By John Hollinger

I didn’t have time to address this on Friday, but a lot of folks are asking about the switcheroo atop the Power Rankings on Friday that put L.A. head of Cleveland -- an odd circumstance, admittedly, given that Cleveland had just beaten L.A.

The technical explanation is that the “last 10 games” component of the Power Rankings is a pretty powerful one, especially in the first half of the season. The flip side is that when a one-sided victory or defeat falls out of a team’s “last 10 games,” it can alter their ranking. In this case, L.A.’s 11th-most-recent game was one of their worst outings of the year -- a one-point home win over lowly Sacramento.

The broader explanation is that there was virtually no difference between the two teams either before or after. People reflexively make a big deal about No. 1 vs. No. 2, but the two clubs are virtually identical in their quality of play so far, separated by only a couple of tenths of a point -- they were effectively co-leaders in the rankings. And we’ll see the same thing going forward. Saturday’s and Monday’s games knock two of Cleveland’s worst results out of their “last 10 games” (an eight-point win over New Jersey and a home loss to Charlotte), starting the cycle all over again.

In the meantime, we had one other development over the weekend when a scorching Utah team passed Cleveland for the No. 2 spot. Unlike the Cavs-Lakers case, the Jazz do own a recent win over Cleveland, and over their past 10 games they have the league’s best scoring margin against the fourth-most difficult schedule.

Along those lines, we have one other important note: Now that we’re past the midpoint of the season, the Power Rankings will shift from "last 10 games" to "last 25 percent of games," which will take in a larger sample of games and gradually make the rankings less volatile over the second half of the season. In other words, if the same Lakers-Cavs result happened in Game 82, we would see a fraction of the impact on the Power Rankings. Similarly, the rankings will demand a team like Utah stay hot for a longer stretch to bust into the top group.