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The NBA Playoffs Aren't What They Used to Be

Nathaniel Friedman on the playoff race and why next year could be a whole different league.

Giannis Antetokounmpo 34 of the Milwaukee Bucks dunks
Photo Illustration/Getty Images

In the NBA, April no longer signals the start of the “real” season. With professionalism and optimization all the rage around the league, the first 82 games are seen as more than just players biding their time. The regular season and the playoffs exist in perfect harmony; one sets the terms and raises hypotheses, the other confirms or denies them in sometimes brutal fashion.

It’s a shame that the MVP is a regular season award because the impossibly tight race between James Harden and Giannis Antetokounmpo could really use a tie-breaker. Both have not only put up colossal numbers but left an inimitable stamp on every possession, carrying their respective teams (in Harden’s bombastic case, often single-handedly) on a nightly basis. The Bucks finished with the league’s best record but the Rockets have faced injuries and, since getting back to full-strength around the All-Star break have been arguably even more impressive than Milwaukee. Both Harden and Antetokounmpo are, in their own, oblique way, strong leaders, and—however hard it may to discern at times with Harden—fundamentally good teammates.

The truly disastrous irony of the MVP award is its optics. Ballots are cast in April based on a players’ exploits up to that point; the results are not made public until after the Finals have wrapped up. The mechanics of the process go on the assumption that, because not every player gets to enjoy a deep playoff run, the only way to make a fair comparison is to stick to the opportunities that are at everybody’s disposal. Otherwise, the process cripples the chances of anyone who bows out early in the postseason or fails to make it there in the first place. But by the time the MVP is announced, the playoffs have served as the de facto arbiter of value. It’s corny to just give the MVP to best player on the title team. In a race like this season’s, though, the gut check—or reality check—that the postseason provides could settle the debate.

The regular season is no longer seen as “false,” in the sense that it generates faulty or useless information. It certainly helps that, during the playoffs, teams no longer gravitate exclusively toward a conservative, ultra-physical, slow and generic style of play that was once viewed as somehow more honorable or manly than the slapdash regular season. This made some sense when the league as a whole hewed more closely to this approach, and the harder teams tried, the more they aggravated this dynamic. As other approaches and systems have flourished, though, it’s made less and less sense to tear through the regular season and then scrap, or mitigate, a system that has paid dividends throughout the year. If the regular season is legitimate, then so are the ways of playing the game that teams employed throughout.

The playoffs no longer look to dispense with the regular season altogether, or reinforce, if nothing else through mythology and narrative, a sharp disconnect between how teams and players approach the game in April and everything that got them to that point. Still, what happens in the playoffs is the real test of what we think we know. You can take Harden or Antentokounmpo’s accomplishments very seriously while wanting to see what happens when they are subjected to the scenario that sets playoffs apart: spending over a week matching up against a single worthy opponent with emotions running high and ample time for highly specific adjustments. Playoff basketball isn’t a different kind of basketball. It’s a heightened, more rigorous version of the sport that should have the final word on legitimacy. Not only would it be unsustainable for the duration of the regular season. It needs a prelude for us to make any sense of it, as the degree to which the playoffs stick to, or depart from, the regular season is exactly what makes them interesting.


If we take the regular season seriously, though, what do we make of teams who underperformed during it, or who still have potential left to realize? In the East, the Bucks are absolutely credible, as are the Raptors, whose past postseason struggles might as well have happened to a different franchise (that’s how much overhaul there was this past summer). But the Celtics and 76ers could very easily end up playing against each other in the Conference Finals. The Celtics have been a ramshackle, disjointed team plagued by infighting and uncertainty, fueled in part by the looming question of where Kyrie Irving will sign in the offseason. Yet they still have the most stacked roster this side of the Warriors, and in Brad Stevens a coach who—if no longer worshipped as the game’s reigning genius tactician—is extremely capable when it comes to the fine tweaks that become all-important in the months ahead.

The 76ers are an even more perplexing case. A Kyrie-less Celtics team ran them out of the playoffs ignominiously last year, exposing and exploiting the weaknesses of Ben Simmons and, to a lesser degree, Joel Embiid. The Sixers responded by loading up with talent, acquiring All-Star-level talent in Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris and looking to establish themselves as one of the league’s elite teams. But they have yet to fully gel and now, must contend with the skepticism around Simmons and Embiid’s ability to perform in the postseason. Teams can no longer look to the playoffs as an fresh start where everyone needs to figure out things all over again, or look to gel under dramatically new conditions. They are shacked to what came before and come in facing real expectations and scrutiny. In this way, the playoffs have never been more meaningful. Not only is the title at stake, there is an entire year’s worth of knowledge to be confirmed or denied.

That said, there’s a chance that the regular season’s stock has risen simply because, with the Warriors on the scene for at least one more postseason, relative success or failure leading up to the playoffs is all that keeps the NBA interesting. The Warriors could potentially lose to the Rockets, who remain their stiffest competition. Then again, that depends not on how well Houston plays but on how much Golden State is able, even willing, to play up to anywhere remotely close to their perhaps purely theoretical potential. But with the Warriors unlikely to keep their current team intact past this summer, there’s also an air of anticipation around these playoffs, like they are themselves setting the stage for our collective post-Warriors existence. They may be a fait accompli but they’re also setting the stage for what’s next. For the first time in a while, NBA fans can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe, with so many marquee names potentially changing teams this coming summer, these playoffs are pointless. The league’s competitive landscape could end up so dramatically altered that it’s basically unrecognizable by the time 2019-20 tips off. But what happens down the line will almost certainly be affected by what happens in the months ahead. What happens with the Celtics will factor into Irving’s offseason plans; ditto for Butler and Harris in Philadelphia. A Raptors flameout could potentially have Kawhi Leonard looking to change teams. As ever, Anthony Davis’s future hangs in the balance. Kevin Durant’s destination is still anyone’s guess. Even if this year’s playoffs are a lost cause, they are unmistakably teeing up what could be a tumultuous offseason. This year, we won’t just be watching a referendum on the past. The playoffs won’t just sort out what came before, or confirm the existence of post-Warriors reality. They will determine what the league looks like going forward. For once, something even bigger than a single title is at stake.