Because the Golden State Warriors have slowly but surely made their option to 72 wins, and at the moment are getting ready to toppling the 1996 Chicago Bulls’ record, there was much manufactured from how the 2 teams would stack up.

Scottie Pippen went on record saying that the Bulls would sweep the soldiers in a better of seven series (and he would shut down Stephen Curry), while Charles Barkley gave them a rather higher chance, saying they might get one game off the Bulls. Pundits at the other side point to the Warrior’s revolutionary offense of their claims that the soldiers could topple what has long been considered the best team of all time.

Although it's impossible to understand who would win, it’s fun to check these two teams - especially from a betting perspective. Below we can compare multiple statistics in relation to what betting on these teams was like. Although there is not any a method to inform from these stats which team was more dominant, it's interesting to compare.

First of all, if we're taking a look at dominance, how one can measure that will be by how much each team was favored. We will calculate the common amount every team was favored by (regular season only) since 1990 and view that. Being favored to win big is just one a part of the equation though. The opposite part is definitely living as much as those expectations. We will be able to plot the typical amount each team was favored by against the typical amount they covered the spread by. Doing so gives us the graph below.

And another very similar graph: winning percentage straight up plotted against winning percentage against the spread. A few things to notice: first of all, although they both won basically an identical quantity of games and were favored by, on average, basically an identical quantity of points, the Bulls were the easier bet that season.

They not just won more games against the spread, but in addition they covered the spread by more points on average. This essentially implies that this year’s Warriors were very good, and the lines managed to capture that… while the 1996 Bulls, despite being given such a lot respect by bookies, still managed to hide the spread.

You is also wondering who the team is that had an excellent higher average spread than both this year’s Warriors and the ‘96 Bulls - that was none rather than the 1997 Bulls. So who knows what the common spread can be for the soldiers next season?

However, simply because either one of these teams were exceptional doesn’t mean they accomplished the similar thing within the same way. For example, we will have a look at the percent of games when each team went over the whole to get an concept of whether or not they were winning their games through surprisingly good offense or surprisingly good defense.

As the soldiers are thought to be probably the most lethal offensive teams in history, it's no surprise they went Over 55 percent of the time. The 1996 Bulls, despite being good offensively, were known for his or her defense, as shown by the reality their games only went Over the entire 45 percent of the time. Below I'VE plotted each team by the percent of games that went Over the overall and as you'll be able to see, the soldiers and Bulls are on opposite sides of the spectrum.

 Finally, much have been product of the soldiers playing right down to their opponents this year, and they performed better when playing better teams. Is that this reflected within the betting data that we have got? Taking a look, we will plot the spread of the sport against how the soldiers did against the spread. That graph is below (the blue dots are wins, and the red dots are losses). We can see an attractive clear downward trend: because the Warriors were favored by more (i.e. playing worse teams) they tended to do worse against the spread. Meanwhile, after they played games that were projected to be close (or where they were even not the favourite) they performed incredibly well.

Did the Bulls have the similar problem?

 There is a slight downward trend, but I WOULDN'T describe it as being as steep because the graph for the soldiers. So maybe the Bulls also played right down to their opponents, but not up to the Warriors, for regardless of the reason.

--Harrison Chase is the Co-President of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a student-run organization at Harvard College devoted to the quantitative analysis of sports strategy and management.

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