Lessons From Round 1

I got some things very right, some things that were well-founded but a new angle showed up, and some things VERY wrong, let's talk about what's next

The first round is over, I’m going to revisit some of my takes, assess my evaluations, and see how that changes things going forward.  Mostly, I feel good about almost everything I wrote about Round 1, with 1 exception, the takes that didn’t quite land were well-founded and the actual outcomes were based on new information that couldn’t have been predicted before hand. As a note, I am not including Nuggets vs Wolves game 1 in this analysis; this is only based on round 1.  Each summary was written as their series ended and has only been revisited for editing touch-ups.

The play-in rounds all went the way I predicted, mostly on the grounds I predicted.  The 76ers looked a little worse than I thought they would, but it's a one-game sample so variation is hard to assess.  I don’t think there was much to learn about any team here except that the Kings were even worse than I thought.  Zion going down gave them a massive advantage and they couldn’t capitalize.  I haven’t watched much of them this year and I don’t care enough to do a deep dive on their statistical profile, but that loss is embarrassing.

I admittedly did not watch a single game of Thunder vs Pelicans.  I predicted it would go 5 and then ZIon got hurt and it went 4.  I’m not totally convinced the Pelicans would get a 5th game with Zion, but certainly they should get swept without him.  I really like the Pelicans' supporting cast, but they just aren’t that good unless Zion is ready to be a top 10 player.  Given that neither of these teams have any fans and I don’t really expect the Pelicans to be relevant, I won’t go further than this here.

Nuggets versus Lakers is a little more interesting.  Looking back at my notes I did pick this series to go 5 and it did.  If you read my post last week, you know I think the Nuggets are incredibly good but a tad overrated.  The Lakers are of course terrible.  The first 3 games showed an insane gap between the two teams with the Nuggets seemingly being able to end the games at will despite maximum effort from the Lakers.  While this is a fairly common theme in lopsided series, it does speak about the Nuggets as a flip-the-switch team in interesting ways.  Jamal Murray was terrible most of the series but came up big in 4th quarter and hit two game-winners.  I’m still not convinced this is going to be a repeatable formula against competent teams, but it is in line with how a lot of people think about the Nuggets.  On the other hand, taking a loss to the Lakers fits a lot closer with my evaluation than the consensus.  The gap between the team the Lakers (who also have a terrible match-up against the Nuggets on top of being bad) and what the public seems to think the Nuggets are should be insurmountable.  For the Nuggets to be that good and still drop one to the Lakers, the Lakers also have to be far better than I believe them to be.  I think I am even less likely to be wrong about the Lakers than the Nuggets.

The Timberwolves versus Suns series was incredible.  Goodness was I wrong about this one.  The Timberwolves had not played any coverage except drop for the whole year and I (apparently foolishly) assumed they would continue to do so.  While I still don’t respect the Suns, I believe they would have won, probably in 6, if this had been the case.  The Wolves of course did not play drop and instead swept the Suns.  A lot of the praise has been going to Anthony Edwards, who played brilliantly, but to me this series spoke higher of Rudy Gobert and Chris Finch.  The Timberwolves were a success in the regular season because of their defense, I thought that would fold in the playoffs due to inflexibility and doubted them, but if that can hold up they remain one of the top teams in the league.  I’ll remind people here that the Wolves are one of 4 teams that met 40/20, are a top 3 seed, and are top 10 in net rating.  If we believe their positive stats are not “fraudulent” then they are back to an interesting status.  They’re still missing a decent amount of markers; no MVP, the star is too young, probably only 1 All-NBA player, and no rotation players who have been to the conference finals.  Additionally, 43/47 champions have had an above-average offense but the Wolves sit squarely at 16.  Because of all this, it’s hard to call them true contenders, but they are firmly in a tier of teams that no one should be surprised if they go as far as the Finals.  

