LOL, c'mon man....."research".....took 5 minutes at BBREF.
and as I pointed out, a 6 game differential between Home/Road between the teams as well as the huge gap in SOS can explain a lot of the gap. I mean, yeah, the Pels have been hot lately, but look at how easy their 'lately' has been: over the past 14 games they have had 11 at home and only 3 on the road; and 2 of the 3 road games were against the Spurs. And their 2 losses at home were against Boston....and Portland (look at that...more research!)
the Pels are a better balanced team than Portland....their GM has been at the job a lot longer than Cronin, and Cronin has been burdened with Olshey's wildly unbalanced and length challenged roster. And of course, everything in New Orleans rides on Zion's health. He's all that stands between potential HCA in the playoffs vs the lottery. Coming into this season, in his first 3 years Zion had played 85 games; Greg Oden played in 82 games in his first 3 years; 88 if you count playoffs. That's an incredibly shaky foundation for a #1 seed that is only 2 games away from losing HCA, 4 games away from the 8th seed and Play-in, and 5 games away from the lottery