Sydney's margin was worth 26 to 28 wins, not 24

The Sydney Kings outscored NBL opponents by 12.0 points a game in the 2025-26 regular season, scoring 99.3 and allowing 87.2. That is the best margin in the league by 4.0 points. They finished 24-9, the best record in the league, but two to four wins fewer than the margin predicts.

Sydney have the largest gap below the line. Cairns have the largest above it. This piece looks at who won more than their scoring says and who won less.

The figures come from the published results for all 165 regular-season games of 2025-26, with 33 for each of the 10 clubs. Points scored and allowed are built from the game scores, and the list is complete: 10 clubs times 33 games, divided by two, is 165.

What the margin predicts

A club's points scored and allowed give an estimate of how many games it should have won, called Pythagorean expectation: games played times points scored to a power, divided by points scored to that power plus points allowed to that power. The power is a choice, so we use two, 10 and 14, and show the range.

Club	Record	Points for	Points against	Margin	Expected wins	Wins minus expected
Sydney Kings	24-9	99.3	87.2	+12.0	25.9 to 28.4	-4.4 to -1.9
South East Melbourne Phoenix	22-11	100.7	92.8	+8.0	22.9 to 25.1	-3.1 to -0.9
Perth Wildcats	21-12	90.8	86.1	+4.7	20.8 to 22.4	-1.4 to +0.2
Adelaide 36ers	23-10	92.2	87.6	+4.6	20.6 to 22.2	+0.8 to +2.4
Melbourne United	20-13	92.2	88.0	+4.1	20.2 to 21.6	-1.6 to -0.2
Tasmania JackJumpers	14-19	87.1	87.4	-0.3	16.1 to 16.2	-2.2 to -2.1
New Zealand Breakers	13-20	91.6	92.7	-1.1	15.1 to 15.5	-2.5 to -2.1
Illawarra Hawks	13-20	93.2	97.1	-4.0	11.8 to 13.1	-0.1 to +1.2
Cairns Taipans	9-24	83.5	96.8	-13.3	3.7 to 6.1	+2.9 to +5.3
Brisbane Bullets	6-27	82.1	96.8	-14.7	3.0 to 5.3	+0.7 to +3.0

Points are per game.

Sydney: wins by a lot, losses by a lot

Sydney's gap comes from how they won. They won 13 of their 24 games by 20 points or more, and their wins were by an average of 20.4. Their nine losses were a mix. Three were by five points or fewer. Four were by 14 or more, at 14, 16, 17 and 23.

A big margin built from large wins can overstate a club's record, because a win by 30 counts the same as a win by one in the standings but adds 30 points to the margin. That is the usual explanation, and the numbers here are consistent with it. They do not prove it.

The last five games of the 2025-26 postseason were between Sydney and Adelaide, and Sydney won three of them: 112-68, 106-93 and 113-101. Adelaide won the other two, 91-89 and 92-91.

Adelaide and Cairns

Adelaide went 23-10 on a margin of +4.6, the fourth best. That was the second-best record. It won 0.8 to 2.4 more games than the margin predicts, and went 7-4 in games decided by five or fewer.

Cairns were 9-24 on a margin of -13.3. That is the second-worst, ahead only of Brisbane's -14.7. At that margin Cairns should have won four to six games, and they won nine. Their record in games decided by five or fewer was 6-4.

Perth went the other way in the close ones, 2-6, yet finished within 1.4 wins of their margin at either power, so the close-game record did not show up in the total.

What the numbers show, and what we read into them

The numbers show three clubs that won more than expected at both powers, Adelaide, Cairns and Brisbane, and five that won fewer at both, Sydney, Phoenix, Melbourne, Tasmania and New Zealand. The largest gaps are Sydney below the line and Cairns above it.

What it means is our reading. A 33-game season is short enough that a gap of three wins can come from a handful of games, and we do not claim that Sydney were unlucky or that Adelaide were lucky. What we can say is that Sydney were far ahead of the field on margin, 4.0 points a game, while their record was the best by only one win over Adelaide. Margin is often treated as the better guide to a club's strength, and this season will test that for Sydney.

The test is now under way. In 2026-27 Sydney are 7-3 with a margin of +9.8 after 10 games. Check at 20 games whether their record has moved toward what their margin predicts.