This morning, a somewhat depressing story broke on the San Antonio Express-News. At least to me. That story, in short? Tim Duncan's getting a divorce. As Duncan is my favorite player ever, I know most of the outline of his personal story -- including the fact that he dated his wife (Amy Duncan) in college and married her in the early 2000s. Like most cases of college sweetheart engagement, I found it somewhat heartwarming. There's something neat about the idea of meeting your beloved in college. College is a time when high school kids evolve and develop into the sort of adults they want to be. Any relationship you carry on from college is bound to go through periods of intense change as both parties grow as individuals. The person you are in your early 20s bears scant resemblance to the person you are in your late 40s -- any collegiate relationship that can stand the test of time shows a beautiful propensity for change and adaptation. When one of those relationships ends, it makes me sad. That's the primary reason the story depresses me.

The other reason? The fact that it exists at all.

• • •

One of the content-related wrinkles to last year's Player Capsules that I found difficult to juggle was my personal desire to bring some of every player's personal background into the fold. There was never any doubt in my mind that I'd try to incorporate some manner of personal examination into every player's essay, but that doesn't mean it was always particularly easy. Some players keep to themselves and made it generally impossible to bring any manner of personal flair to the capsule, other players had so much depth that I felt any treatment whatsoever was hardly going to do them justice. One of my main goals in undertaking the series was to humanize and bring the readers "closer" to the players in whatever way I could -- either through a quirky examination of their game, a publicly released personal story or two from their lives, or a teammate's endorsement of how they were off the court.

Here's the thing. With a few notable exceptions of individual events that are court record, virtually every available story that I could point to for individual players were positive. That wasn't without reason. I found myself willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a dubiously sourced story that highlights positive character while demanding a higher burden of proof for a dubiously sourced story that highlights negative character. I don't think my reasoning was particularly out of line, either -- these guys are sports stars. They make millions of dollars playing a game. They make millions of dollars playing for fame. They make millions of dollars playing the hero. A sports star -- minor or not -- represents person who's signed up to become a distraction from our daily lives. They've put their job performance in the public eye and taken on a vastly different lifestyle than one I could ever imagine.

Critique of their game and their general play is quite in-line. Critique of their status as a human being, with perhaps a few notable exceptions (the Karl Malone children story is my go-to example as one that transcends sports and fundamentally disturbs me), serves only to undermine the entire point of a sports star. At least to me. They're a nice little distraction from the rigors of everyday life, a decent pastiche of a hero to young children and an escape for an overworked adult. Character assassination -- relative to the way I watch sports -- has always struck me as a little unnecessary. This story edges into that "character assassination" fold, if only just. The facts behind the case are slim, and the article generally reads as a speculatory whodunit. Reporting a divorce that appears to be in-process is hardly some character-impugning nightmare, but it is a generally unwanted incursion into an athlete's personal life. And it's rather obvious that it's unwanted -- why else would Duncan and his wife have set up the paperwork to include none of their actual names and as little identifying information as possible? Why is it necessary? Why do we need to know?

• • •

Thing is, there's nothing that can be reasonably done about it. And all things considered? It's probably apt coverage.

When complaining about the ongoing creep in mass media's engagement with our stars and heroes, it all usually comes back to a single issue: the smut sells. Anyone remember_ A Tale of Two Cities, the Charles Dickens classic? That's sold roughly 200 million copies over the course of its 154 year lifetime, making it the highest selling book of all time. But _People magazine -- one of the more popular of the world's Celebrity Gossip rags -- sells 43 million copies every week. Many people blame celebrity gossip and the dumbing-down of the world's press for the fall of the newspaper and the death of the printed word. I don't totally disagree, but that interpretation limits society's culpability for the long fall -- it's hard to defend the integrity of the reader without noting that the not-so-gradual shift towards paper-thin journalism and fluff was precipitated by the reading audience's purchasing preferences.

Most people balk at this, especially when they aren't the ones directly involved. "I don't buy gossip! I'm not at fault!" On some level, it's true. But mass price signaling has been around since the dawn of time and it's hardly going to go away now. And there's a certain amount of culpability inherent in all of us, even if we aren't the ones buying the gossip magazines and feeding the churning beast. I've never bought a gossip magazine in my life, but I've also never had a frank conversation with one of my gossip guzzling friends trying to get at the bottom of why exactly they get so heavily engaged in it. I've never really tried to dissuade them from feeding the beast, or taken any effort to understand why they and so many others are so inclined. I can work on interesting basketball writing until the cows come home, but I'm often genuinely stumped when I try to step back and understand exactly why Gothic Ginobili readers like what they like. There have been more than a few pieces I thought were awful but drove scores of traffic by being a bit controversial. There have been more than a few pieces I thought were really good that virtually nobody read. It's the nature of the beast.

And looking at it from a broader level, it's hardly as easy as blaming a rogue editor or an individual story-writer. I'm sure that -- on some level -- the editors that greenlight celebrity gossip and supervise the entrenchment of the rags are as confused as anyone as to why this sells. But that's the thing. It still does, whether we know why or not. When the NBA's Twitterati slam Bleacher Report's search engine optimization and ESPN's Heat Index and the over-focus on the NBA's star-studded teams, I find myself caught between two sides. On one hand, I tend to agree with the complaints. On the other, I find it difficult-to-impossible to blame the larger institutions who perpetuate the problem. It's not really their fault it sells. It's not ESPN's fault that screaming and ranting drive viewership over intelligent philosophical sports banter. It's not Bleacher Report's fault that mindless slideshows drive much more traffic than a loghorrea of intractable play diagrams and acronyms meant to share intelligent basketball strategems. One can't simply consider the editorial contributions to the problem in a vacuum -- if it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't be done. And it's profitable because, for reasons somewhat beyond my understanding, the sorts of people who follow sports (and politics, and music, and media in a general sense) tend to be more interested in controversy and screaming matches than they are in thoughtful meandering through a field of ripe ideas.

In a world where print media is dying and television is flagging fast, there are two things that virtually guarantee short-term profits and a semi-sustainable revenue stream: gossip and controversy. Pap, fluff, and reality TV abounds. As all-too-tuned-in NBA fans, we tend to criticize NBA general managers for focusing on the short term to save their jobs. But we also tend to feel a slight twinge of sympathy for them -- ownership demands dictate consideration of the short term over the more intelligent play of cultivating the long term. They're locked in a catch-22. And as much as I'd like to pin the blame on the producers of injurious, inexplicable fluff like the Duncan divorce story, I find myself feeling that same twinge of sympathy for the editors and the writers as I do for the errant GM. The stuff sells, and it'll keep them their jobs in an increasingly brutal media environment. Journalistic integrity and media ethics be damned -- sometimes you have to save your own skin. And stories like this, as bankrupt as they may seem to the outsider, go a long way towards doing that.

Why's that, though? Why does it sell? Wish I knew. Maybe someday I'll figure it out.

In the meantime, tune in to Gothic Ginobili tomorrow for an up-to-the-minute liveblog of my seventh divorce.

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Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. Sometimes Friday, like today. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. Today's short piece is as follows.

• CHI at MIA: The Indefatiga-Bulls Flame Out (by Aaron McGuire)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

CHI/MIA: The Indefatiga-Bulls Flame Out
Aaron McGuire

With Chicago's unfortunate five-game ouster yesterday evening, three things were made absolute fact.

• Derrick Rose will officially not be returning this season.
• The Bulls -- despite winning the first game of the series -- were outscored by 66 points over their 5 game loss.
• This terrible, god-awful season for Chicago has drawn to a close. The Bulls get a summer to recover.

The first point isn't really that important, even if we've been inundated with coverage to assert that it is. Derrick Rose is taking a little bit longer to come back than the world could've hoped, but it's hard to put together a strong argument that Rose should cow to his fans and media when it comes to his ACL recovery. Oh, sure, I've heard the spiel -- he's been "cleared to play" for months, it's all in his head, he owes it to his team, et cetera. Tom Ziller covered the "cleared to play" angle pretty well already, but I'll relay the cliffs notes -- Chicago's medical staff has a disturbing history of allowing players to see the court with grievous injuries they should've already caught. Rose's personal doctors may be saying something different, and there's scant reason to assume Rose is acting in bad faith here.

It may very well "all be in his head", but you can't just huff and puff and declare that a person should think the way you do. You can't just yell at Rose and have him suddenly stop having the hang-up in his head that's keeping him off the floor. He has to work through the blocks in his own head and find a way to get around it himself. And as for owing it to his team? Rose's contract is in large part insured -- the Bulls had to pay Rose less than $10 million due to the number of games he missed, and the insurance payout may have been the infusion that allowed Reinsdorf to pay the luxury tax. Rose practices with the team, and his teammates all seem to support him. I'm not sure what -- exactly -- he owes the team if he's not quite healthy and he needs a bit more time to get there. Perhaps I'm wrong, and I simply haven't heard the right arguments for why Rose's absence is a big deal. But when you peel back the overzealous reporting and overexposure, I feel that the Rose saga is a journalist-invented mountain designed of a tiny molehill.

What is more interesting -- at least to me -- is the second point. There was a lot of talk after Game 5 about how the Bulls made Chicago proud over the five game series and put up a strong challenge to the Miami Heat. Despite twisting and turning, I have trouble seeing it that way. The inclination to give the Bulls a wealth of credit for their performance this series is rooted in how the Bulls lost -- if there was any way for Chicago to maximize their best efforts and minimize their stinkers, this would be the way to do it. They opened the series with a shocking upset, something that set the basketball world abuzz and made for a week's worth of "Can They Beat The Heat" coverage. They closed the series with a gutty comeback and a brilliant defensive performance, at least for two and a half quarters -- the Bulls outscored Miami 73-45 from 5:24 left in the 1st to 1:05 left in the 3rd. They started strong and they closed strong, which is exactly what you'd want to do if you wanted to rewrite the book on how a series went. Because people forget about the middle. And in this case?

The middle was horrifying.

Really. The Bulls outscored Miami by 4 points over the first and fifth games combined -- Miami outscored the Bulls by 70 points over games 2 through 4. That's an average of 23 points per game. In game 2, Chicago was obliterated by 37 points. At one point, the Bulls gave Miami a 62-20 run. It was gruesome. Worst playoff loss in franchise history by a country mile -- their previous worst was 26 points, in 2007. Then, in Game 3, the Heat played completely terribly for an entire game and the Bulls simply found themselves completely unable to capitalize, losing the game by 10 against a seriously pathetic Miami performance that might not have beaten the Milwaukee Bucks. Then there was game 4, a pitiful performance that ended up being by far the worst offensive performance by a Chicago Bulls team in the NBA playoffs, losing by 23 points in a game where the were outshot from the floor 49% to 25%. The final margin could've been far worse, too, if the Bulls hadn't made a living at the line and forced a score of Miami turnovers.

Which leaves me with my take -- the Bulls started strong and closed strong, but the only way one could really assert that the Bulls had a "good" series against Miami is if they quite literally ignored the middle three games. As injured and snakebit as this Bulls team was, one can't quite ignore how embarrassingly lopsided the middle-matter of the series was, especially game 3. Even against the defending champs. Boozer and Noah dominated and Chicago's defense kept Miami in check for most of the night, with Miami's offense sputtering and their defense barely functioning. It didn't matter, though -- the Bulls lost by ten! Chicago's performances in game one and game five should give their fans hope. But the way the Bulls folded during those three games -- in a series they once led, and a series they had stolen home court advantage in -- was more than a bit depressing, and perhaps a tad embarrassing. It wasn't embarrassing for no reason, of course. The team was spent and ravaged by injuries, with naught but a skeleton crew on deck with their season on the brink. But it was a brutal series and it was a depressing series to watch. And bookending their horrible middle with two strong efforts doesn't erase the fact that the middle happened.

The Bulls are going home. The long national nightmare is over for our worldly Bulls fans, and their players are going to get a chance to recover. The 2013 Bulls had a lot of intriguing highs -- winning a game 7 in Brooklyn, snagging the five seed despite their myriad injuries, staying in the top-6 defenses despite their injuries, winning game 1 in Miami, and validating Thibodeau's system. But don't let the highs erase the lows. This team was incomplete, and they need to change some things going forward. For all of Thibodeau's strategic brilliance, Thibodeau needs to augment his system creativity with rotation creativity to keep his players healthy. The Bulls front office needs to find ways to beef up the team's depth. Derrick Rose needs to get his body in shape and eradicate his mental blocks. And the fans need a bit of time off from the constant drumbeat of injuries and insubstantial information.

Goodbye, Chicago. Here's hoping for a better 2014.

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Heart breaker, heart breaker
You stole the love right out of my heart
Heart breaker, heart breaker
I wanna tear your world apart

-- The Rolling Stones, Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)

The NBA playoffs can be a harsh mistress -- you get a lot of intense games, but you also get a lot of heartbreakers. You know the type. Those deflating games where a team is, retrospectively, on the absolute verge of victory. A high-leverage game that could've gone either way. The winning team gets to experience the rushing elation of a minor theft -- the losing team takes a bitter pill. This year's playoffs have an air of inevitability around them, and that's cast a minor pall on the proceedings. And that's a bit of a shame, because we're having a remarkably close and snippy season. Heartbreaking loss after heartbreaking loss -- gutty win after gutty win. All over the place! Gut punches abound.

All that said, there's a tendency for analysts and bloggers to take on vacuous airs when the subject of a heartbreaker loss comes to play. "This team has no chance of winning the series," they say -- "how could they, after a gut punch like that?" Smart analysts galore cast aspersions to the mental toughness of the team and conflate heightened probabilities with statistical certainty. So, on the inadvertent request of Dr. Jeremy Abramson, I decided to take a bit of time to clear a few things up. For today's playoff question, I'm examining a subject near and dear to the hearts of NBA fans everywhere -- how does a heartbreaker loss affect a series, really?

• • •

DEFINING A HEARTBREAKER, and THE THREE BIG QUESTIONS

This was a bit tough, but I think I finally came to a reasonable conclusion. For my definition of a heartbreaker loss, I'm going with a road game lost by 1-2 points in regulation or any game lost in overtime. The logic here is simple. If the game was lost by 1-2 points in regulation, one single shot -- a three pointer -- could've won them the game. A single additional shot. They were on the road, which means they were a single shot from silencing a hostile crowd. If the game went into overtime, the same is true -- one more shot, one more free throw, one more anything and the game was theirs.

The logic behind excluding three point contests is simple. In a three point game, the best you could reasonably do with a single shot is force overtime. And if you played regulation evenly, overtime is more than likely going to be a 50-50 coin flip either way -- hard to really call that a heartbreaker so much as a bad break. So there you have it. It's a 1-2 point margin or an overtime game. For my data, I used information from Basketball Reference (where else?) and compiled a score of information by hand for all heartbreaker losses from 1993 to 2013. It was something of a massive slog, but I'll share my final dataset with anyone who asks -- let me know if you'd like to look at it.

Now that we've defined our "heartbreaker" losses, let's examine some big-picture questions.

• HOW COMMON ARE THEY?

Not as common as you might think, actually. They've been exceedingly prevalent over the past two years, but that's something of a statistical outlier -- this is the first two year period with more than 20 playoff heartbreakers in the last 20 years. Here's a graph to illustrate the point.

The red bar indicates this year, when we (clearly) have a strong chance at accruing a few more of these types of games before the playoffs conclude. In general, heartbreakers are relatively rare events. They don't happen particularly often, and when they do happen, they tend to have a few games clumped together into a relatively small group of hard-fought series -- for instance, this year's 10 heartbreakers are clumped into seven of the series we've played out so far. In 2006, five of the 14 heartbreakers were concentrated in two of that year's most contested series -- DAL/MIA and DAL/SAS. Et cetera, et cetera.

• DOES THE HEARTBROKEN TEAM ALWAYS LOSE?

No! Not at all, actually. There's a relatively persistent trope that's been running around for a while that a team can't possibly come back from a road heartbreaker. Especially if they're the road team in the series -- if they lack home court advantage, they couldn't possibly win a series where they let a game get away on the road, right? Sort of, but not quite. Here are the raw series win/loss numbers when a team suffers a playoff heartbreaker.

