Play-in for the win
The concept still has wrinkles that need smoothing out, which we review below, but Year 3 of NBA play-in games will go down as another hit
(Editor’s note: It was still very much Tuesday on the West Coast when our latest Tuesday Extravaganza was published at last. Thanks for your patience!)
This much is certain about the NBA's playoff play-in round: Four teams are destined to hate it every single season.
"If you're 7 or 8, you don't like it," San Antonio's Gregg Popovich said. "If you're 9 or 10, you go, 'Hey, this is kind of cool.' "
Year 3 of the play-in was better than cool … no matter what the dissenters said. It briefly loomed as a safety net to rescue Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets when they slipped as low as No. 10 in the Eastern Conference on April 2 and flirted with missing the playoffs entirely. It definitively offered a lifeline to LeBron James, Anthony Davis and the Los Angeles Lakers that the 33-49 Lakers were simply incapable of grabbing. And it actually enhanced the trade deadline: New Orleans and Sacramento made go-for-it mega trades, headlined by CJ McCollum and Domantas Sabonis, just to try to secure a play-in spot after we had been conditioned to believe that the concept would actually lead fewer teams to become sellers and thus chill the winter trade market.
Last May I proclaimed the play-in portion of the schedule to be “the most invigorating aspect of a dour, draining, pandemic-skewed season.” This year, echoing my pal Mike Prada, I see the play-in as one of the most enjoyable innovations across my three decades covering #thisleague. Too many teams were still, uh, prioritizing draft position down the stretch — Indiana, Detroit, Orlando, Portland, Houston and Oklahoma City all fell into the tankers category — but the race to secure a top-six spot in each conference to avoid the play-in and the corresponding jostling to finish 7-through-10 did exactly what they were hoping for at the league office. It made the regular-season stretch run matter more.
Then the actual play-in games were almost all compelling win-or-go-home theatre. Even the rare stinker (Atlanta routing Charlotte) carried no shortage of relevance because the Hornets, as we've been writing for weeks now, have some hard roster questions to confront in the coming weeks and months and now must factor in back-to-back blowouts in the play-in round to their evaluations.
“We're pleased with it,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this month. “There may be a need to tweak it additionally. We’ll see how it goes this year, but I think it’s going to become a fixture in this league.”
Good summation. A fixture that needs some tweakage.
For all of my aforementioned support, I would pinpoint at least three areas of concern:
The league has to bring back the rule it employed during the Walt Disney World bubble that required play-in teams to be no farther than four games out of the No. 8 seed in their respective conferences to force a play-in game.
The Pelicans snagged the final playoff spot in the West with a home win over San Antonio that consigned Popovich to his third successive non-playoff season, followed by a stirring road victory over the LA Clippers in which the teams staged dueling comebacks before Zion Williamson-less New Orleans prevailed.
The truth, though, is that neither the Pelicans nor the Spurs should have been in the tournament.
The Clippers, at 42-40, finished six games ahead of the Pelicans (36-46) and eight games ahead of the Spurs (34-48). Minnesota, by contrast, was 46-36 in the regular season — two games closer to No. 6 than the Timberwolves were to No. 8.
The Wolves ended up overcoming Karl-Anthony Towns' foul trouble to hold off the Clippers in the teams' play-in opener and secure just the second playoff berth for this woebegone franchise over a span of 18 seasons, but they never should have faced so much pressure in the first place. The Wolves were too good over the course over 82 games to be thrust into the position that two bad nights in the play-in round could have ended their season.
This wasn't a problem in the East, since each of the four play-in teams went 44-38 or 43-39. While I'm sure that the league wants to guarantee its television partners a full slate of six play-in games while the top six teams in each conference are resting from Monday through Friday leading into the first round proper, it's a serious stretch to suggest that the Pelicans or Spurs deserved the shot they got to sneak into the full-fledged postseason based on their 82-game performance.
We have to find a way to memorialize play-in statistics with more volume and resonance, because it makes no sense to come away from, say, last season's 50-point performance from Jayson Tatum against Washington and act like it doesn’t exist.
Play-in games realistically can’t factor into regular-season statistics, since that could theoretically affect the scoring race or another category on the seasonal leaderboard. Play-in games likewise can’t be treated statistically as if they are playoff games because they are not playoff games — they are games to get into the playoffs.
