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| That’s more like it. |
THE LOSE thought it best to wait to comment on the NBA playoffs until the first round was completed. And one of the things that I want to say here at the start is this: all of these teams who got beat in the playoffs are good teams. They’re good teams with good players, and I’m inclined to want to watch them.
And being good matters. I’m
not into the whole notion of “ringz.” It’s nice to win championships but doesn’t happen too often. I’m not a believer in championship or bust. There is nothing inherently wrong, in my mind, with being a good team that wins a lot of games regularly. It’s easy to forget that when we live in an era of Tankamania – an idea which is predicated on the idea that in order to be great, you have to first be terrible, and there isn’t any point to being somewhere in between. But this is an entertainment industry above all else, and in the present tense, putting a good and winning product out on the floor is a good thing.
Where the problem comes with being good in the NBA is that teams wind up being locked into certain cores and groups of players, and once that happens, you have very little flexibility to change. This is a function of the salary cap, which puts benchmarks on the amount that teams have to spend on players. There’s a minimum floor, there are top end caps and tax thresholds, and there are slots where certain players and entitled to certain amounts. Those hold true for everyone. You have to spend that money. There are more than a few players in the NBA who have so-called “max” contracts not necessarily because they are élite players, but simply because the team had the slot available and had to spend the money on someone.
So what frequently occurs, of course, is that a team gets locked into a core group of players and that core maxes out their ability, but very few good teams are good enough to win titles and once you’ve maxed out and reached your ceiling, and you’re locked into enormous financial commitments for players who are no longer improving, the only way to go is down. We are tantalized by young teams with talent and potential, in part, because it’s exciting to see growth and imagine the possibilities, whereas a lot of fundamentally good teams look, in the bigger context, to be stale and staid and stuck.
And one of the things which has been a plague for the NBA the past couple of seasons is the overwhelming sense that a whole bunch of good teams are stuck. Not bad teams, mind you, but actual good teams that win a lot of games. They can’t get better, they can’t realistically compete for a title, and they’re cost-constrained. Now what? Far too many of the eight teams recently vanquished from the NBA playoffs find themselves in this exact predicament.
This is a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. None of these teams are actually trying to get themselves stuck. They’re making what seem, at the time, to be sound personnel decisions that, cumulatively, come to wind up looking not so good.
Being stuck and good sucks, but being stuck and bad is far worse. Detroit is stuck and is bad. Charlotte is probably an even better example. Hornets 2.0 was actually a 3-seed in the playoffs two seasons ago. They’ve built up their entire roster with the idea of being good, and with the idea that it’s going to cost money in order to do it. They’ve done things like sign Nic Batum to a $25m a year contract which, at the time, seemed like a bit of an overpay but it wasn’t that far above the going rate and, more importantly, if Batum didn’t get that money in Charlotte, he’d likely have gotten a similar amount elsewhere. Their entire roster is built this way – guys signed in good faith on the part of the organization for a few dollars more here and there. The problem being, of course, that in 2018, none of these guys are any good any more. They’re old or hurt or whatnot, so now Charlotte has a bad team with a bad roster that’s also an expensive roster. Their best player, Kemba Walker, is only their 5th-highest paid player. They’re up against the tax, which they do not want to pay. (The legendary competitive drive Michael Jordan had as a player does not seem to extend quite as much as an owner when it comes to absorbing extra cost.) The only way to create some financial relief is by attaching something they want to a trade of something they don’t want, since no one else in the league wants $20m+ of Dwight Howard or Nic Batum. The Hornets are not only bad in the present, but they’re completely screwed going forward. Those days in which they were gagging away a first round series against Miami are going to look like the salad days for residents of Buzz City in a couple of years.
So, if you’re a fan of one of these types of teams which dotted the first round of the playoffs – a good team, a playoff team that cannot make it out of the first round and now seems stuck – at least take heart in the fact that your team has been good. There will be plenty of time for theorizing about team building and roster construct this coming summer, but rather than lament about the uncertain future, at least you can bitch here and now in the present about the fact that your team wasn’t very good in a best-of-7 series.
• No team was worse in a best-of-7 series than the Portland Trail Blazers, who were swept by New Orleans and played a supporting role in this year’s edition of Small Sample Size Theatre, in that getting thumped so convincingly by the Pelicans actually convinced more than a few people that New Orleans was good enough to beat Golden State in the second round. The advanced data would suggest that the Blazers actually generated a decent number of good shots and simply missed them, to which I would respond that missing good shots is Exhibit A of not playing well. More than anything, it was just a bad match-up for the Blazers: they have no one to guard Anthony Davis (who does?), and Jrue Holliday decided it was a good time to remind everyone that he’s one of the better 2-way players in the game and spent the whole series thwarting Dame Lillard. New Orleans were bigger and more assertive defensively, and compounding the problem was the fact that Portland runs the least transition in the NBA, whereas the Pelicans run up and down the floor and play faster than any other team in the league. Being both smaller and slower is not a winning combination.
