Can the 2019-2020 Lakers get 70 wins?

I know I know, it's way too early to have this conversation.
If we're already having it with less than a third of the season under our belts, can you imagine what it will be like for the rest of the way? "70" might be a top Google search in 2020!

That being said, the conversation has already started, here's the record for the '71 Lakers, blablabla, very similar, blablabla... So it's difficult to block it out entirely and as a big fan of visualization, even more difficult not to add a couple of visuals to avoid all the number comparisons we're seeing.

Very quick background: the NBA regular season consists of 82 games. 70 was a mythical number of wins no team seemed able to reach, the Lakers getting the closest with 69 in 1972. That all changed in 1996 when Michael Jordan's Bulls went on to win 72. Twenty years later, the Golden State Warriors were able to inch just a bit further with 73 wins which is the record as of today. (People will routinely point out that while the Bulls won the championship that year, the Warriors lost the Finals in 7 games...). The year after they got 72 wins, the Bulls were close to repeating the 70-win feat but lost their last two games and ended at 69. They did however win the championship again that year.

This year, the Los Angeles Lakers are off to a really hot start, and after the Bucks' loss yesterday, lead the NBA with a 24-3 record. This hot start has naturally fueled the 70-win conversation, so how do all these teams stack up at this point of the regular season?

Here's a game-by-game evolution of those four teams' win percentages:

The gray horizontal line is 83.4% representing the 70 win threshold. What really stands out here is the overall downward trend as the season progresses. It took a while for the '71 to get above the 70-win threshold , but once above it seems a very difficult level to maintain. No team was just under the limit to finally make it above in the final stretch of the season.

While the Lakers are currently tied with the '95 Bulls, '96 Bulls and '71 Lakers, they will need to keep accumulating wins at a higher than 83.4% win rate to provide an acceptable cushion for the downward end of year trend.

As for the rationale behind that downward trend, it could be due to fatigue, although one could argue that all teams should be similarly affected, but more likely it is due to final Playoff standings starting to fit in. The 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th seed are all fighting for the last two Playoff spots and will do whatever it takes to win.

It could very well be that LeBron and company will have to make some late season decisions as to whether they want to pursue the 70-win mark or maximize their chances for title. Officially they'll declare the latter as being their priority, but we all know that if LeBron can add a 70-win season to his resume he wouldn't spit on that. He also knows first-hand the risk associated with chasing the wrong priority, as his team was the one who beat the 73-win Warriors....

Unbe-klay-vable! (apologies, klay-verest pun I could think of)

Exactly nine years and two days ago, Kobe Bryant scored 81 points in a game.
Yesterday, Klay Thompson had a historical feat of his own: 52 points, which in itself is not jaw-dropping, but the way he recorded it was, thanks to 37 points in the third quarter alone (9/9 from 3-point land and 4/4 for 2-pointers).

If there ever was a definition of a player being hot, we witnessed it yesterday! Tracy McGrady did score 13 points in 35 seconds, but what Klay did is on another level.

But for the sake of some fun stat: What was the probability of Klay putting on this insane shooting display?

For the 2014-2015, Klay started the third quarter having attempted 272 3-pointers and made 120 (44.1%). He had also attempted 386 2-pointers and converted 188 of them (48.7%).

Assuming all his third quarter shots are independent of each other (very reasonable assumption, the only thing that could invalidate it is if there was such a thing as a "catching fire" effect), then the probability of Klay scoring a perfect 9-of-9 3-pointers and 4-of-4 2-pointers is 0.441^9 * 0.487^4 = 3.6e-5! Or 1 in almost 30,000. Basically, you would expect such a performance once every 342 seasons! Or Klay would have a higher probability of getting struck by lighting once in his life.

One question that this mind-boggling performance also raises is whether it has cemented Klay Thompson to be as inconsistent as ever? I am sure Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman will have some thoughts about this.

Even if you've seen the highlights countless times already, never hurts to review this once-in-342-seasons performance: