Our CARMELO NBA player projections are back! In the video above, Nate Silver breaks down what CARMELO thinks about the league’s top prospects.

Phil Jackson is no longer leading the New York Knicks’ front office, agreeing to leave the organization Wednesday. In the video above, Neil Paine discusses Phil Jackson’s legacy with the Knicks.

Read more: At Least Phil Jackson Didn’t Leave The Knicks In Ruins

Although it didn’t exactly come as a shock to NBA observers, both Chris Paul and Blake Griffin of the Los Angeles Clippers opted out of their contracts last week, creating the real possibility that LA’s recent run of relevance is coming to an end. And if the end is near for “Lob City,” it would mean one of the sports franchises most associated with failure somehow managed to fail even when it was winning games. Few NBA teams have ever accomplished so little with so much talent.

With 313 wins since Paul joined the team for the 2011-12 season, the Clippers own the league’s third-best record over that span. They’re coming off what is unquestionably the best six-year period in franchise history. Paul is a bona fide Point God, and with Griffin and center DeAndre Jordan, he gave LA a Big 3 that could theoretically go toe-to-toe with the league’s other star-powered trios. In terms of personal honors, Paul has few statistical peers in history among point guards, while Griffin and Jordan made seven combined All-NBA teams. By numerous team and individual standards, the partnership has been a rousing success.

But when dissecting this Clippers squad, there’s always the unfortunate matter of the playoffs to address. Because despite all those victories and accolades, LA has won only three measly playoff series in its Big 3 era and never advanced past the conference semifinals — a truly weak performance for a team with so much regular-season success.

We can measure just how disappointing the Clippers have been with a system called “playoff success points,” which I’ve used before to judge a team’s performance in the NBA postseason. Teams rack up points for winning series and advancing further into the playoffs. A championship is always worth 1,000 points; losing in the Finals, 500; losing in the conference finals, 250; and so forth. Since 2012, the Clippers have accumulated only 562.5 playoff success points, less than half as many as we’d expect based on their regular-season record:

Going back to the 1976 NBA-ABA merger, no other team has won at least 320 regular-season games in a six-year span and accumulated anywhere near as few playoff success points as the 2012-17 LA Clippers did. (The next-closest were the David Robinson-led 1990-95 San Antonio Spurs, another team known for falling short on the cusp of greatness.)

And LA’s star power makes its shortfall even harder to understand. In the CP3-Blake-DeAndre era, the Clippers have been home to 17 individual seasons where a player logged at least 20 percent of available minutes and posted a Box Plus/Minus (BPM) of +3 or better (those cutoffs roughly give you a star-level season): Six by Paul, six by Griffin, four by Jordan and one by Matt Barnes. Only 17 times since the merger has a franchise boasted so many star-level seasons in a six-year span, and they usually come from dynastic teams (Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls; Tim Duncan’s San Antonio Spurs) or would-be dynasties like the Stockton-to-Malone Utah Jazz and the Philadelphia 76ers of the early 1980s. Once again, the Big 3-era Clippers have enjoyed the least amount of postseason success of any team in that group:

None of this is to say that the Clippers’ core should be blown up; after all, players of Paul and Griffin’s caliber don’t grow on trees. Nor do the duo’s opt-outs necessarily mean either (or both) won’t be back in LA next season anyway. The Clippers can still pay each substantially more money than either could get elsewhere, should LA choose to offer them max deals. Griffin and Jordan will still be under 30 next year, and CP3 is coming off his best statistical season as a Clipper (when he was healthy).

So the tank is hardly empty in LA. But with fabled exec Jerry West leaving the champion Golden State Warriors to join the Clippers as a front-office consultant, a Big 3 breakup wouldn’t come as a total surprise, either. And if that does happen, the Clippers and their fans can only look back at the last six seasons with regret over what might have been.

The Congressional Budget Office on Monday announced an unsurprising but important conclusion: The Senate version of the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is broadly similar to the House version that has been discussed for months. The Senate bill, if it becomes law, is likely to increase the number of uninsured Americans by 22 million by 2026, compared to what would happen if the Affordable Care Act stayed in place, according to the CBO. It would also reduce the number of people on Medicaid by 15 million by 2026. And it would reshuffle the private insurance system set up under Obamacare in a way that is likely to increase costs for older people, while reducing premiums and other costs for some younger people.

The overall number of uninsured people is projected to be slightly different under the Senate plan than the House version, which the CBO said would result in 23 million more Americans being uninsured, although the agency estimates that many of the people losing coverage would be those who chose not to buy insurance because it would no longer be legally required, as it is now under Obamacare. The CBO said the Senate version would cut $772 billion of Medicaid funding over the next decade, compared to $834 billion in the House bill. The Senate bill’s 15 million person decline in Medicaid enrollment is slightly higher than the drop that would result from the House bill, which was estimated at 14 million people. Both bills would repeal a variety of Obamacare tax increases that largely targeted wealthy Americans and the health care industry; those tax cuts are worth about $541 billion in the Senate bill, compared to $664 billion in the House version.

In terms of its costs to individuals, the CBO estimated that a 40-year-old with an annual income of $56,800 would pay about $5,000 in yearly health insurance premiums under the Senate Republican bill, about $500 less than the same person would pay under Obamacare. But a 64-year-old making the same amount of money would pay $4,400 in yearly premiums under Obamacare, compared to $16,000 a year under the Senate health care bill. If those premiums are combined with a high deductible, the cost of health care could equate to nearly 40 percent of that 64-year-old’s annual income.

“This legislation would generally reduce the percentage of income that younger people had to pay toward their premiums and increase that percentage for older people,” the CBO wrote.

And many Americans would get less help under the Senate plan than they get under the ACA. Broadly, the agency concluded, “the average subsidy per subsidized enrollee under this legislation would be significantly lower than the average subsidy under current law.”

The CBO goes so far as to say that few low-income people would buy health insurance, even though they would qualify for subsidies under the Senate plan, because the tax credits would be pegged to plans with high deductibles. That would make the total cost of the plan unaffordable, even if a person can pay the premiums.

These findings are unsurprising because the Senate, despite its suggestions that it would effectively toss out the House bill and create a new one from scratch, wound up including similar provisions to those in the bill passed by the lower chamber last month. But the CBO score is important because those who want to kill the legislation, including Democrats, medical groups like the American Heart Association, the AARP and other constituencies, are very likely to cite these numbers when they blast the Senate proposal. And these findings could complicate Republicans’ plans to pass the legislation through the Senate — which they are rumored to be trying to do as soon as this week — by giving reluctant GOP senators a reason to vote “no” or demand changes to the proposal. The legislation needs at least 50 votes to pass the Senate (Vice President Mike Pence would serve as the tiebreaker if necessary); there are 52 Republican senators, and several have voiced reservations.

On Friday, Dean Heller, a Republican senator from Nevada, said he opposed the legislation, at least “in this form,” because it “takes insurance away from tens of millions of Americans.” The CBO has now buttressed his position.

Here are four of the big shifts the Senate made away from the House version of the bill:

1. Phasing out some of the federal funding for Medicaid expansion over three years rather than reducing funding for expansion all at once.
2. Using a formula for Medicaid funding that would provide less money to states for the program than the House bill would have provided — and far less than is allocated under the ACA.

The CBO said this change would likely force states to either spend more of their own money on Medicaid, cut payments to doctors and hospitals, reduce services for Medicaid recipients, limit Medicaid enrollment or figure out how to implement “more efficient methods for delivering services.”

The agency predicts that, under the Senate plan, about 15 million fewer people will be enrolled in 2026 than under current law. But the agency also foresees additional drops in Medicaid enrollment after that date.

3. Barring states from waiving the ACA provision that prohibits insurers from charging higher prices for insurance plans to people with pre-existing conditions. However, this legislation, like the House bill, would allow states to waive some of the insurance laws implemented under Obamacare, and there appear to be a lot of ways that insurers could get around the ban on charging sick people more.