Mavericks versus Clippers is really quite interesting.  In an unexpected twist, the Mavericks' defense has shined and completely suffocated the Clippers.  Of all the first-round teams, the Clippers were second in very tightly contested shots, 1st in contested, while dead last in open shots, and fourth to last in wide-open shots.  Their percentages have not been good but that appears to be because their shot quality is horrendous.  Dallas isn’t exactly getting amazing looks out of their offense or generating a ton of points either, but the Clippers' total inability to create anything in the half-court has left them miserable.  The question becomes if this formula is repeatable for Dallas.  I picked the Clippers to win in 7 before I knew Kawhi would be out.  The way the Kawhi-less Clippers dragged this out is impressive, but nearly to the extent Dallas’s defense has been.  I will talk match-ups further down, but I’m inclined to believe this won’t be repeatable against true contenders and think the major reveal was James Harden and Russell Westbrook annihilating Luka’s defense, regardless of the rest of the team holding things together.

In the East, Celtics versus Heat went roughly as expected.  I picked the Celtics in 4 and they won in 5.  Even with their double-digit loss in game 2, they led by an average of 15.6 points per game.  Interestingly, they did this despite taking the fewest wide-open shots per game of any team in the playoffs.  To say the Celtics clobbered them is an understatement.  Game 2 may give people some pause for the same reason Game 4 should give people pause about the Nuggets, and it is fair to say the Heat pulled off an excellent game plan, but that game also required a 55% clip from 3.  It will be interesting to see what other teams with less able coaches are able to pull off against the Celtics.  Future teams will have more talent, but you should expect to see the Celtics' wide-open attempt rate go up a little.

Knicks versus 76ers was, but shouldn’t have been, a surprise to me.  I thought the 76ers' size was going to be too much for the Knicks and relying on a small lefty in the playoffs would not be effective for the Knicks.  As it turns out, I’ve been mostly right.  Jalen Brunson leads the league in playoff scoring right now but on a putrid 46.9% eFG.  However, I should not have underestimated the 76ers ability to lose games. They have not beaten a 50-win team or a higher-seeded team in the playoffs during the Joel Embiid era and I think this was a major data point that I simply overlooked. The 76ers suck and it was truly very foolish to predict otherwise.

I’ll quickly run through what happened on the court, but most of this I think came down to spiritually and morally, the 76ers are losers and always will be. Despite largely being able to keep Brunson in check and outscoring the Knicks overall, the 76ers have fallen apart to lose this series.  Somehow, they have been the worse rebounding team of the two despite their massive size advantage and it hasn’t been close.  Embiid, despite an obscene and quite frankly offensive 13 FTA per game, has been very inefficient in scoring the ball and has not been great at ending games.  He has been outrebounded by Paul Reed off the bench and uncompelling as a defensive anchor.  I thought they’d make the Conference Finals, finally, this season, but it appears I was wrong.  I picked Philly in 6, I was decently far off on this.

The Bucks put up a nice fight against the Pacers but that match up was simply doomed without Giannis.  I picked the Pacers in 6 and that is what they did.  On paper, the Pacers are a bad match-up for the Bucks and all the things that change in playoff basketball to benefit the Bucks are mainly functions of Giannis.  Losing Damian Lillard on top of that is just getting kicked in the balls.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about this series because losing your two best players is a death sentence unless you also have a young Jayson Tatum on the roster.  What I will note is that Indiana shot 6 more wide-open 3s per game than their season average this series.  Traditionally, that number should go down in the playoffs.  Against a team with even semi-competent point-of-attack defenders, expect this number to drop dramatically.

Cleveland and Orlando gave us a really fun series.  I was right about these teams; Orlando has more talent and is a match-up problem for Cleveland, but Cleveland’s experience gives them an edge and they were able to pull out the win.  I picked Cleveland 7 and that is what happened; the home team didn’t lose a single game.  I won’t spend a lot of time here because the summary would read exactly like my prediction from the playoff preview, but watch Orlando.  They should be fun for the next few years.  For Cleveland, Donovan Mitchell stuns, Darius Garland perplexes, and overall they underwhelm.  

