, they won 89% of their regular-season games, while the Thunder won only 67%. If those percentages reflected the teams’ true talent, then Golden State would be expected to win a head-to-head matchup around 80% of the time, more than enough to compensate for a one-game shortfall.

However, there are three reasons to believe that the Thunder’s regular-season record does not do them justice. The first is the simple fact of their recent performance: their past seven games have all been against historically great teams, and they’ve won five of them. In order for a club to be expected to go 4-2 versus the Spurs and 1-0 against the Warriors, it would have to have won some 96% of its regular-season games. Even the average NBA champion from the past 20 years—i.e., a team with a 75% true-talent winning percentage—would only be expected to win at least five of seven contests facing that calibre of opposition 13% of the time. Sure enough, FiveThirtyEight’s model rewards Oklahoma City heavily for its recent accomplishments: the club has gained 64 Elo points, equivalent to nine points of projected regular-season winning percentage, during their 12 games in this year’s playoffs.

Sceptics might note that this interpretation relies heavily on a small sample. There is still about a 5% chance—a common threshold for statistical significance—that a team “merely” as good as the regular-season Thunder could go 5-2 or better in seven games against the Spurs and Warriors. But there’s a strong case to be made that Oklahoma City is almost uniquely built to succeed in the playoffs. Basketball is a superstar-driven sport, and the Thunder are among the most “top-heavy” teams in NBA history. They probably have two of the league’s five best players in Mr Westbrook, who led the league in scoring in 2014-15, and Kevin Durant (pictured, left), who held that distinction in four of the five previous seasons. But those two elite talents are essentially the Thunder’s only major assets. Oklahoma City has two halves of a world-class imported big man: Enes Kanter, of Turkey, is a skilled scoring threat in the post who can’t play defence, while Steven Adams of New Zealand is a formidable rim protector but rarely touches the ball. Unfortunately, they inhabit different bodies, and are often substituted for each other. Serge Ibaka was never a meaningful offensive threat, and is no longer the shot-blocker he was in his early days. And pretty much everyone else on Oklahoma’s entire roster is below average.

In the seemingly interminable regular season, this lack of depth was the Thunder’s Achilles’ heel. Whenever either star is resting, the other must essentially play one-on-five; when both are on the bench, the Thunder are barely better than the woebegone Philadelphia 76ers. In contrast, the Warriors have so many weapons that they can play prime talents like Andrew Bogut, Andre Iguodala and Festus Ezeli less than half the time, keeping everyone fresh over an 82-game slog. The team barely missed a beat when Mr Curry was hurt. And as Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight noted in January, the Spurs’ bench was so good it “could probably make the playoffs on its own.” Such inexhaustible reserves of talent are a prime reason why both clubs won over 80% of their regular-season games.

The playoffs, however, are the only thing that really counts in the NBA, and they are a sprint, not a marathon. Although every team uses its stars more in the post-season, no club has more to gain from doing so than the Thunder. The Spurs barely increased Kawhi Leonard’s minutes at all in the playoffs, from 33.1 per game to 33.9; the Cleveland Cavaliers have modestly bumped up their deployment of Mr James from 35.6 minutes a game to 37.7. The Thunder, by contrast, are playing Mr Durant and Mr Westbrook a combined seven more minutes per game now than they did in the regular season. Moreover, that time has come largely at the expense of flotsam at the end of their bench, rather than from other highly skilled players. This factor alone should be enough to improve their point differential by around 1.8 points per 100 possessions, or roughly six points of win percentage.

The final argument in Oklahoma City’s favour is essentially the mirror image of the first. Just as the club’s most recent performance is strongly suggestive of a top-tier contender, the long view also supports their claim to be taken seriously. Before the season began, CARM-ELO considered them the third-best club in the league, behind Cleveland and Golden State and ahead of San Antonio; it was only after the Spurs began racking up an absurd point differential that the Thunder were all but forgotten. Any team with Mr Durant and Mr Westbrook at the height of their powers, plus a half-decent defensive big man (Mr Adams), should be able to beat anyone—even the record-setting Warriors—on a merely-pretty-good day. The biggest surprise about Oklahoma City’s season should not be that they beat the Spurs and now lead the Warriors 1-0, but that they somehow managed to lose 33% of their regular-season games. Maybe they were just saving up strength for a deep playoff run.

It’s hard to say whether a single Game One victory means that the Thunder should truly now be favoured over the Warriors. But even if they remain a slight underdog, it’s hard to resist taking a punt on their winning the title at the four-to-one odds still being offered by some bookmakers. In fact, I should probably disclose that I socked down $100 on Oklahoma City the day before writing this blog post.