The Durant Decision
2016–17Perhaps you, like the author of this study, remember exactly where you were when you heard about KD-to-the-Warriors. It was shocking at the time, and really never stopped being shocking until the double-whammy of KD and Klay's injuries.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Warriors needed Durant, and that by leaving OKC he left an obvious title contender and created an unstoppable monster. We fed the counterfactual into the engine: Durant re-signs in Oklahoma City, and Golden State keeps its 73-win core — Barnes and Bogut included — intact. Hit the "re-simulate season" button to see a fresh season + playoffs, with chance respecting the calculated odds.
* A seeded simulation — one plausible alternate season, reproducible from its seed, not a prediction. Or perhaps a portal to an alternate dimension.
Each re-run re-rolls every game’s bounces from the same rosters — the bar is how often each team ends up champion, so it weighs the likelihood, not a single outcome.