An all-time team in the making: The Spurs' 21-5 start by the numbers
In any other year, what the San Antonio Spurs have done to start this season would be the talk of the Association.
Of course, when the defending NBA champions, led by the reigning MVP, get off to the record-breaking start that Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors are off to, everything else tends to fly under the radar.
Gregg Popovich, Tim Duncan, and the Spurs wouldn't have it any other way, but if you've been sleeping on the five-time champs, here are a few numbers to consider.
66
They may not be chasing the 1995-96 Bulls, but with 21 wins in their first 26 games, the Spurs are on pace for 66 wins. To put that in perspective, even the Spurs themselves, one of the best pro sports franchises around since their inception 42 years ago, have never won more than 63 games.
Put another way, only 11 teams in NBA history have finished with a winning percentage higher than the Spurs' current mark of .808. Eight of those 11 teams won a championship, while 10 of 11 advanced to the conference finals.
91.8
Any defense that allows less than 100 points per 100 possessions is one worth boasting about. A defense that flirts with allowing less than 90 points per 100 possessions is an all-timer.
Through nearly a third of the season, the gap between the Spurs' league-leading defensive rating of 91.6 and the second-ranked Miami Heat's defense is equivalent to the gap between Miami's D and the 15th-ranked Atlanta Hawks. The Spurs are defending at the best rate the NBA has seen in 12 years, since the 2003-04 iteration of Popovich's Spurs allowed just 91.6 points per 100 possessions.
The 2015-16 Spurs' mark of 91.8 is the second-best defensive rating recorded in NBA.com's 20-year archive, and their Basketball Reference defensive rating is the fourth-best mark since 1973.
+13.2
Speaking of NBA.com's 20-year advanced stats archive, only one team in that database has posted a better net rating per 100 possessions than this year's Spurs (+13.9) - that would be this year's Warriors (+14.8). But when it comes to raw point differential per game, not even the Warriors can top the Spurs' mark of +13.2, aided by Monday's 118-81 beatdown of the Jazz.
Spurs last 10: +20 -3 +25 +20 +3 +51 -3 +22 +25 +37. That's more 20+ point wins in last 10 than GSW, CLE and CHI have combined ALL SEASON.
— Tom Haberstroh (@tomhaberstroh) December 15, 2015
For what it's worth, only eight teams in NBA history have posted an average point differential of at least +10.0 (including last year's Warriors), but no team has ever been better than +12.26. Of the eight that have been +10 or better over an entire season, seven went on to win the title, while the other - the 1971-72 Bucks - lost to one of the other eight, the 1971-72 Lakers.
If the first seven weeks of the 2015-16 season are any indication, one of the Spurs or Warriors could join the 1972 Bucks as a historic team that just happened to have the misfortune of running into another all-time squad.