If states drop rules requiring insurers to offer certain benefits, “coverage for maternity care, mental health care, rehabilitative and habilitative treatment, and certain very expensive drugs could be at risk” in those states, the CBO concluded.

4. Penalizing those who went without insurance for more than 63 days by imposing a six-month waiting period before they can get coverage in a new plan. All three systems — the ACA, the House bill and the Senate bill — seek to punish those who don’t have insurance in order to discourage people from buying health insurance only after they have gotten sick and to make sure that relatively healthy people get insurance, which helps keep insurers’ costs down. The ACA does this through the so-called individual mandate, which charges a tax penalty to people who don’t have health insurance. The House bill would have done it by allowing insurers to impose a 30 percent surcharge on premiums for people who had gone without coverage for 63 days or more in the previous year.

“Imposing that waiting period” proposed by the Senate “would … slightly increase the number of people with insurance, on net,” the CBO concluded.

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This week on the show, the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast team games out the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. Is the race between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel really that big a deal? Plus, in “good use of polling vs. bad use of polling,” Nate explains that chocolate milk does actually come from brown cows. Finally, they speculate on the possibility of a Mike Pence presidency and what it would mean for the Republican Party.

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The narrative going into the 2016-17 Warriors season was how unfair it was that one of the best teams of all time added one of the best players of all time to become unstoppable. And after the Warriors posted the best winning percentage in NBA postseason history and their star acquisition won the NBA Finals MVP, the narrative coming out of the season is much the same, only louder. But easy to lose in this narrative is the simple fact that the Warriors probably didn’t need Kevin Durant for the team to be this good — or at least almost this good. While adding Durant has been a success, it didn’t end up breaking basketball any more than the Warriors had broken it already.

Counting the regular season and playoffs, the Warriors won 84 percent of their games this year — up from 83 percent last year and 81 percent the year before. Teams have only won 80+ percent of their combined season games 11 times in the 70-year history of the NBA. The Warriors have now done it three years in a row.

But the Warriors’ mission isn’t just to win titles, it’s to guarantee them. And Durant is both icing and insurance policy — a guarantee that the Warriors will always have an MVP-caliber, one-man offense available. Though he makes them a little bit better in his own right, his main value comes from making what happened to them in the 2016 playoffs less likely.

So what does make them so good? And, more broadly, is greatness a matter of refining all aspects of a discipline, or does it stem from being freakishly good at one thing? The Warriors are the first dynasty in the ball-tracking era, which gives us an opportunity to measure their greatness in ways that we couldn’t for dynasties past.

This, in turn, may also help answer the question of just how likely the Warriors are to regress to the mean. If their greatness is a confluence of factors, then there’s a whole lot of things that could go wrong to bring them back to earth. On the other hand, if their greatness is more about one thing, then maybe they can keep crushing the game indefinitely.

The most dominant three-year dynasty ever

The Warriors are an offensive juggernaut — but they’re more than that as well. We can see how much they’re contributing to their margins elsewhere by comparing their offensive rating (points scored per 100 possessions) to their SRS (margin of victory adjusted for strength of schedule), like so:

While they’ve scored about 7 more points per 100 possessions than league average, they’ve also been 10.6 points better than their opponents overall — so about a third of their edge seems to come from something other than offensive efficiency.

But it isn’t rare for teams with stronger-than-average offenses to also have stronger-than-average defenses. This is a bit counterintuitive — it seems like a great offensive team would be more likely to be weak on defense, since those are two very different skillsets and trade-offs must be made. And teams do, in fact, have to choose between more offense or more defense, so it’s significant that the relationship isn’t negative at all.

The offense can make the defense

To understand the sometimes complicated relationship between offense and defense, take the case of Dennis Rodman. Despite being known as a great defensive player, Rodman’s teams defended just about as well with or without him. And despite him being unable (or unwilling) to score himself, his teams were significantly more efficient on offense when he was on the court (even after accounting for his offensive rebounding). I suspect this is because having Rodman in the game allowed his teams to devote fewer resources to defending and rebounding, diverting those energies to offense instead. Similarly, having a highly efficient outside offense may allow a team to divert resources to the other end of the floor — not to mention that having your offensive players hang out more in the space between their opponents and their opponent’s basket can make their defensive job easier.