Yet it’s also wholly unfair to the participants to pretend, at least statistically, like play-in games never happened.
The problem: There is no clear solution.
And it's an issue that, to my surprise, has actually flummoxed the NBA and its record-keepers for at least 65 years.
I was blissfully unaware of this, but my pal Mike Lynch from the indispensable Basketball Reference informed me that the NBA had a number of seeding tiebreaker games from 1948 through 1957 that were never counted toward individual players' regular-season or postseason statistics.
One example: The St. Louis Hawks, who pushed the Celtics to seven games in the 1957 NBA Finals, had to play seeding tiebreaker games against the Fort Wayne Pistons and Minneapolis Lakers before those playoffs started.
Major League Baseball has always counted statistics from tiebreaker games as part of its regular-season statistics. I completely understand the NBA's reluctance to do so, but no one has come up with a proposal that does a better job than we've done three seasons into the Play-In Era … beyond clamoring for more thorough online bookkeeping.
(Reader suggestions, of course, are most welcome.)
This is more of a lament, rather than a change-seeking complaint: My foremost quarrel with the play-in tournament is that it has emboldened Silver to push forward on his plans to launch an in-season tournament.
I've heard the case made with some frequency lately that the single-elimination goodness witnessed during the play-in tournament, which doesn’t otherwise exist in the NBA, illustrates the dramatic potential of in-season tournament play.
Nope.
The drama was so delicious last week at its peak during the play-in round because a spot in the actual playoffs was on the line. Single-elimination games in the eventual Stern Cup — and it remains to be seen how early said Cup would advance to a single-elimination knockout phase — won't carry the same tension because teams would be eliminated from a competition that is nowhere close in stature to the playoffs. It doesn't mean anything to anyone yet.
As I've stated on a bazillion previous occasions: I suspect no one who has anything to do with the NBA has seen more Cup games in person than me (albeit in soccer through my frequent England trips). And I'm telling you: I want no part of this for the NBA. We just don't live in a Cup culture in this country, so you're going to struggle to convince me that, just for argument’s sake, Grizzlies fans are going to go nuts about winning a Stern Cup one of these Februarys.
Pretty much any Cup competition anywhere in world soccer throws teams from different levels into the same pot. That's where a good bit of the romance comes from: An upstart from a lower division, or from a smaller country in the Champions League, upsets one of the established heavyweights.
The Stern Cup won't have any of that. The same 30 teams chasing the Larry O'Brien Trophy (yawn) will be the same 30 teams trying to win the NBA's secondary silverware.
Commissioner Silver will inevitably say that sports leagues have to change with the times and try to create new traditions. While the NBA has successfully pulled that off with the play-in, I remain skeptical in the extreme, given #thisworld we live in on this side of the Atlantic, that domestic fans will embrace a Stern Cup run as any sort of significant achievement.
Don’t do it, NBA.
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Iron unkind
Without thinking too deeply about it, I wrote last week about the (very) select group of five players who appeared in all 82 games this season.
I didn't realize how absurdly low that total is.
Leave it to the Warriors' tireless stat maven Daryl Arata, with an assist from the Elias Sports Bureau, to clue me in. The fivesome in question — Dallas' Dwight Powell, Detroit's Saddiq Bey, Golden State's Kevon Looney, Phoenix's Mikal Bridges and Washington's Deni Avdija — represents by far the smallest group of ever-presents in league history.
The previous low was 17 in the 2016-17 season, followed by 18 in 2015-16 and 21 in 2018-19.
You can see where this is going.
In the Load Management Era, we are seeing the concept of what used to be known as the NBA Iron Man freefall toward extinction. As a young beat writer, I wrote extensively about A.C. Green, then with Dallas, surpassing my beloved Randy Smith of the Buffalo Braves with the longest consecutive-games streak in NBA history. (Green reached 1,192 without missing one; Smith played in 906 games in a row.)
The longest active Iron Man streak in today's NBA? In four seasons, Bridges has played in all 309 regular-season games for the Suns ... after playing 116 without a miss in college at Villanova.
