Intense again
Brilliant competitors in their element over the playoffs' first weekend
What a breath of fresh air! And what a travesty the end of the season was by comparison. This is the NBA when guys are fucking trying, defending everywhere, all over the court.
NBC loves to show their stuff from the nineties, when NBC was the NBA, right? And I’m sure it’s not the intent, but what they’re showing most of the time is eight guys standing around, one guy dribbling with another guy guarding him. No one’s really guarding anyone outside 15 feet.
And then we revert to today’s live action, and guys are moving everywhere, guys being guarded everywhere, all over the court. It’s so physical.
I talked to a player who played Sunday, and he watched all the games on Saturday, just kind of getting the flavor of the intensity of the games. We talked about the refereeing and my thought was: it was the same. It was relatively physical, to a point where you weren’t totally sure when they might call a foul. If you hit a guy in the face, you’re probably called for a foul. If you hit him on the arm with your hand, it’s gonna get called a foul.
But there’s a lot of body contact. There are a lot of scrums where there’s just no call, which means it’s intense and tough. That’s just the reality, which is what I thought was predictable. They don’t want these games going three hours.
So yes, Shai got 17 free throws, and Jamal Murray got 16 free throws. And a few guys had, you know, 10 or 11 free throws. But if they had used the old whistle from four or five years ago, those guys were getting 20 or more.
Jalen Suggs sniffs out the lob to Jalen Duren, breaks the pass up, then races to recover the loose ball near the sideline. Then Franz Wagner did what he did all game, and just bullied a dude for an And One.
This is playoff basketball. It’s like the regular season, except everyone’s doing the opposite of tanking. Everyone is very invested.
Not every player can handle that. We can go back just a little bit, to the Charlotte-Orlando Play-In game. Did you know the three biggest losses in Play-In history all feature Charlotte?
LaMelo Ball has grown and changed, and he’ll keep growing. But to my eyes, he still doesn’t have that. He hasn’t gotten that level of Ali versus Frazier, where they both almost died from overheating, and kept fucking answer the bell for the next round, because fuck you, fuck you, I’m fucking fighting.
That’s the level of playoff basketball. It’s pushing yourself into uncomfortable territory.
I remember talking to a former high school player of mine who played in the NCAA Final Four in the 1990s, one hour after they lost, hugging him after a heartbreaking last second loss. I said to him, how does it feel? You’re this guy no one expected this from who made it so close to the top of the mountain, leading your team in scoring in the Final Four.
He answered sweetly, “I’ve never been more tired in my life.”
And that’s playoff basketball. I was so proud of the product this weekend. This was a flare being shot into the sky, Adam Silver, and the 30 billionaires, you must fix this disastrous problem of these players and these coaches appearing in listless games. The last three months of the season, the ship isn’t just sinking; it’s leaking oil and it’s on fire.
And I don’t want to go on too big a tangent, but I’m worried that the results of whatever they’re going to do is going to mean coaches are going to play their best players more and not develop young guys. The answer is not to bench 22-year-olds for 33-year-olds. You can do both, fight to win games and still play future starters.
A second observation was about the degree of talent, skill, and athleticism on display–it was just extraordinary. This is Game 1. Everyone but the Play-In teams has had a week off. You’re challenging people everywhere. You’re flooding the rim with bodies. There was marvelous play making and shot making. There were some stretches in the Hawks-Knicks game where I thought “oh my god” as someone took an incredibly tough shot, and they just kept fucking going in.
The way the Thunder rally to drives yet keep their structural integrity on the perimeter is incredible. In general, teams flooded the first box well, offenses need to counter with more second box targets in Game 2. There were a couple of stretches in the OKC game where I wanted to grab an Ajay Mitchell defensive possession and send it to the whole world. Just unbelievable defense. He also made his first three 3s, which is always nice.
When Karl-Anthony Towns is “Angry Kat” the Knicks have one of the best inside-outside duos in the NBA.
I just couldn’t help but notice the level of Karl-Anthony Towns’ play. That was just a man possessed. He was angry, ornery, you know? If he showed that kind of shot making and driving in the eighties, it would shut the arena down. What? A seven-footer plays like this? His shot making, his competitiveness. And Atlanta is giving it right back.
Deni Avdija is a fearless driver with rare agility for his size. The Blazers only had one guy play great, but for a new playoff team on the rise, it can build around that guy.
Another thought: How many players were impact players on their team and were basically given up on by a previous team?
C.J. McCollum was important for Atlanta, and has been important for Atlanta, and he’s 34. This is not about “we should give old guys more chances.” Normally, we give them too many chances. But I mean, he was left for dead. And now he matters in the playoffs.
