Early Game 72: GSW at DAL, 6:30pm PT
end of the hell road trip, 3rd city in 4 nights
GAME DETAILS
WHO: Golden State Warriors at Dallas Mavericks
WHEN: Monday, March 23rd, 2026; 6:30pm PDT
WATCH: NBC, Peacock, NBCSBA
Last game
APRIBOT projects this game
Long time readers know that APRIBOT is my projection system. She runs on my humble computer and does not run on LLM AIs. I admit any mistakes it makes are my human fault, so could she please stop messing with my thermostat.
APRIBOT thinks GSW have a 43% of winning! Actually, normally, GSW would have a win probability of 54%, but the schedule is extra bad for this game: another 3rd city in 4 nights, 5th game of a tortuous road trip, a long flight from Atlanta, which drags down the win probability by -11%.
What APRIBOT doesn’t know is that DAL would really like to lose this game for lottery seed purposes. She already factored some of this into account by calculating in DAL’s horrendous recent record, but still. So this game is a real toss-up. Let’s hope GSW keeps having players play well to keep the engine warm for Steph Curry’s return.
APRIBOT projects the league
APRIBOT also evaluated the strength of teams around the league. All the results are below, but here’s a quick summary.
GSW is ranked as a middle of the pack team (#18) judged on the entire season of play, but just looking at Recent play (~15 games decaying), GSW is… a LOT worse. The last column is redder the more your recent play is worse than your season-long play. GSW is ranked dead last for bad recent play by a runaway margin). That’s organic bad play for you, no tanking here.
GSW’s recent play has been bad but strikingly, they are still #21 in the league because so many teams are tanking so hard. You can observe the tanking by seeing how many of the last ten teams have very red last column. Only Sacramento is an honest bad team, the other bottom 9 teams are worse recently than their already bad season. Shameful.
Data as of Mar 22 morning. The columns are Team, Wins, Losses, Win %, Season-Long Rating in points per game over average (league rank), Recent Play Rating (league rank), Recent Play compared to Season-Long (league rank).
APRIBOT continues to think GSW are most likely in the #10 playoff spot with odds of 1% for #7, 8% for 8th, 23% for 9th, 68% for 10th. Given that Steph is coming back this week, that will increase the chances GSW pulls into 9th for home-court Play-In, and there is still a tiny window to sneak into the 7-8 Play-In.
She also thinks GSW has a 81% chance of getting the #11 lottery spot (assuming Play-In loss), 15% chance of #12, 3% chance of #13.