Immediately in the aftermath, there were rumblings about Terry Stotts possibly losing his head coaching job, which would be stupid. Stotts has done a uniquely good sort of coaching job in Portland the past few years, one in which the Blazers’ continually overachieving during the regularly season saves his boss’ job, because GM Neal Olshey hamstrung this team for the next five years by getting drunk on cap space in the summer of 2016 and doling out awful, unmovable contracts to the likes of Myers Leonard (who?) and Evan Turner – the latter of whom has become the source of fan ire this past season, as if it was somehow his fault that Olshey drove a dump truck full of money up to his house and poured it out in his driveway. It would help if he weren’t next to useless on the floor, of course: every one of the many moments he has the ball in his hand is a moment that neither Dame nor C.J. does, and the greatest advocate of that in the league are the 29 opposing defenses.
Portland’s had the same problem for years now: their backcourt is great and their frontcourt is meh, and at this point every year, the question that arises is, “can you win in the NBA with that backcourt?” Well, sure you can, if your frontcourt isn’t meh. People say the Blazers should trade either Dame or C.J., which is a perverse sort of game of whack-a-mole in which you solve one problem by creating another. They managed to get some salary relief this season by moving third guard Allen Crabbe’s $70m contract to Brooklyn, but the problem was that Crabbe was a guy whose shooting ability the Blazers actually needed. The roster is still a mess.
But it’s been a mess for several years now, and every year Stotts goes back into the laboratory and cooks up a scheme enabling his team to then outperform. They won 49 games and got the 3-seed in the West through some slick offensive sets and through some tenacity on the glass and on the defensive end. There is some frustration in stagnation, of course, but in truth, the Blazers are actually continuing to punch above their weight, and that is noteworthy and admirable. The worst thing they did all year was draw the short straw come playoff seeding time.
• One of my favorite moments in the first round of the playoffs came in Game 1 between the Houston Rockets and the Minnesota Timberwolves. Minnesota were down three with 8.8 seconds remaining, having been just thrown a lifeline in the form of Chris Paul throwing a pass into the stands. Minnesota needs a three to tie, and they are inbounding from their own sideline in the backcourt.
As it turns out, the Wolves have, on their roster, one unique player who is useful in this circumstance: Jamal Crawford. Crawford may be a day older than coal, but he can still create a 3-point shot for himself. He’s one of the best ever at doing that. (Now, whether it goes in or not is another story, but you can say that about every guy on the Wolves who puts up a three.) Furthermore, he is indisputably the best ever at creating a 4-point shot for himself. This is important because the Rockets are likely to foul, forcing Minnesota to shoot two down three, but Crawford’s good enough at getting up his own shot that the Rockets would have to be extremely careful not to give three free throws to Jamal, who is also a 90% foul shooter. You couldn’t think of a better player to have in this situation.
And the Houston Rockets respond to this threat by covering Jamal Crawford with … James Harden, whose defensive deficiencies are the stuff of NBA folklore.
And Houston does this, of course, because they know exactly what Minnesota is going to do, which is have all of the on-court awareness of a traffic cone. Minnesota will throw the ball in to Jimmy Butler, who will go down and try to shoot it himself, because that’s what Minnesota always does in these situations. Houston is so sure this is going to happen that they put a guy who can’t guard his own shoes on the Wolves’ best option for getting up a quick three.
And sure enough … Butler gets the ball, the Wolves stand around and do nothing, he’s picked up by the Rockets best defender, P.J. Tucker, who doesn’t actually have to foul him because Butler dribbles into a no-man’s land, and he winds up taking a spinning turnaround long two, as his foot is on the line. Bad shot, bad play, game over, Wolves lose a game that could possibly have been stolen.
And that’s not to knock Jimmy Butler. I love me some Jimmy Butler, and he did all he can in the playoffs after returning from knee surgery. But what it speaks to is the complete lack of awareness, and lack of any sort of coherent offensive plan, which runs rampant through the entirety of Timberwolves. And that alone makes any meeting with the Rockets a pending disaster, because one of the things the Rockets do, which I love, is dare their opponents to actually pay attention.