How does Minnesota not find a way to keep Nickeil Alexander-Walker?
Deni Avdija is 25. You can build around him. He can fucking score and lead, and he’s the boss of that team. His next deal is max, and he’ll deserve it.
Teams misread their own personnel all the time.
I’m going to pass along some information that I don’t see as news. I have no idea what the truth is. I just know these are insiders telling me this. But I’ll tell you that in my circles, between the players and agents and people who I talk to constantly, it’s taken as fact that Jamahl Mosely is a done deal to leave Orlando to become the next coach of the Pelicans. He and Paulo never get along, and you’re always going to fire the coach before you fire the player, right?
And the other one is Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brown are done. They aren’t gonna play together anymore after this season–one’s definitely winning. That’s what everyone has been telling me.
Okay. Meanwhile, the two most impressive wins of the opening weekend of the playoffs were the Magic and Celtics. Brown and Tatum combined for an efficient 51 points.
You just never know when a team’s going to catch fire, and then … do you really want to break it up?
I remember in 2006 Udonis Haslam called me so upset that they were tied with the Bulls going into Game 5. He was so surprised how selfish the team had gotten, because the team was so connected all season. He was saying all season that he’d never been on a team at any level with that kind of connectivity—they’d go all fifteen guys to see a movie. And he’s like, so shocked at how the team was reacting to the stress of fighting the Bulls.
And my only advice was simply, one game at a time, you never know when your team’s going to catch fire. They won the next two in Chicago, the beat the Nets in five, they beat the Pistons in six, and then they won a championship against the Mavericks.
I’m not predicting that kind of run from the Magic or Celtics, but you can’t rule out a remarkable run and then how easy would it be to make a big change?.
The Pistons, for example, didn’t jump a level up. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that they are feeling themselves. I don’t think they looked flat. I think they look the same. But Orlando raised their level of fight. The announcers kept talking about Jalen Suggs, how could they not!
And JB Bickerstaff, I thought, was just so focused on the referees. I have no idea what he was saying on the bench or whatever, and so it’s unfair for me to castigate him fully. But I just felt like he was spending so much energy bitching to the refs. I wanted him to focus on the Pistons! Not that Coach K never yelled at referees, but I always loved his philosophy of “talk to Duke.” He was always telling his team, let’s focus on ourselves, building each other up, helping each other problem solve. And he definitely worked referees too, but, but he was never Bobby Knight, there were no throwing chair incidents. He coached his guys up. Phil Jackson coached his guys up. I feel like JB needs to coach his guys up. He’s in a war. This is a big, rugged, physical fucking team they are playing.
And the only one that isn’t really big and physical is a tall, skilled, very controlled Anthony Black. He’s not going to beat you up physically, but the fucking guy is Mozart.
Mozart was born to play the piano, obviously. But also: his dad was a famed piano teacher, yeah. So no surprise, it’s this very gifted person, he’s born to a farmer, we have no idea what would have happened. But born to a teacher and we have a legend.
Anthony Black is Mozart, and he’s got a coach who, at the very least, pushes him to play beautiful basketball.
As LeBron James is the fastest and strongest 41-year-old on earth it can be easy to forget he’s a genius playmaker. His 13 assists showed that, at least for one game, he can still carry a team in the playoffs.
THE SECOND BOX
Let’s keep trying to get good shots. That’s the game of NBA offense. It seems to me that too often there was too much focus on getting to the rim. I can tell you firsthand from players themselves who don’t like the philosophy of only taking dunks and 3s, because against some teams when you get to the rim the defense is such that there’s nothing there.
This is the entire reason why I invented the second box theory: to give my guys a target that they could play with when teams are so focused on flooding the rim.
The most basic part of the Art of War is to attack where your enemy is not. If the opponent has done an amazing job of protecting themselves against archers, and you feel like, okay, we’re gonna go to hand-to-hand combat. Well, your guys better fucking know how to attack that way, or it doesn’t matter. You have to practice and be ready for the moments where the best shots available aren’t what is typically considered high percentage, and if you are good enough at them, they are certainly better than highly contested dunks and 3’s. .
You’ve got to train for it. OKC is very comfortable with it (plus they’re not playing a team with great rim protection).
But a lot of these other teams were going to the rim, and they just had nothing there. Instead of just stopping on a dime and shooting that 12-footer when you’ve got the open space, you just rush to the rim and there’s a gigantic, athletic, coordinated dude waiting for you. And so I bet we’ll see a pivot. I bet we see a trend of a lot less of that as the playoffs unfold. Plus, getting to the second box means every teammate is just one pass away(as opposed to what we call “two passes away) when a ball has to travel a great distance). So getting to that spot earlier in possessions can unlock a good shot elsewhere.
