The NBA regular season wrapped up recently and that means it’s time for the most interesting basketball of the year: the NBA playoffs. Sure, March Madness is a lot of fun, and sure, I love watching some random accountants from Yale beat up on some SEC powerhouse, but that didn’t happen this year, so I instead have to pray that there’s a significant upset in the rankings. I hope. Please, let this not be a 1 seed vs. 1 seed finals. (With the Grizz! No way!)
(Editor’s note: The Memphis Grizzlies are not allowed within 50 feet of the 1 seed.)
Anyway, enough manifesting chaos, there’s a few interesting games that’ll be happening in the coming weeks, but, in all honesty, this has been a hell of a season. The play-ins are the #9 Kings vs the #10 Mavs, and the #9 Bulls vs. the #10 Heat. The winner of the Kings-Mavs game will go on to play the loser of the Timberwolves-Grizzlies in order to get the 8-seed, while the winner of that game will go on to get the 7-seed and the honor to get their face kicked in by the Houston Rockets. The Rockets went 52–29, have taken a chainsaw to most of the rest of the teams in the league, and have been shooting a .455 from the field and .353 from the three. The NBA early rounds are notoriously upset-free, with only six teams ever completing a 7–2 upset. The most recent of those upsets was the Lakers against the Grizzlies in 2022 playoffs, and then again before that in 2009–2010. Essentially, it’s really, really hard to win games against the #2 seed, and with how the Rockets have been playing, I’d be surprised if the winner of this year’s play-ins will somehow buck the trend.
On the East, the #2 seed is the Boston Celtics, defending World Champions and another team that was completely dismantling their opponents this year. Going 61–21, winning nearly three-quarters of their games, puts them in rarified air already, and they’re still playing at the incredible rate that they were last year. They’re going to be a huge player in these playoffs, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them in the Eastern Conference Finals for another crack at the championship.
However, there’s something in their way, and that’s the Cleveland Cavs. The Cavs, who have not appeared in the top two since LeBron left in 2018, stormed into first place this year on the backs of incredible coaching and top quality contributions from players on the bench. Garland and Mobley are playing some of the best basketball of their lives, and the two have finally avoided the injury bug enough to give serious contributions to the Cavs, the sort of contributions they absolutely needed to make a genuine push for a ring. Cleveland has always been a cursed city, but this Cavs team looks and feels legit, and it might be the best shot they’ve had in a while.
On the other hand, the #1 seed in the West is… something else. The OKC Thunder, a team that hasn’t gone all the way since they were the SuperSonics and they took home a ring in the ‘70s, have put everything together in such a way that you could call it generational. The team is currently sitting at a 12.8 net rating, a measure of how good a team is. They were, for a few weeks, sitting at a 13.5 net, which would be the greatest of all time, and have instead settled on a comfortable second place, sandwiched between the 1995–96 Bulls and the 1996–97 Bulls. They’re boasting the fourth-best offensive rating of all time, and the fifth-best defensive rating, and, moreover, they’re scoring an average of 120 points per game. Essentially, they’re one of the greatest things to touch the court in a very, very long time, and nobody really knows what to make of them. They’re doing all this off of an absolutely transcendent player in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who is currently boasting the 10th best Win Shares per 48 minutes in history, an advanced stat representing how much of a win a player represents on the field as they play. This is a leaderboard filled with prime LeBron, the best years of Kareem or MJ, and now it’s a list that includes Shai.
He could also be on the list of NBA champions in a few months.
Either way, there’s a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks as people try to make heads or tails of an NBA season that has seen some incredible performances.
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