As an example, the Rockets switch everything on defense. They’re perfectly content to do so, even if, at times, it means their guards are matched-up with bigs underneath. This is because the Rockets do the math: as explained previously here by Mike D’Antoni’s brother, the post-up is one of the most inefficient plays in the game. They know that teams will break down their normal offensive patterns when they see a switch of a guard onto a big down low and try to force the action, and that teams will mess-up the cross-matches going back down the floor. They want to try and bait their opponents and fool them into doing this. Having said that, the Rockets are also stubborn in how they will adhere to what they’re doing, sometimes to a fault. They’re not going to change what they do even if it’s not working – which is how they got thumped by the Spurs in last year’s playoffs, when the Spurs yielded whole areas of the floor where the Rockets could take shots and the Rockets refused to take them. If, for example, you design some primary actions whereby you can get small Houston guards switched down low on a talented and offensively-skilled big, your guy can eat and eat really well, and keep on eating because Houston will keep switching. Gosh, if only Minnesota had one of those types of guys on their team.
Oh, wait, they do. Karl-Anthony Towns. Remember him?
And what is KAT doing when the Rockets switch on the primary action and he’s matched up against someone like Chris Paul, who is something like nine inches shorter than him? He’s routinely, systematically drifting off into the corner to “preserve the spacing” on the play. What the hell is that? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong is you? That should be an instant read – CP3 is switched onto KAT, feed the big guy in the post and let him eat. But instead, you have KAT scoring 5 points in playoff losses and rarely seeing the ball, and you’ve got Thibs saying “Karl has to be more assertive on the offensive end” in the post-game interviews after playoff losses, and I’m wondering if KAT being more assertive involves him saying, “give me the motherfucking ball, motherfucker,” in order to get their attention. That’s generally not a great way to endear yourself to teammates, but given how hard-headed everyone in Minnesota is, it may be the only way.
Seriously, I’ve hated literally everything I’ve seen from Minnesota for the past two seasons. That they somehow finished with the 4th-rated offense in the NBA this season speaks to how flawed the metric is for rating offenses. The Wolves have gone all-in on loading up on guys who can create their own shot. The downside to that is that no one on this team can actually pass the basketball, and even worse, they don’t appear to be able to think their way through a game – which doesn’t really bode well when you’re playing against teams that actually know what they’re doing. If the primary action of a Minnesota play doesn’t work, everyone on the court collectively shrugs and then whomever has the ball just goes one-on-one.
Oh yeah, and the defense sucks.
That they were even close to winning several of their games with Houston stemmed from the fact that the Rockets didn’t play all that well and couldn’t throw the ball in the Gulf of Mexico. (50 point quarter in Game 4 aside.) And most of the narrative about the Wolves falls along the lines of “a young team that needs to grow,” which belies the fact that they really aren’t all that young, save for KAT and Anthony Wiggins, who is sending Glen Taylor scrounging through the desk drawer and looking for the receipts after giving Wiggins a max contract.
Tom Thibodeau has parlayed his role as the defensive mastermind of the 2008 NBA champion Boston Celtics first into a head gig in Chicago and then as a head coach and president in Minnesota – a combo of jobs which proves to be a bad one most of the time – and while me, the Celtics admirer, genuinely appreciates what he did in Boston, the fact is that the 2008 Celtics are one of the most unremarkable and self-important NBA champions in history. Yet he’s managed to con people into thinking he’s a good coach, parlaying that Boston success into conning first the Bulls, and then Minnesota, into thinking he’s some sort of coaching guru when his offensive schemes are pre-historic, and for some reason he gets amazing leeway when it comes to signing old Chicago wash-ups like Derek Rose and needlessly playing two bigs and running an offense that wasn’t even cutting edge in 1998. The Wolves win games in spite of him. Their guys just make shit up and occasionally the ball goes in the basket. Not to mention the fact that he is grossly overplaying guys, just like he did in Chicago, which shortened quite a few careers there. And meanwhile, the defense still sucks.
And since Minnesota is so starved for success – they hadn’t made the playoffs in 14 years – and because they had to endure the absence of Butler for two months in the middle of the season due to a knee injury, Thibs will likely get a pass for this team’s truly gross performance. But there is enough individual talent on this team to add up to more than an 8-seed in the playoffs. This team should have been better than it was. It shouldn’t have been playing a play-in game in game 82 of the regular season of the Nuggets just to make the playoffs in the first place. That it did speaks to a level of general incompetence in the organization, but you can’t remove the coach in this sort of situation because, as we’ve seen elsewhere, that would require the exec who is also the coach to admit that he the coach doesn’t know what he’s doing.
• If Joe Prunty weren’t already a lame duck coach in Milwaukee, his in-game decision making in Game 7 would have constituted a fireable offense. Leading 15-12 late in the first quarter, Prunty decided to turn to his bench …
The Celtics went on a 20-2 run to close out the quarter, and the Bucks were running uphill from there.