And then, of course, the counter is when teams start sending their help up the floor more, into the second box, now that guy is running towards me instead of waiting for me. Then we can see about attacking the rim, as the defender is more vulnerable farther up into the paint.
The other thing I’d add is that for contenders, it’s a blessing to have a feisty opponent right now. It’s better to be more tested in the first round, because you’re practicing solving problems and playing with more intensity.
We just went through the worst two months of NBA basketball in recorded time in terms of how often teams were trying to win. It’s not that anyone is going out there trying to miss shotsInstead coaches aren’t necessarily coming up with their best strategies to win when they don’t want to win. The joke is a guy that’s heavily left handed that you only run screens for them to go right. That mentality is infused into everyone on the team. All-Stars aren’t playing as if their hair is on fire when they know nobody cares if they win. It affects everybody.
This first weekend was a challenge to ramp up. They did it in terms of effort and execution, and maybe their shooting suffered. The playmaking was amazing. Execution suffered, as you might expect. And I think that’s going to come around a little bit. Teams get more comfortable playing with uncomfortableness, because they’ve done it. And they’ll have to play with a bench. You’ve got to give the bench players time to let them perform in the playoffs.
So many players impressed me this weekend. Nickel Alexander-Walker, LeBron, Chet, Karl-Anthony Towns. Jalen Suggs. Franz Wagner. Wendell Carter Jr. Deni Avdija. Scoot Henderson—I don’t know how talented of a playmaker he is. I think his stats suggest that he’s good. I did not think he was great last night, but I was very impressed with his power and speed coming in. He just got to play his first playoff game and I thought he was good.
Victor Wembanyama hit a 3 in isolation a few possessions earlier, and went 5-6 from 3 in the game. Good gosh almighty. But this is where he is most dangerous, screening and rolling, because his shooting touch from 3 causes all sorts of problems for defenders who are not sure what to take away. My guess is, the Blazers will prioritize taking away these shots in Game 2.
I thought Wemby’s approach was great. I just found him to be so dialed in. He really plays like a Zen master. I mean, he is a cauldron of competitiveness, but I feel like he controls it really well.
Chet Holmgren made an unbelievable 3 at the end of the quarter. It was almost like Christian Laettner’s famous gamewinner. Chet just looked super composed. Again, tell me what seven-footer was doing that the 80s? These players are amazing.
Nuggets vs. Wolves was a popular pick to be the West’s best first-round battle. Denver’s defense has not been great. But Jamal Murray took it on. He drew ten fouls in Game 1, including this one on defense. His fight to stay in front of Anthony Edwards was rewarded, and he really took it personally.
Nikola Jokić got a triple double, but I thought he had to spend a ton of time on his teammates. His vocal coaching is very obvious. I worry Jokić is going to be out of gas because of all the coaching he’s doing on the court. He looked frustrated to me at times with some of his teammates’ decisions. He’s a good teammate. It looked to me like he wanted to yell one time at Christian Braun for something, and then he just picked him up. I feel like Cam Johnson pissed him off a couple of times.
Some coaches would say this effort by James Harden was risky and lazy. I just know that they need him to make plays on D, be a fighter, and not a target. He had an OK Game 1, and when Donovan Mitchell is cooking, 22 and 10 with two steals is plenty.
Cavaliers vs. Raptors was an interesting game. Toronto actually shot well (13-27 from 3) and got thumped. That isn’t common. I thought Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen had a little edge to them, which is super important. Harden was just in control. It helps that Quickley didn’t play; it’s really kind of a mismatch there now.
The Knicks had KAT locked the fuck in. They’re a team that crushes the offensive boards, because of Mitchell Robinson, but only had six, Brunson did not shoot well, and they still rolled. Brunson just has that swagger of, oh, I know how to do this.
Desmond Bane has shown some real abilities to lift that team up. He’s an angry guy. I don’t know where it comes from. That’s not what I’ve heard about him. But he’s had a couple different flare ups. You’re not going to bully Detroit, but Bane is bringing something that matters to Orlando.
Franz Wagner just bullied people. He’s a fucking huge guard. I thought he just out-physicaled guys. I very much enjoyed watching the world’s best players compete the way they competed.
You know what I didn’t see? Hero ball (except from the Sixers). Instead there was lots of ball movement, lots of player movement, lots of pace, not just in the full court, in the half court, lots of Indiana Pacers/OKC Thunder style. On the court, in the playoffs, the league is in a good place.
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