Do we need to wait for the final play-in games on Friday evening to engage in this exercise? Absolutely not. Here are the NBA playoffs round one series, ranked from most entertaining to “barely worthy of NBA TV.”
1. Houston Rockets vs. Golden State Warriors
Less than two weeks ago, Houston held Steph Curry to one of his worst games ever. Largely thanks to the demonically athletic Amen Thompson, among other hellacious defenders, Curry shot 1-10 on the way to a relatively comfortable Rockets win. Now Steph — still the best show in the entire league on the right night — gets to face that defense for two straight weeks. This series has any number of fun narratives — the seasoned champions versus the young up-and-comers, a collection of loose cannons on both teams (Dillon Brooks and Draymond Green, primarily), a 35-year-old Jimmy Butler trying to summon Playoff Jimmy one more time — and we should all just hope it goes seven games.
2. New York Knicks vs. Detroit Pistons
Detroit has been the stealth most-fun-team-in-the-league since early December. The Pistons feature two people — Isaiah Stewart and Ron Holland — who would fight the logo at midcourt if it looked at them funny. Cade Cunningham has been a revelation all year. They are the first team to triple their win total from the previous season. The Knicks, though, have the league’s fifth-rated offense and are relatively healthy, for the moment. This will be extremely fun.
3. Denver Nuggets vs. Los Angeles Clippers
The Clippers have sort of come out of nowhere the last couple months of the season, emerging on Kawhi Leonard’s healthy-for-now shoulders like a team capable of beating pretty much anyone. The Nuggets, while enduring a very strange end of the season, still have the consensus best player on the planet. This could go any number of ways.
4. Los Angeles Lakers vs. Minnesota Timberwolves
Last year, Luka Dončić dragged an otherwise middling Dallas Mavericks squad all the way to the NBA Finals. Now he has LeBron James on his team. Minnesota’s sixth-ranked defense will have to deal with one or both of the league’s resident basketball geniuses on the floor at all times, and Anthony Edwards will try to cook the generally porous Lakers perimeter defense and lack of rim protection on the other end. This is the only first-round series that has three of the top ten or twelve players in the league; four series in and we are still in “extremely fun and interesting” territory.
5. Indiana Pacers vs. Milwaukee Bucks
Damian Lillard will somehow return from a blood clot in time for this series, but who knows what the Bucks will get out of him. Indiana has been among the league’s best teams since January. Giannis is a world-destroying monster. We’re getting a bit thin here, but still fun.
6. Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Memphis Grizzlies/Dallas Mavericks
It doesn’t really matter who it is, because OKC is a historically great team and both Memphis and Dallas — especially Dallas — are having among the weirder and darker seasons in recent memory. But this series doesn’t get relegated to the bottom of the pile if only because it will be fun to watch the Thunder start to carry their regular-season dominance into the playoffs. It should be a warm-up for them, but a reasonably entertaining one.
7. Boston Celtics vs. Orlando Magic
Orlando’s injury-plagued season has been hard to watch. Their offense at times devolves into what can only be described as “pure butt.” If they take a single game off the defending champion Celtics that will be considered a success. We are finally in “this is not very fun to watch” territory.
8. Getting kicked in the nuts twice by Draymond Green
9. Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Miami Heat/Atlanta Hawks
Cavs in three.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