Jesus, what an incoherent mess of a team. The Bucks have all of these long, rangy types, and yet their defense couldn’t stop conceding wide open shots to a Celtics team that was desperately in need of wide open shots in order to succeed, given that their two best offensive players are on the shelf. They would foolishly overhelp and leave open shooters, they would reach on defense late in the shot clock and pick up needless fouls and concede free throws. Brad Stevens took what the Bucks defense gave them: his two slashers were filling those gaps, Horford was patient in the post game and worked the Bucks down low, and Scary Terry Rozier used the lack of attention span from the Milwaukee guards against them time and again.
On the offensive end, meanwhile, you’d wind up with nonsense like three Bucks all standing within two feet of each other on the block, while on more than one occasion a Bucks 2-man game got stymied by running into their own guy, a third guy standing in a spot where he wasn’t supposed to be. Every player on the Bucks has a tell. You know what they’re going to do from the moment they get the ball. Giannis can win games on his own even if you know what he’ll do ahead of time, but he can’t win all the games by himself. Not yet, anyway.
And Giannis is still our future overlord, of course, but Giannis still has lots of bad habits on both ends of the floor – habits due, in part, to the fact that the Bucks don’t do anything to make the game easier for him. The obvious ploy in this series, of course, was to play Giannis at center, put the ball in his hands at the top of key and let him go to work – but that lineup fares badly for Milwaukee because the other four guys on the court can’t figure out where it is they’re supposed to be at any given time, so Giannis has no good passing angles and can thus be at least be slowed down, if not stopped completely. Even worse, whichever empty suit is patrolling the sidelines can’t even figure out which four guys should be out there with Giannis playing center to begin with.
If I’m the Bucks, knowing now that Mike Budenholzer has worked his way out of a job in Atlanta, I’m calling him immediately. Coach Bud got far more accomplished in Atlanta with far fewer raw materials than Giannis and also Khris Middleton, who was just a stone-cold assassin in this series. There is a lot of chaff on the roster, of course, and there is a big question of what they’ll do with Jabari Parker – he of the -39 rating in 29 minutes in game 7, a skilled offensive player who seemingly can’t guard a chair and who has unfortunately missed two whole seasons with knee injuries. I’d be inclined to let him walk as a free agent this summer, but then again, if you had a coach with a clue, maybe he could carve out a scheme in which Jabari’s considerable offensive upside could be realized.
This was a huge missed opportunity for the Bucks. They played like garbage most of the season, but maneuvered themselves into a favorable match-up in the first round with a beat-up Boston side. Having the best player in the series on your team is usually a huge advantage. We’d have thought going in that was the case for the Bucks with Giannis, but unfortunately for Milwaukee, it turns out the best player in this series was Brad Stevens.
• I was grateful for this ESPN deep-dive, published yesterday, in which they attempt to discern just what in the hell is going on with Kawhi Leonard in San Antonio. This was actually an underreported story during the regular season. If this had been going on in Cleveland, given that franchise’s propensity for self-creating drama, it would have been splashed constantly across every site in the country. I know the Spurs want to be low-key about everything, and I know Kawhi Leonard wants to maintain a low profile in the media, but we just went through a season where one of the five best players in the world missed 73 games and then the entire playoff series with a mysterious injury that’s never been fully explained, and somehow this was of less importance than talking about “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WARRIORS?” which is nothing, and “WHAT’S WRONG WITH CLEVELAND?” which is … well, how much time do you have …
And I was really looking forward to seeing what Kawhi was going to do this year. He’s added elements to his game every summer. I sort of anticipated that Kawhi would work to improve his playmaking, given that the Spurs were desperate for point guard play last season. He’d tighten up his handle, he’s got the feel and vision and basketball IQ to become an excellent passer … Kawhi running the point? Jesus, that could’ve been cool.
But instead, we got no Kawhi this year. Instead, we had this injury mystery – and to be clear here from the get-go, I have ZERO doubt that Kawhi was truly injured. Kawhi doesn’t want to waste time on the sidelines. Basketball players want to play basketball. And team doctors can say that guys are ‘cleared to play’ all they want to, but if guys don’t feel like they’re ready to play, they shouldn’t be playing. Guys know their own bodies better than anyone else.
But everything else about this story speaks of mistrust between team and player – or, as framed frequently by the Spurs, between team and player’s entourage – and as that ESPN story explains, there are all these weird ulterior motives seemingly at play, and there is an enormous frustration level now for everyone involved – for Kawhi, for the team, for the players, for Coach Pop. The Spurs brass are understandably a bit miffed at the moment, and now have to decide if they want to invest $219 million in an extension for a guy who they think stiffed them for a whole season.