TEAMS THAT HAVE HOME COURT ADVANTAGE: If the team with home court advantage suffers a road heartbreaker, it's hardly much of an ill omen for their chances at all. In the 20 year period surveyed, homecourt teams that suffered road heartbreakers went 37-22 in the series they suffered the heartbreaker in. That's a reasonably good winning percentage (63%), but it's not 100% robust -- for instance, in five cases, the heartbreaker actually ended up being the deciding lever in a series where the homecourt-blessed team outscored the visitors handily over every other game of the series.

TEAMS THAT DON'T HAVE HOME COURT ADVANTAGE: If the team without home court advantage suffers a road heartbreaker, their chances are certainly slimmer... but they definitely aren't extinguished. It's not a death knell, even if things look rough. Teams that start the series on the road are 18-53 in series where they suffer a road heartbreaker, a 25% winning percentage. There's certainly some truth to the idea that a HCA-lacking team that loses a road heartbreaker has missed their best chance at winning the series. But there's also truth to the idea that the road heartbreaker tells more about how evenly matched the series is than it does about the team's chances to win the series. In four of those series losses, the heartbroken team actually managed to outscore the homecourt team over the other non-heartbreak games of the series.

Overall, teams that suffer heartbreakers are 55-75 in their heartbreaker series over the 20 year span examined.

• HOW OFTEN ARE HEARTBREAKERS THE DECIDING GAME?

This was an interesting sub-question I had when I finally got my data together. Out of all these series, how often did the heartbreak loss represent the deciding game of the series? That is to say -- how often would a flip in the heartbreaker have flipped the results of the series? The number was a bit surprising, at least to me. In 24 out of the 130 cases in this dataset, the heartbreaker game represented a game that could've flipped the series. That is to say that the entire series could've been flipped with just a single additional shot or -- in many cases -- a single free throw. Of course, once you looked at the point differential, one starts to wonder why the number wasn't higher. Even though teams that suffer heartbreaker losses were 55-75 in the heartbreaker series, they posted a positive point differential (0.35 PPG) among their series when taken as a whole. That's extremely, extremely close. Closer than I'd expect, especially looking at the numbers regarding road team series losses and the scant number of teams who lost the series but won the point differential outside of that game. To summarize the contents of the last few paragraphs, a short table:

Series Win and Series Loss are pretty self-explanatory. "Flip" implies that the series would've flipped if they'd won their heartbreaker. DIFF/GM gives the point differential for the team, and CHAMP indicates whether the team with the heartbreaker loss won that year's championship. That's right -- 10 of the games in this dataset involved teams that would-be champions losing a road heartbreaker during their run. That's eight of the last twenty champions, listed below:

• 2012: MIA @ BOS, G4 -- Miami loses 93-91 -- in OT -- to give Boston a 2-2 series tie.

• 2011: DAL @ POR, G4 -- Dallas loses 84-82 to give Portland a 2-2 series tie. (The "Brandon Roy" game.)

• 2009: LAL @ UTA, G3 -- Los Angeles loses 88-86. They ended up winning the series 4-1.

• 2005: SAS @ SEA, G3 -- San Antonio loses 92-91, missing one free throw in the final minute that could've tied it and shanking four separate shots -- many wide open. They'd close the series in 6.

• 2003: SAS @ NJN, G4 -- San Antonio loses 77-76, in the finals. The Spurs dominated the Nets for most of the series, but they gave Game 4 away -- they went cold for 2:37 to end the game, scoring nothing from Manu Ginobili's two free throws to Duncan's flush with 6 to play. In the meanwhile, the Spurs missed a bunch of wide-open shots and nearly won the game anyway. They'd win the series in 6 for their second championship.

• 2003: SAS @ PHO, G4 -- San Antonio loses 86-84 to tie the series at two apiece. The Suns actually upset the Spurs in Game one, but the Spurs nearly won the next four games to take the series. Instead, it took six games, with a successful razor-thin road win in game 6 to close it out.

• 2002: LAL @ SAC, G5 -- Los Angeles loses 92-91. It would be their last loss of the season. Welp.

• 1998: CHI @ IND, G4 -- Chicago lost 96-94 to the Reggie Pacers. This series was kind of funny -- Indiana won their three games by a combined total of 7 points, while the Bulls won their four by a total of 36. And, obviously, they won the title.

