Most Overrated NBA Playoff Storylines
13 NBA Substack writers on what's overplayed, featuring the Celtics, the Lakers, the Nuggets, the Knicks, the refs ... and Rudy Gobert
We asked 13 leading NBA voices on Substack for their …
Overrated NBA Playoff Storylines
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Easy, you say?
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Lamenting how "easy" Boston's path to the NBA Finals looks has become a popular sport within the sport during these playoffs, but is that really the Celtics' fault? Injuries they had nothing to do with incapacitated Milwaukee, Miami and Cleveland and certainly hurt Philadelphia hugely on the way to the postseason.
The Celtics, furthermore, still face more championship-or-bust pressure after a top-shelf regular season than any other team in the league and will surely be excoriated in pretty much any scenario that does not end in a championship ... except for maybe losing to the Nuggets in the Finals. No one is going to go easy on them if/when they lose, so I can't muster much outrage over Boston's good bracketology fortune while they deal with the injury loss of Kristaps Porziņģis.
Things not to do when Denver isn’t dead
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I think we have to go with the premature rumors of the Denver Nuggets' demise.
I'm not sure if it was because of the brilliance of Anthony Edwards, and people's desire to see him potentially lead an NBA champion (just to push those MJ parallels forward), or a collective outburst from all the Nikola Jokić haters who have always been suspicious of his game and his team — but had to swallow that for a whole year after they won it all — but there was a real rush to bury the Nuggets when they went down 2-0 at home early against the T-Wolves.
And now, after Denver won three straight to take the series lead, it feels like we've already kind of memory-holed all of that breathless commentary about Minnesota dethroning Denver.
Postseason ≠ regular season
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Say it with me, folks: Playoff games do not prove anything one way or another about regular-season awards.
Rudy Gobert getting smoked by Nikola Jokić in one-on-one coverage in one of the best playoff performances of all time tells us absolutely zero about who was the best defensive player in the NBA during the regular season.
We're not trying to time travel to figure out what will happen later. We're appreciating the impact that a player made across 82 games.
Rings are just things
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Player legacies and rings are overrated. I said it!
As fans, we don’t want to accept that some players are fine crashing out of Round 1. They just want to go to Ibiza and hang out on a yacht!
At the end of the day, being an NBA player is a (highly paid) job. Players are just like us: Sometimes, you don’t care how that project turns out at work as long as your PTO gets approved and you can set that OOO email.
The worst part of the playoffs
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Armchair refereeing is overrated.
Yeah, refs miss calls, and it sucks. But the proliferation of super-slow-motion replays shown from every angle has made it simple for fans to adjudicate decisions after the fact with near-perfect accuracy. It’s an impossible standard to expect of humans reacting in real time to opposing players simultaneously bending the rulebook like a magician’s spoons. And social media conspiracy theories based on thin-as-Chet evidence presented with no context do the discourse no favors.
It’s the worst part of the playoffs, and it will only worsen as the spotlight grows brighter.
La La Land
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The Lakers. All the what-iffing about what the team could have done if the coaching was different, if the matchup was different, if the team was better prepared, etc. is starting to remind me of the scene in Wayne's World when Wayne's ex, Stacy, confronts him with, "If you're not careful, Wayne, you're going to lose me," after they'd been broken up for two months. Every new, delusional truth about what this Lakers team could've been beyond the middling 7th seed they were makes me want to scream, "I lost you two months ago, are you mental? We broke up. Get the net!"
"This series is over"
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I get the instinct. You watch those first two games in Denver, and you're left with a pretty strong sense that something's broken. You start counting how many healthy players the Knicks have left, and you start to wonder who's gonna score. You see Luka hobbling around in Game 1, and you start thinking: tough luck. We're all prone to recency bias, just as we are hyperbole.
But I'm always impressed by how we collectively forget about seven-game series every single year.
Winning isn’t enough?
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The Celtics playoff "struggles.” Yes, they lost two games where they looked unfocused against banged-up teams. But they also just went 8-2 in two rounds and have a double-digit scoring margin. Boston is just fine … assuming Kristaps Porziņģis can play before the NBA Finals.
Hard, easy … who cares?
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My pick for most overrated is the "Boston has the easiest path to the Finals ever" storyline.
Look, injuries impact the playoffs every year. All championships are hard to win, but not all of them have the same level of difficulty. Even with its own injuries, like to Kristaps Porziņģis, Boston has a relatively easy way to the Finals. OK, that's fine. Who cares?
First of all, that's why you win 64 games in the regular season and try to be the 1st seed. Second of all, only winning the ring matters. Nobody is going to remember if your strength of schedule was hard or easy to get there.
The scapegoat
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In terms of overrated storylines, the Rudy Gobert narrative has become exhausting. There have been plenty of playoff series where his liabilities defensively have proven particularly problematic, but this series against the Nuggets has not been one of them.
Rudy has been much better when switching on the perimeter and has done as admirable a job against Jokić as anyone can ask for. The reality is that the Joker is just that dominant. Let’s please find another scapegoat.
The Cavs’ shooting additions?
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People were raving about these Cavs’ additions in the offseason, but Georges Niang was a complete miss in the postseason as his defense is poor and his shot was as nonexistent as the rest of his offensive arsenal.
Max Strus is a great secondary creator and solid defender, but his shooting was bad through the playoffs (other than the last two games vs. Boston).
One of them stepping up earlier in the Cleveland-Boston series maybe would have kept the Cavs alive.
Knicks vs. load management
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Tom Thibodeau is about as stone cold as a coach can get, but the supposed inevitable burnout of the Knicks’ starters hasn’t quite panned out as some pundits expected.
Sure, Josh Hart has played over 40 minutes per game on average, Jalen Brunson has taken more shots than James Harden on vodka, and every other play it looks like Donte DiVincenzo is gonna die, but they're fine.
This team has been conditioned well for this by taking load management out of the dictionary. Emperor Thibs deems it so.
Jokić is just that good
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It's certainly not everyone's sentiment, but I've seen some people mentioning being upset with Gobert for not being to keep Jokić better in check.
Sure, it's OK to hold the DPOY to high standards. But remember how Jokić was playing a two-time All-Defensive First Team player in Anthony Davis just the round before? There, he averaged 28/16/10 on 67% True Shooting. In last year's five-game Finals against Bam Adebayo, it was 30/14/7.
The bottom line is that's just incredible hard to stop a 7-footer with such feathery touch and such incredible footwork. We can't blame Gobert for not being able to handle what less than a handful of elite NBA centers in NBA history would've been able to.