The Ultimate Test: Templates, Zombie Magic, and More

Let's check in on this new graphic template. I'm struggling a little with finding a good website template for articles, but let's try this. Here we go, using a Power Rankings snippet.

Written & Illustrated by Jackson Boake

Power Rankings are a fickle endeavor. I spent an unspecified amount of time meticulously crafting some sort of quantifiable criteria, only to throw it all away as a sunk cost — because let’s be real: Power Rankings never have a real criteria. So I’m going to begrudgingly lean into the impalpability here.

These rankings reflect some amalgamation of recent results, future projections, championship equity, and the likelihood of the pieces actually falling into place as intended. If that was hard to digest, here are some examples (with some spoilers): Boston takes a little dip because of their recent skid, even though I’d still pin them as title favorites. Philadelphia is probably higher on this list than most, if not all others on the internet. I’m willing to somewhat look past their cataclysm start because of their promising flashes of late and contingent full-strength upside (more on this in a minute). Houston’s durability, depth, and defense resembles your archetypal regular season buzzsaw, but their inexperience and, for lack of a better term, lack of a “top dog” renders me highly cynical of their championship ceiling—thus knocking them down just a bit here. And the “likelihood of the pieces actually falling into place as expected” hurts teams like the 76ers and the Clippers. Yes, these teams receive a boost for what they might look like at full power (Sixers with Embiid; Clippers with Kawhi), but no, I’m definitely not ignoring the overwhelming possibility that such scenarios remain merely hypothetical. I’ll attempt to rank them based on some intermediate between the ceiling and the floor. Teams like Orlando, on the other hand, feel like a far safer long-term health bet, so I’m tipping more towards their full-strength rendition in my assessment.

This gets real murky when the subcategories start counteracting each other. I think that Boston wields more championship equity than Cleveland, despite Cleveland (pretty irrefutably) boasting a superior night-to-night output at the present moment. In these cases, I’m defaulting to the team that’s better right now. In this case: the Cavaliers.