Kawhi’s absence, of course, exposed just how awful the Spurs offseason was. They’d positioned themselves well to try and land Chris Paul, and were caught off-guard when CP3 decided to go and play off-guard in Houston. They gave away lots of future flexibility to the likes of 30-somethings like Pau Gasol and Rudy Gay and an LaMarcus Aldridge extension. Aldridge was a beast this season, mind you, playing at an all-NBA level and earning every penny of it, but the Spurs are even older and slower than before, and they looked completely hopeless against the Warriors in the playoffs. But, of course, put the world’s best 2-way player out there on the floor, and the Spurs would suddenly have been a legit challenger to the Dubs and the Rockets. That’s how good Leonard is, which is why they’re going to have to bite the bullet and offer him the $219m. If they don’t offer it, he’s gone, and you simply cannot get enough value back in trade.
The Spurs were such a bummer this year. Oh sure, they did what they usually did, which was out-execute all of the bad teams, and enough of the visiting teams, in order to rack up a decent number of wins, but they were horrible on the road and against the good teams, where the scheme couldn’t compensate for the overall lack of talent. If anything, the entire Kawhi saga has served to nuke that narrative of the perpetual motion machine that the Spurs have built up in the past two decades. They’re prone to the same sorts of bickering and in-fighting and sniping as every other franchise in the league. And so too did the gloss and lustre come off of Kawhi the quiet superstar. Even if he’s legitimately injured, which I believe he is, the optics of it all have been bad.
Oh and one more thing about the Spurs: Manu Ginobili is not allowed to retire. Few people bring the joy and the imagination to the game quite like Manu does, so he cannot leave. He must play until he 80. There. We’ve voted on it.
• Speaking of bickering and sniping and in-fighting, here’s a live look-in at the goings-on in Washington:
When Giannis says, in the aftermath of losing to the Celtics in Game 7, that he felt like the Bucks were the better team, you can at least see his point if you squint and look hard enough. If any member of the Washington Wizards does that after their meek exit in six games against Toronto, you’re reminded that this team would be better served if someone went and got a gag order issued by a judge. And then you have John Wall coming out in his postseason presser and throwing all of his teammates under the bus, apparently having also thrown under the bus the mirror that he should be looking into, since he’s part of the problem.
All you need to know about how dysfunctional this team was this past season was that a team with big aspirations, and big opinions of itself, managed to only go 21-15 against sub-.500 teams. Given that so many of the sub-.500 teams were actively trying to lose games this year, to rack up 15 losses against that sorry lot is only possible with a lack of focus and cohesion. In a year where the East was wide open, given that Boston lost Gordon Hayward five minutes into the season and Cleveland was a festering cesspool, a team that was actually as good as the Buzzards think they are would’ve been up at the top of the standings from the get-go and managing their roster down the stretch to prepare for the playoffs. As it were, John Wall then is forced to miss two months with a knee injury, the team is in trouble and has to scramble to get an 8-seed in the playoffs.
Now, to be fair here, it’s unclear just how many of the early season struggles of the Wiz owed to the fact that Wall’s knee was killing him. That doesn’t help matters. He was clearly struggling. But then, lo and behold, he goes out of the lineup and, at first, they win some games! And the ball movement is good, the offense is crisp, and you’ve got a few people starting to whisper that maybe Washington is actually better without John Wall – which they aren’t, of course, as this run of play had more to do with the fact that the other guys on this team came to realize that they’d goofed off for much of the season, their margin of error was now gone, and they needed to actually focus and start playing better. But, of course, this being the Buzzards, where everyone involved appears to hate one-another, guys were suddenly talking about great “team” wins on social media in what were considered by every Buzzards observer to be poorly concealed jabs at Wall and his propensity for hoarding the ball.
And I love me some John Wall. Wall becoming a daredevil going 100 mph on the fast break is one of the most breathtaking things in the sport. But whereas I’d be worried, as an opposing coach, about what do against Wall, that’s still better than being terrified about Bradley Beal, which is what should happen because the guy can be just unguardable at times. Oh wait, I know how to guard him – let the Wizards do it for me! Let Wall pound the rock and go one-on-one and only throw it to Beal in bad areas of the floor. And as much as I love Wall in the open floor, the guy takes a beating. He’s got bad knees already and he’s due another $160m in the next four years – yeech – and he’s going to have to modify his game. He can do that, of course, but pretty much everyone in Washington has to, at this point, which would require them to, oh, you know, maybe actually play as a team and try listening to a coach for a change. They’re going to have to, given how much of their cap is eaten up by the enormous contract of Wall and the maxes doled out to Beal and Otto Porter (whose injury didn’t help matters against Toronto). They managed to make enough small moves to cobble together a bench unit this season that wasn’t an affront to the game of basketball, but no big moves are coming.
