Among the four major sports in the US, basketball has always seemed the easiest to predict once the playoffs arrive. Football is single elimination, so anything can happen; baseball has too much variance to think a better regular season team will necessarily beat a worse one; logic does not bother itself with playoff hockey. But historically in the NBA, a great regular season team has a really good chance of excelling in the playoffs; significant upsets are relatively rare, and in general if there are dominant teams we can expect them to at least make the Conference Finals. And beyond that, even when a lower seed is overmatched, playoff basketball tends to be good — games stay close, because they slow down and scoring drops.
With that context in mind: What the hell has been going on in this year’s playoffs? We have seen some of the most lopsided scoring numbers in league history, some of the ugliest stretches in recent memory, and not just one but several of the best teams running into some unexpected roadblocks. It’s weird!
In the first round, the top teams did what they were expected to do, though even those had some oddness baked in — Oklahoma City, Cleveland, and Boston, the clear three best regular season teams, won their series by a collective 12 games to one. Cleveland beat Miami by the largest margin ever for a four-game series (122 points), and won the closeout game by a preposterous 55 points — which would seem ridiculous, except that OKC opened their series against Memphis with a 51-point blowout of their own, so maybe that’s just what we do now. (There is an argument here about the play-in tournament and what it does to competitive first rounds but we can leave that for another day.)
But then the second round started and the good teams forgot how to play basketball. It took until the eighth game of the Boston/Cleveland/OKC series for those home teams to win their first game — only, after that lone win against seven losses, the higher seeded teams were a collective +16 thanks to the 43-point beatdown OKC administered to the Nuggets.
The Celtics have built 20-plus-point leads over the Knicks in all three games so far, only to blow them in about as ugly a fashion as you can manage in the first two before sailing to an easier win in game 3. Cleveland, though dealing with some injuries, has looked like the overmatched lower seed in going down 3-1 to Indiana, including an absurd blowout in game 4 on Sunday that included the largest halftime lead in NBA playoff history — 80-39, which looks like what happens when Kentucky or Duke play an exhibition against a DII team.
Meanwhile, OKC has tied things up at two games apiece with Denver, but basically nobody has looked good in doing so. The first quarter of Sunday’s game was literally the most futile first-quarter scoring effort in the league’s playoff history, a 17-8 pile of sewage that should be excised from the NBA’s video records.
If the Celtics even their series against the Knicks on Monday evening, there’s a decent chance that at least two of those three dominant regular season teams will right the ship and advance (Cleveland seems… lost). And maybe the next round will feature some good basketball where both teams remember how to dribble and shoot, and at the same time so as to avoid more 40- and 50-point leads. Or maybe we’ll end up with Pacers-Knicks and Timberwolves-Nuggets in the two Conference Finals; both would be fun series (probably? Who knows, things are weird!), but consider: those four teams won a combined 200 games in the regular season. The three teams we would be missing, OKC/Cleveland/Boston, won 193.
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