So let’s compare the Warriors’ offense and defense a bit more directly:

This uses the SportsVu optical tracking data to judge offensive and defensive shooting versus league averages — it’s pretty similar to offensive and defensive ratings, but with rebounding and fouls taken out so we can concentrate on just shots taken and defended. Over their three-year run, the Warriors have been the best on both ends of the floor when it comes to both making and defending shots. Even so, their offensive prowess is particularly absurd.

Another thing we can do to compare their offense and defense is to break them down two-dimensionally: by the quality of the shots taken or allowed (based on each shot’s modeled expectation), and then by how good a team was at scoring or preventing each shot, given that expectation. This relies heavily on my shot-value model, which accounts for shot type, shot location, shot clock, dribbles, time held, home court, defender position, defender distance, defender height and more.

This shows that the Warriors appear to have a lot of players who are better at defense than they should be. Perhaps being free to focus on defense more than rebounding and offense helps. Perhaps they play bigger than their size in part because they’re typically in better position than you would expect from players on a more conventional offense whose goal is literally to get behind the other team. Perhaps opponents have to play offense with an extra eye on defense, or with more defenders than they would usually play.

Also, having people like Stephen Curry and Durant as the offensive centerpieces may allow you to surround them with players who are more defense-oriented. Much like Rodman, someone like Draymond Green’s value may be fully realized precisely because he isn’t required to carry his offense. For a power forward, his responsibilities don’t include that much penetrating and collapsing the Warriors opponents’ defenses. Thus, despite being somewhat undersized for his position, Green has thrived — and indeed, may be one of the most valuable players in the league — in his current role.

And Curry’s shooting makes the offense

While the link between Golden State’s offense and defense is speculative, the relationship between their 3-point shooting and their other shooting is easier to track.

Golden State’s relentless barrage of 3s tends to make people forget that the Warriors are also good at 2-point shooting. The difference is that much more of their value on 2s comes from getting good shots, while more of their value on 3s comes from making the shots they get. Typically there is a relationship between how good a team is compared to expectation for both 3- and 2-point shooting, which is unsurprising since we’d expect good shooters to be good shooters, no matter where they’re shooting from. But the Warriors are not only unusually good at 3-point shooting, they’re also better at 3-point shooting than other shooting by an unusual margin. Comparing the two directly, we can see where the Warriors really butter their bread:

The Warriors are respectable at shooting inside the arc, but have been more than twice as good as the next-best team at shooting 3s in this period. They’re so good at it that there’s an argument that they should be doing it even more often, and that Curry — still the best shooter the game has ever seen — should be doing it way more often.

You can throw more defense at them, and teams have done so — as you see in the breakdown chart above, they’re pretty close to average in 3-point shot quality already. But the Warriors are still better at shooting 3s than any other team is at anything — 3s, 2s or defense. And diverting more and more resources toward keeping them from scoring 130+ points per game (as they would if they got off a typical Warriors dynasty-era 3 on every possession), comes at a price. Opponents are working so hard to stop the 3 that they’re almost certainly losing something from their offense or 2-point defense, which likely helps explain why the Warriors get so many open looks inside the arc.

Part of being good at lots of things is being really good at a couple of things. Curry’s ridiculous shooting opens up the Warriors’ offense. Not only are his shots incredibly efficient, but he also draws so much of his opponents’ attention that he makes his teammates look amazing — and makes his team immensely better. Looking at NBAWowy, which tracks how teams perform with a given player on the court versus on the bench, the Warriors outscored their opponents by 3.1 points per 100 possessions when Durant was playing and Curry was not; that number jumped to 16.1 points per 100 possessions with Curry on the court and Durant on the sidelines.

While Durant may be the story of the season, the Warriors’ dynasty was built and is still being propped up by Curry’s ability to throw the ball into the hoop from great distances. Provided he keeps being able to do that, expect Golden State to keep the game broken.