NBA's weird weekend: No. 1 seed, No. 2 seed and superstars go down
The playoffs got real very quickly with eight series underway and more storylines than we can count. Let's try anyway ... with some coaching carousel news sprinkled in
Some advice for you after a weekend of NBA playoff basketball that was at once utterly absorbing and undeniably dispiriting.
It's advice that I suspect won't be heeded by many of the forthcoming TV shows and podcasts immersed in Monday Morning Quarterbacking these first 48 postseason hours from #thisleague. But it's wise (if not free) counsel.
Don't overreact to what you just saw.
It's one game, people. Whatever you just witnessed was the first game in eight separate best-of-seven Round 1 matchups. This is the NBA — not the NFL. One game, no matter what happened, is too soon for declarations.
Not too soon, though, for the usual Monday helping of my latest reactions, opinions, reflections, disseminations, etc. Let's hoop:
🏀 The weirdest West I can ever remember delivered good theatre for starters.
The regular season was so irregular that we entered Saturday's play seeing very little public belief in the West's top three seeds beyond the city limits of the teams that house them. Can you remember another postseason that a No. 6 and No. 7 seed, like the defending champion Warriors and the resurgent Lakers, are a more popular bet to come out of the West than Nos. 1, 2 or 3?
This is that postseason.
The No. 4 Suns were right there with the other lower-seeded prognostication darlings thanks largely to the 26-2 record sported by Kevin Durant's Brooklyn and Phoenix teams in the last 28 regular-season games he's been healthy enough to play. The No. 5 Clippers, who promptly stunned the Suns on Sunday to drop Durant's desert record to 0-1 in the playoffs, would be generating the same buzz, too, if Paul George were healthy enough to line up beside a very playoff-ready Kawhi Leonard.
The opener in three of the four West series proved extremely watchable, with the only letdown fortuitously proving to be the Denver/Minnesota opener that tipped off way too late at nearly 11 PM ET Sunday night. The higher seeds, most notably the No. 3 Kings on the strength of their steely second-half performance Sunday night for a first playoff triumph in forever as ESPN’s SportsCenter noted below, could manage only a 2-2 split.
This much we can say already about Denver, Memphis and Sacramento: They won't be stamped as real-deal contenders until they actually prove it.
Which is something Kings coach Mike Brown, remember, recently told Chris Haynes and me on our #thisleague UNCUT podcast that he’s fine with.
"So we know what the narrative is,” Brown said. “Trust me … And you know what? That's fine because we deserve it — we haven't done anything yet. And if we're as good as we think we are, we'll change the narrative. That's how I look at it."
🏀 The dispiriting part is obvious.
Injuries tend to have a huge influence on every NBA postseason, but Sunday — Day 2 — was especially early and grim. Ja Morant came away with a hand injury that he says puts his Game 2 availability for Grizzlies-Lakers "in jeopardy,” followed by a lower back contusion that knocked Giannis Antetokounmpo out of Milwaukee's Game 1 loss to Miami in the first half, followed by Miami's Tyler Herro sustaining a broken hand in the same game that will sideline him at least a month. Ja and Giannis were felled on drives to the basket that predictably reignited the conversation about the dangers of charge-taking in the NBA in a league that often rewards defenders for sliding right in front of rim-attackers.