I felt a little bad for Scotty Brooks. I’ve never thought he was a particularly good coach, and he certainly should be used to not being listened to after having coached OKC, but he looked exasperated by the end of the season, as the Wiz were coughing up 19-point 4th Quarter leads in Cleveland and blowing games to tank commanders like Orlando – games they needed to win to avoid getting stuck playing Toronto in the first round. Scotty was clearly wondering what he has gotten himself into.
This team was a colossal disappointment, a mix of bombast and bluster, a heap of dung and slag. It was the type of team which teases you with their potential but never leaves you feeling satisfied.
• I generally don’t watch much of the Miami Heat, because I find them to be generally unwatchable. Their defensive strategy seems to be to foul the opposition repeatedly on every single play and dare the officials to call it. The offense doesn’t work all that well, either, and there are stretches of their games where they look like a lottery team. Other than Goran Dragić, I’m not sure there is a single player on their team that I’d actually want. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I missed the Dion Waiters Experience this season, as he was out after an ankle injury, and he took with him the irrational confidence and wild shotmaking ability that made Miami fun a season ago. I wasn’t the only one who missed Waiters. Miami really could have used his offense this postseason.
Waiters revived his career in Miami, and was rewarded with a nice contract. This has been the way that Miami does business over the years. You come to Miami, you buy into what they do, you play well, and they tend to reward you with a contract that’s generally above market rate in terms of both dollars and years. And this is a commendable way of doing business, an admirable way and one of the reasons why Miami is considered a top-notch organization.
But it’s not useful to have a whole team of guys with extra-long, extra-pricy deals if none of them are actually very good. There is a feel-good and collegial sort of vibe to this team, and a sense of strength in numbers, in that Coach Spo will plug and play any and everyone on the roster to good effect at times, but it was so abundantly clear during their first round defeat to the 76ers just how disparate the levels of talent were between the two teams.
And you can certainly understand why Miami wants to keep doing what they’ve been doing, given that they’ve won three titles, but not even repeated acts of sorcery from Spo can masque the fact that the roster is not very good. Another problem seems to be that they are stuck in their own nostalgia at times. The return of Dwyane Wade from Cleveland at the trade deadline amused me, in that the Heat were winning a lot of close games in crunch time, but given his equity with the franchise, Wade was bound to wind up being inserted in crunch time lineups when, by all rights, he had no business being there. To his credit, Wade got in shape upon returning to Miami and provided a few vintage moments here and there, including a great performance in their lone playoff win, but this was in no way a viable solution. If anything, it was a solution that went searching for a problem. They were fine in close games with their close-to-the-vest approaches. It was when they needed to open up the games that the Heat struggled, as they are lacking playmakers.
And the other big issue, which reared its ugly head in the playoffs, is the fact that Miami has invested an ungodly amount of money in center Hassan Whiteside, who got played off the floor by Joel Embiid and then bitched about his role to the press to such an extent that Pat Riley felt the need to respond. This was one of the sneakily bad contracts given out in the summer of 2016, and one that was made worse by the circumstances. Remember, the Heat were one of the teams Kevin Durant was willing to take a meeting with in the Hamptons that summer, but before that meeting occurred, they dumped $100 million into Whiteside – and while there was no guarantee KD would want to come to Miami, that gargantuan deal made it virtually impossible for the Heat to put that deal together even if KD did. And I have no idea why anyone in Miami thought that it was a good idea to invest so much in a less-than-complete player like Hassan Whiteside in the first place, much less one with a propensity for selfish play, and much less even still who is playing a position which has never been so less in demand.
Nor do I have any idea why felt a need to match the offer for backup point guard Tyler Johnson given in RFA by Brooklyn. I mean, I like Tyler Johnson, but the Nets poison pilled and backloaded the deal, and the contract explodes starting next year to $19m a year. (The Nets, who had nothing to lose, used this ploy on Washington and Portland as well, offering wacko deals to RFA’s Allen Crabbe and Otto Porter that the others felt they had to match – the moral of the story being that if you have to hold your nose and do it, don’t do it.) Guys like Whiteside and Johnson are not guys you can really build around and win with, and they are unmovable guys now! You can’t do that!
And what should be one of the league’s glorious franchises is, in fact, rather unsightly. The Heat were completely out of ideas against Philadelphia, and seemed far more determined to want to try and fight the Sixers than try to beat them playing basketball, but the Sixers wouldn’t take the bait. But when it came to actually playing the game, the Sixers simply blew them away.
• One team that didn’t get blown away was Indiana. In fact, the Pacers followed up last season’s playoff performance against Cleveland, where they set a record for the best point differential for a team that got swept (-16), by setting a record this year against Cleveland for the best point differential for a team that lost in seven games (+40). If any of these vanquished sides this year can make a legit claim that they were the better team in their series, it’s Indiana – and that’s with LeBron absolutely playing out of his mind, no less. By the eye test, the Pacers were the better team, and the better team lost.