• 1998: CHI @ IND, G3 -- Chicago lost 107-105. Same series as above.

• 1995: HOU @ UTA, G1 -- Houston lost 100-102, in the opening game of their postseason. They'd win 3 of their next 4 against Utah (including a 140-126 annihilation in game 2) to take the series, and would eventually sweep the finals.

• • •

Overall, the presiding narrative -- the idea that a road heartbreaker is an omen of utter doom -- isn't exactly right. Close, but not quite there. Road teams posting a 25% winning percentage in the aftermath of a road heartbreaker is hardly as bad as it looks on its face, given that you're talking about lesser teams who are essentially giving their opponents a one game handicap. The fact that it's that high is more a testament to what the heartbreaker means to the road-starting team on a macro level -- it means that the gap between the two is hardly insurmountable, and whether the series is long or not, they have a chance to push them. As you can see with this year's mercurial Warriors squad.

And the heartbreaker isn't just suffered by the downtrodden -- eight of the last twenty champions suffered one such heartbreaker loss on their march to the title. Will that continue this year? Certainly possible -- five of the remaining eight playoff teams (Golden State, San Antonio, Memphis, Oklahoma City, and New York) have already suffered heartbreakers, and there are still ample games remaining for the final three holdouts (Miami, Chicago, and Indiana) to join the party. We'll see. If you have any questions regarding this analysis, feel free to comment on this post -- I'll be responding to comments for most of the day.

Stay frosty, folks.

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The Spurs are in trouble.

It's self-evident at this point, but it must be said regardless. The San Antonio Spurs went 35-6 at home in the regular season this year. They nevertheless lost game two of their best-of-seven series against the Golden State Warriors. What's worse is that the Spurs lost the game in embarrassing, befuddling fashion. They missed open shots. They couldn't stop Klay Thompson. Their decision-making down the stretch was a bit confusing, and they stopped playing their brand of basketball despite experiencing naught more than a modicum of defensive resistance to it. They lost faith in their own system and started isolating in an attempt to win the game. That's not how San Antonio plays basketball. Not when they win, anyway.

Worse yet, that was at home -- we haven't even seen what the Oracle is going to look like for Golden State's home games. Which, after last night, are all they need to win if they want to win this series. If the Warriors hold serve at home, the Spurs are done. Which is a rather terrifying thought for any self-respecting Spurs fan, given the furor of their bay area crowd and the tendency for San Antonio's role players to fade a bit in road game situations. Regardless. After two games, we don't really have the slightest clue what's going on in this series. But I'm going to try as hard as I can to explain it anyway.

• • •

FIRST: WHO ARE THESE TEAMS, ON A FLIGHTY METAPHORICAL LEVEL?

The Warriors are easy to place, at least for me. They're the gambler's wayward son.

Look at it this way. There's this town bum -- he's a poor drunkard, long ago wealthy but on something akin to a 17-year cold streak. His once-considerable fortune has been squandered and he lives on the streets, cobbling together pennies to gamble at a local casino every week or so. Loses it all, of course -- that's just his way. He represents the prior-to-2013 Warriors -- the post-TMC crew that's been so unlucky and unfortunate as to boggle the mind and distress the soul. He has a child, a son barely born at the time of his tremendous fortune. As his luck dwindled, his wife left him. Took the kid, too.

Enter 2013 -- the son returns. He lets his father sleep in the hotel, and upon his father's prodding, he decides to enter the casino. Thing is? He's never played a lick of cards before. The kid is a golden boy, a bright kid who nevertheless had never gambled before in his life. He only has a vague recollection of what each poker hand means, and he hasn't yet figured out that a flush is better than a straight, and he's still confused that he lost that hand where he had a two-pair and his friend had 3-of-a-kind. Nevertheless, the kid is crushing it. He's winning hands he shouldn't have played and showing absolutely no fear at the table. Which makes sense, because he isn't sure what he has to fear. Or what anything means at all. The chips keep piling up for him, and the house wonders if he's cheating. But the kid isn't. He's just on all the rolls his father always dreamed of, and given that it's his first time gambling, he has no reason to be tight or concerned -- he doesn't have any human conception of "normal." He's just playing a game he scarcely understands, and playing it incomprehensibly well.