The next round presents some different match-ups than I saw coming.  In my original playoff preview, I did the bracket wrong and accidentally paired a 2 with 4 and 1 with 3 in the West.  In this post, I’ll cover all second-round match-ups that I didn’t spend time on in that post.

Thunder versus Mavericks is a really interesting matchup.  The Thunder drive more than any team in the league and the Mavericks are not amazing at defending it.  Their losses to the Clippers tended to come from pressing inside past Luka and getting hot shooting.  Replacing James Harden with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander seems like it ought to produce better results as well.  The major change is that the Thunder are far less experienced than the Clippers and far less experienced than the Mavericks as well.  Mark Daigneault is unproven in a playoff setting and may have more trouble containing the Mavericks' offense than Ty Lue did.  The Pelicans got the third-most wide-open 3s of any team in the first round and this spells some trouble for OKC against more legitimate threats.  However, the Mavericks' preferred offenses are Pick and Roll and Isolation.  OKC is elite at defending both of those and we should expect that to continue.  Overall, this match-up looks incredibly favorable for OKC but the experience piece could slant things against them.  My guess would be OKC wins a hard-fought series in 7 games.

Nuggets versus Wolves with the new wrinkle of the Wolves can defend is fascinating.  None of our defensive data from the season is super useful for them since they literally only played drop and could potentially pivot to cover any weaknesses very easily.  The one problem that should continue to exist for them is offense.  They were a below-average offensive team this season and it’s not totally clear to me we should expect them to be better going forward.  Popular wisdom says having a superstar go nuclear is the way to create playoff offense but it is rare that that strategy works that way.  Stephen Curry in 2022 is probably the best comparison point and I do not think Anthony Edwards is as good as Steph as an individual scorer, let alone an overall offensive force.  Regardless, Stephen Curry was also on the team in the regular season as they struggled to score so it's hard to say he was able to shoulder a bad offense - he was part of the bad offense.  It’s also not clear that Steph reached totally unheard of levels in the postseason, just enough that the defense could win games for them.  Maybe the Wolves can have a similar formula, especially if Towns or Conley are able to contribute substantially and the defense can hold up, but it is important to note that what the Warriors did in 2022 was a major historical anomaly, and predicting a team to do it again on the basis that it has happened recently feels foolish statistically.  

Mostly, this series is a mystery to me.  If you had asked me before the playoffs started I would have said Nuggets in 5, 6 at most.  Now I’m thinking this goes 6 minimum and the Wolves have a legitimate shot to win.  I’ll take Nuggets in 7, but this should be fun unless either A. The Suns series was a total aberration or B. The Nuggets are really just miles better than everyone else but have long since stopped caring about the regular season (even more so than traditional flip-the-switch teams, and earlier in their run).

Celtics versus Cavaliers I covered in my last preview.  I think Cleveland gets a nice little boost from Kristaps Porzingis potentially missing some time, but Al Horford is better in the switch anyway, cutting off some water to their one major advantage versus Boston; pull-up shooting.  Either way, I think Boston makes quick work of them, likely a 5 game series with 4 more likely than a Celtics loss.

Knicks versus Pacers isn’t really a match-up I foresaw.  I think this will favor the Knicks.  The Pacers have a solid chance to turn up the luck by inflating pace; something which can swing outcomes wildly.  The Knicks are absolutely atrocious when missing 3s or when the opponent is hitting at an above-average clip, which is only going to increase variance if the Pacers succeed in pushing the pace.  However, if the Knicks can slow things down and limit play mostly to the half-court, they’ll have more control over shot quality which will favor them versus the high-speed, high variance game Indiana wants to play.  Indiana also has no defense.  This means they can’t really take advantage of Jalen Brunson’s deficiencies as a first option as well as other teams might be able to.  In sum, I think they’re going to get some nice juice flowing and probably steal 2 games off of three-point swings, but will lose in 6.  New York and Boston will go to the Conference Finals.

Short one this week, I’ve been doing longer pieces for a bit so this is just a quick check-in on how I think the playoffs are going.  Keep watching, it’s been a fun one so far.