Keep doing it for A.C. and Randy, Mikal!
(Editor’s Note II: When this story first published I didn’t properly account for the COVID-19 factor over the past three seasons, with two of those seasons shortened from 82 games and players throughout the league missing numerous games due to the league’s health and safety protocols. The overall sentiment, however, stands: We’re likely to see the NBA Iron Man less and less.)
Numbers Game
🏀 11
This is a hockey stat, but I'm printing it to bond with long-suffering Sacramento Kings fans: My Buffalo Sabres have now missed the NHL playoffs for 11 consecutive seasons. It's the longest postseason drought for any franchise in NHL history. So, yes, Sacramento: I feel your pain more than most. (The Kings, as we've been discussing ad nauseum all season, have missed the playoffs for 16 consecutive seasons, snapping a tie with the Clippers for the league's longest-ever drought with their 30-52 finish earlier this month.)
🏀 478
Chicago's Zach LaVine appeared in 478 regular-season games before making his playoff debut Sunday in the Bulls' narrow Game 1 loss at Milwaukee. As passed along by my pal Tim Reynolds of the Associated Press, Indiana's Buddy Hield has now inherited LaVine's mantle as the most experienced active NBA player yet to taste the postseason. The all-time leaders via Reynolds: Tom Van Arsdale (929 games), Otto Moore (682), Nate Williams (642), Omri Casspi (588), Sebastian Telfair (564) and Popeye Jones (535).
🏀 527
Interesting quirk: Although Eddy Curry is next in line on that list with 527 NBA regular-season appearances without playing in the playoffs, Curry did earn a championship ring with Miami in 2011-12 without actually participating in that postseason.
🏀 3
San Antonio's Gregg Popovich is now the winningest coach in NBA history with 1,344 regular-season wins on his résumé, but he has also slogged through three successive losing seasons. After a 20-62 mark in his first season coaching the Spurs in 1996-97, Popovich went to the playoffs on the strength of a winning record 22 seasons in a row. Of course, Popovich also had Tim Duncan on his roster for 19 of those seasons.
🏀 6
Only six coaches got votes in National Basketball Coaches Association voting for its own Coach of the Year award, which went to the Suns' Monty Williams for the second consecutive season. The other coaches to receive votes in balloting restricted to current head coaches were, as listed alphabetically, Willie Green (New Orleans), Taylor Jenkins (Memphis), Tyronn Lue (LA Clippers), Popovich and Erik Spoelstra (Miami). Boston's Ime Udoka, Dallas' Jason Kidd and Minnesota's Chris Finch were the most deserving coaches who did not receive a single vote from their peers.
🏀 15
The Suns have averaged an increase of 15 victories in each of Williams' three seasons as coach, going from 19 wins to 34 victories in 2019-20, then up to 51 victories last season and 64 victories this season. My instinct is that Williams will win the media's Coach of the Year vote this spring, boosted by the fact he narrowly lost out to the Knicks' Tom Thibodeau last season.
🏀 31-14
In the team’s play-in matchup for the last playoff spot in the West, New Orleans scored 31 of the game's final 45 points after this tweet from LeBron James proclaimed the Clippers' Tyronn Lue to be the best coach in the NBA. Cue the irresistible it's been that kind of season for LeBron reaction ... although it must be noted that I was firing off plenty of my own tweets that night praising Lue when it appeared that the Clippers were headed for yet another impressive comeback victory after the Pelicans had seized a 16-point lead.
🏀 3
Only three of the world's 10 richest sports owners can be found in the NBA, according to Forbes Magazine. The list is naturally topped by the Clippers' Steve Ballmer with an estimated worth of (gulp) $91.4 billion, but I was surprised to see that the Nets' Joe Tsai — who is under increasing scrutiny for his close ties to the Chinese government — is not Ballmer's closest pursuer. The other two NBA owners in Forbes' top 10: Cleveland's Dan Gilbert ($22 billion) and Memphis' Robert Pera ($14.6 billion). The Grizzlies just keep surprising us.
I like to imagine Jonas Valanciunas’ agent keeps up with play in statistics more than most. JV moves to 4-1 in the play ins, with pretty big games outside of the Clippers small balling JV out of the lineup last week.
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