And it was a frustrating series to watch, because Indiana could have won all seven of the games. The Pacers are sort of a strange team, in that they’re sort of a versatile bunch of generalists who don’t have that much of an identity. They shoot well from three, but don’t shoot many threes, in part because they also shoot well from two. They started out the season playing among the fastest teams in the league, but by the end of the year, they were playing among the slowest. They’ve got a bunch of guys whose greatest strengths seem to be, above all else, that they know what they’re doing, with the idea being that Indy can throw a whole bunch of competent guys out on the floor at any time and carry on, and yet it was in all of these small moments here and there in this series where the Pacers would lose focus and make mental mistakes – turn the ball over or fail to properly execute breaking a trap - that ended up costing them this series. They could never seem to settle on what kind of an approach they wanted to take to attacking the Cavs – a team whose defensive flaws are many, so it’s not like you’re lacking for choice. Indiana could run them up and down, could drive it to the basket, could do whatever they wanted ... but never seemed to make up their minds. And the one thing the Pacers have never done well is rebound, which killed them in Game 7, as the Cavs dominated the offense glass to both create extra possessions and slow the game down – which proved crucial, given how LeBron was gassed by the end of this series and running on fumes.
As annoying as this series was to watch, and as frustrated as the Indianapolis faithful most certainly are after losing yet again to LeBron in the playoffs, this has been a really nice year for the Pacers. They are different from all of these aforementioned first round losers in that they’ve got considerable room to grow. They’ve got money to spend, and they’ve got a core of young players to build around. They far exceeded any and all expectations, having gone off in Vegas with an O/U of around 30 wins at the start of the year, and GM Kevin Pritchard struck it rich by trading Paul George to OKC for Victor Oladipo – who will win the NBA’s Most Improved Player award and who received MVP votes – as well as center Domantas Sabonis – miscast as a stretch four in OKC and showing great potential now in Indy in his more natural position. Everyone, including me, thought this was a terrible trade for the Pacers, one which was somewhat cynically done so that the Hoosiers buying tickets in the Fieldhouse would be mollified by seeing, out on the floor, one of their favorite adopted sons in Oladipo. But Oladipo showed up to camp in great shape, ready to push the pace and run the offense, and he was terrific all year. Funnily enough, when you tell guys in the NBA that their role is to be furniture, they act like a piece of furniture, which is basically what Oladipo was last year in OKC, and now the $80 million extension he signed while in OKC, which felt destined to be an albatross, suddenly looks like a great value contract.
Oh yeah, and speaking of OKC …
• I saved the best for last here, but I’m going to attempt to write about the sound and the fury signifying absolutely nothing that was OKC in the most objective way possible. And this is hard for me to do, of course, because I hate that franchise with a passion, and find an OKC loss to be the most enjoyable thing in all of the sport. But here goes, so bear with me.
Perhaps the best line about OKC which I heard all year came from ESPN’s Royce Young, who said that OKC could take any team to seven games in a series – they could take Houston or Golden State to seven games, or they could take Phoenix or Sacramento to seven games. They were all over the place. Once this supposed ‘superteam’ had been constructed, with Paul George coming from Indiana, and with Carmelo Anthony coming from New York in exchange for Enes “Can’t Play” Kanter, they were going to be a worthy challenger to the Warriors for supremacy in the West. Oh, of course, it would take some time to ‘figure it out,’ but come playoff time, this would be a dangerous team and legitimate threat.
And not once did I ever believe that.
There would be glimpses, of course – they’d beat the Warriors or put 148 up on Cleveland or win at Toronto – but ultimately, whatever success this team could garner was unsustainable, as it was entirely dependent upon their ‘Big 3’ making tough, contested shots since, yet again, the offense was a complete quagmire and literally nothing ever came easily for anyone.
And it’s always been that way at OKC. The ball doesn’t move. It stops and everyone else stops as well. A first action doesn’t work, and the default setting is for Russell Westbrook to just do something, anything.
Which, frankly, is the way that Westbrook seems to want it. His competitive drive is unquestioned, and I truly think that Russ does what he does on the floor because he truly believes it gives his team the best chance to win. A lot of nights, he’s proved correctly, in fact. And while I’m not interested in going back and deconstructing the MVP race from a year ago, I firmly believe that the way in which OKC plays – with one guy dominating the ball while everyone else stands around waits for the scraps – is not a winning strategy. The narrative was that Russ had “no help” in a 47-win, 5-game playoff season. So Presti goes out and gets him help in PG13 and Melo, and it results in a 48-win, 6-game playoff season.
