Can the Celtics really be the 3 seed this year?

We’ve heard a lot of predictions for this team so far. Many of them have the team finishing in the 40-something win range, but I’ve yet to see even the most optimistic of Celtics fans come close to what the folks at Nylon Calculus came up with. 

Last year my predictions, using a blend of my Player Tracking Plus Minus (PT-PM) and a Regularized Adjusted Plus Minus (RAPM)² player metrics, finished at near the top of the APBR metric predictions, whether by luck or by skill. So this year I mostly repeated the same process, relying of the same two metrics. One possible  advantage this year is that I now have two years of the PT-PM metric to measure players’ ability, though my research indicated that the more recent year should be weighed more heavily.

So what number did they come up with for Boston?

49 wins, and the THIRD seed in the East.

I’m an optimistic guy, but even I have a hard time picturing this Celtics team as the third best team in the East… and just one win from tying for the second seed. Head on over there to read more of their justification… but I’ve got this team as a 5th seed at best (providing there isn’t a huge trade that significantly upgrades the talent).