As for the Spurs? They're the sly accountant -- an experienced poker hand who's nevertheless underwater at the table and completely at a loss. The accountant considers himself a good judge of talent, of tells, of hand-quality -- all that said, he has no idea how to handicap this new kid. He's as confident with a junk hand as he is with a good one. He's destroying his betters on hands the betters have never lost with -- Christ, did that kid REALLY just play a 4-of-a-kind to beat my ace-10 full house? Did that seriously just happen? Hell -- the kid had just bust out an old Denver businessman. The businessman had been having the night of his life in the casinos, he was up some ungodly sum before he chose to sit down at the kid's table. The accountant had played with the businessman earlier that night -- he was good. Very good. And when the kid bust the businessman out, the accountant found himself a bit happy -- he knew he'd be at that table later, and the businessman was on such a roll that it was hard to imagine he'd be an easy out.

But he never quite saw that kid coming. Apparently, nobody did.

• • •

SECOND: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE FAVORITES?

The time for illustrative metaphors is over -- the time for a frank examination of what the Spurs are doing wrong and the Warriors are doing right is now. And to these eyes, the problem is pretty simple. The Warriors are making bad shots and the Spurs are missing good shots. I don't mean that to be a backhanded compliment or an insult, either -- the Warriors are such a terrifying team to face for that exact reason. The Spurs defense is built around the concept of making the opposing team's shots as difficult as possible. Try to goad the opposing team into taking the worst shots on the table, then simply hope they miss them. The Warriors are funny, in that they actually can make those shots.

Now, of course, that poses the question -- SHOULD they be taking those shots? No. Obviously not. They try to take easier shots, they screen off Curry and Thompson and they run decent plays to open up their guys. But if faced with a situation where they're being goaded into taking a lot of bad shots, they're not going to simply fall apart like a wobbly Jenga board, like the Lakers or the Nets or the Clippers. They're going to make more of them than the opposing team expects. The key to defending Golden State -- at least when they're as hot as they've been this postseason -- doesn't really exist. As long as they're in even a semblance of rhythm, the shot is at least remotely malleable to their will.__ You simply need to hope that Curry and Thompson stop making terrible shots, like pull-up threes over a stout defender or off-balance one-legged three pointers with a hand in their face. And they might, sure. But they aren't incapable of making those shots like a Steve Blake or a Gerald Wallace. In fact, nobody on the Warriors is strictly incapable of making shots -- there's nobody to funnel the ball to, no offensive sieve to try and redirect their action to. You just need to make their shots more difficult and hope they stop making them. Against the Nuggets, they didn't. Against the Spurs, with the shots even harder than they were in the Denver series, they still aren't.

As for the Spurs offense, this is an important point -- the Spurs are missing a lot of wide-open shots. I counted eight wide-open threes that the Spurs completely clanked last night, including five totally open corner threes from Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. Both of them usually make that shot. Missing that many wide open threes is absurd, and a relatively unexpected wrinkle going into this series. Additionally, the Spurs were missing a lot of open at-rim layups -- Duncan missed a particularly glaring one where he sealed off Bogut and had several seconds of prep time early in the game. Parker missed a point blank nearly-uncontested layup in the last two minutes. So did Danny Green. Andrew Bogut is a wonderful defensive presence and he affected many shots. But the Spurs weren't even making the shots they created when they ran their offense, which may partly explain why most of the Spurs started going away from their offense and isolating. Especially Manu and Gary Neal, who both played like putzes for most of last night's contest. Just befuddling. If the Spurs continue to miss that many open shots over the remainder of the series, they'll lose handily.

• • •

THIRD: HOW DO YOU ADJUST?

There are two adjustments I think each team needs to make if they intend to win this series.

If you're San Antonio, you need to...