And it’s impossible to say what does and doesn’t constitute “help” because it’s impossible to view anyone on this roster outside of a Russ-related context. People have tried to make the case regarding Oladipo that he wasn’t the same player a year ago, but how would you even know that, since he almost never was on the floor without Westbrook, and had to be subservient to Russ’ whims. Same goes for Steven Adams – a promising young center and a definite badass, but someone who is almost never on the court without Russ. What can he actually do on his own? I have no idea. The bench has been so worthless that it almost seems like it is deliberately constructed in an attempt to make Russ look better, since OKC always looks completely hopeless whenever he is off the floor. Everything about this team, for the past two years, has felt artificial and contrived, with the entire narrative being “look how great our small-town hero Russ is.”
At no point did I ever believe they were ‘figuring it out’ this season, and whatever flashy moments of brilliance occurred obscured the greater reality that this team really wasn’t very good. My most retweeted foray onto twitter of all time came in response to Russ mashing a dunk and stomping around and scowling against Charlotte, which drew oohs and aahs from the Russ stans out there, and completely ignored the fact that Charlotte responded to said dunk by going on a 22-2 run and handing OKC yet another confounding loss in a season of confounding losses. OKC apologists could also point to the devastating injury sustained by defensive specialist Andre Roberson, which was a real downer, as something which undid their season, but if your season is really being undone by a guy who can’t shoot a lick, perhaps you’re not as close to élite as you think. They played down to their competition repeatedly, struggling regularly with the Dallases and the Phoenixes and the Sacramentos of the world, all the while saying they would ‘figure it out,’ but never actually doing so, because there was nothing really to figure out.
This team was a fraud. It was a fraud from the get-go, and I’m amazed that anyone bought into it. Actually no, I’m not, because it’s the same group of people who think Russ ‘plays harder’ than everyone else simply because he stomps around and scowls.
A phenomenal and inspired comeback, led by Russ and PG13, from 25 down against Utah in Game 5 saved the season, but they were down 3-1 in the first place because of their nonsensical defending of Utah’s pick-and-rolls and because of Westbrook deciding he wanted to shut down Ricky Rubio, after Rubio lit him up for a triple-double in Game 3, and then wasting his time picking up four fouls in the first half of Game 4 doing that, while the Jazz just shrugged off this made-up beef and went about running more pick-and-rolls which OKC couldn’t defend. It was such a selfish and small performance by Westbrook, who then atoned for his sins in Game 5, and who then took 43 shots in their Game 6 loss, including 19 threes, which was both preposterous and, quite possibly, necessary since everyone on the offense just stood around and waited for him to do something. As much as I don’t like the way Russell Westbrook plays and think that he pads numbers and chases stats, there has never been any sort of a coherent strategy in place to do anything besides that. You can’t play this way and hope to win, but good luck getting Russ to change. (Now he can do what he wants, remember?)
And now OKC is in a mess. They swung for the fences and they whiffed, and going out meekly in the first round of the playoffs is an unquestioned disaster. This entire season was intended to be a sales pitch and an audition to the soon-to-be free agent George, but even if he wants to re-sign for OKC – which seems unlikely, given their awful performance this season – their cap situation is dire: including luxury taxes, the cost of reassembling this team next season would run well over $200 million, to which ownership will rightly ask why it is they are paying over $200 million for a 5-seed. It would help matters if Anthony would opt out of the $28m he is owed next season, because he is miscast as a catch-and-shoot guy, can’t guard anyone, and was routinely hunted by the Utah offense to the point where head coach Billy Donovan had to bench him in the playoffs, which is pretty much the only decisive thing Donovan’s done in the last three years. But there is no way in hell that Anthony would do that, since he isn’t likely to garner more than a fifth of that amount on the open market. Volume shooters who hoard the ball and can’t shoot from three and can’t defend aren’t exactly en vogue in the NBA, except in OKC, of course, where they already have one of those guys in Westbrook and definitely don’t need another.
And while I revel in OKC failure, the fact is that if the effort on the court had matched the effort it took to compile this team, OKC would probably still be playing. That Oladipo and Sabonis bloomed in Indianapolis while George is likely to walk, and Kanter had a nice year in New York while Anthony was a bust, doesn’t change the fact that they were trades GM Sam Presti looked, at the time, as if he’d won. They were, at the time, seemingly no-brainer trades. And even if he didn’t win those deals, it was worth it to try. When trading for Chris Paul, Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that thanks to the dominance of the Warriors, it was necessary for Houston to “raise the risk profile.” Doing so is quite likely going to lead to one helluva good series in the Western Conference Finals. And I would much prefer to be profiling teams that take big risks, try to amass talent and wind up missing than those who simply give up and throw away multiple seasons trying to amass ping-pong balls. We can question the methods and mistakes, but ultimately, losing in the playoffs is the right sort of losing.