• STOP PLAYING GARY NEAL. This isn't meant to be impugning Gary's spirit. And he's provided a decent shot or two over the course of the series. But my GOD, man -- this is not the series for Gary. When he's on the court facing off against Klay Thompson or Stephen Curry, he's giving them open looks. The Warriors aren't always capitalizing, but that's really not something the Spurs can bet on going forward. If the Warriors stop making impossibly well-contested shots, they'll probably try taking a few slightly more open ones. Combine that with the fact that Neal is bogging down San Antonio's offense (I counted two separate fourth quarter possessions in Game #2 where Neal dribbled, isolated, and refused to pass the ball out to Parker, Duncan, or any other player on the Spurs despite having a game within 8 points and a chance to make some ground. He doesn't run the offense. He needs to get off the floor.)

• MODIFIED SMALLBALL -- CALL IT... QUICKBALL? This may seem to run counter to adjustment #1, since Pop tends to put Gary out in those sort of 3-guard lineups with Manu and Tony. But I think Nando De Colo or Tracy McGrady are both going to be superior to Gary defensively given their size and their improved passing abilities, and that's worth something. The Spurs have come back in both games when they've played small and started loosening up. By trying out more Kawhi-at-the-four lineups with Duncan at center and three guards darting from lane to lane, the Spurs can speed up their offense and leave the Warriors fewer opportunities to switch the Spurs into a bad assignment where a plodding big man can't get back to the three point line. The quicker the lineup, the better this works. With their general shot release as quick as it is, the Spurs need to play lineups that can recover fast enough. So far, smallball works best for this. Call it quickball.

If you're Golden State, you need to...

• RUN YOUR OFFENSE THE ENTIRE GAME. At the moment, the most disturbing thing for the Spurs has to be that the Warriors have essentially seen fit to let the Spurs back into both the games we've played so far in the series. If the Warriors simply ran their fast paced, fluid offense over the full 48 minutes, the Spurs probably lose both these games by double digits. At home. To a six-seed. Welp. When up by a large lead, the Warriors have an odd tendency to start running the clock with about 12 minutes left in the game. That's now how they play, and it leads to a god-awful out-of-rhythm shot just about every time. If they actually ran their offense in the fourth quarter, they put both of these games away far earlier.

• CONTEST SAN ANTONIO'S OPEN SHOTS. You know how I mentioned that the Spurs missed a ton of open shots? Well, the fact that they got those shots is something of a problem -- the Spurs are a top-10 offense that's punched below its weight this season, with the present ceiling of "best in the league" as they demonstrated last season. If that offense comes to play when the series moves to Oakland, every open shot they give up is going to hurt. A lot. Jackson and the Warriors need to look at the tape and figure out how exactly their defense keeps breaking down and cut that out. They've gotten lucky with the Spurs missing so many shots. It may happen again that the Spurs simply miss open shots, but it's much more likely that the Warriors make their adjustments and eliminate the open shots in the first place.

And if you're a fan of either team? Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

(If your power doesn't go out.)

Continue reading

Hey, folks. Aaron McGuire here. Are you having a good morning? If you're a fan of the San Antonio Spurs, you might be. Of course, there are several serious analytic reasons for last night's game to worry Spurs fans. The Warriors brazenly outplayed the Spurs over the first 44 minutes of the game, and it took a sudden miracle confluence of San Antonio's elite defense of this season, elite offense of last season, and some completely incredible Warriors follies to lose the game. This isn't going to be a series the Warriors are simply content with lying down and losing. The Spurs are going to have to wrest every win out of Golden State's cold, dead hands to get to the conference finals. Because a team this good and a team this hot simply isn't going to bow out quietly.

All that said, I find myself uniquely unqualified to write about this game. Why? Because my power went out with 1:18 remaining in regulation. What's more, IT DIDN'T COME BACK UNTIL HALF AN HOUR AFTER THE GAME HAD FINISHED. For a Spurs devotee watching his first Spurs game in HD (...no, I had never seen a Spurs game in HD before tonight), that was a unique experience. It was a unique experience that will merit several furious calls to my power company and the possible purchase of a backup generator. But that's besides the point. Given that my phone had only 2% battery life at the time my power went out (and boy, did I time that BEAUTIFULLY!), I had to do some crazy stuff to finish watching the game. I felt this made a reasonably compelling post. Here's what happened.

• • •

As Carl Landry entered the game for Richard Jefferson out of a time-out, I was writing a tweet.

spurs are still down 3 to a team starring curry with duncan in the locker room. so, uh, they lose. but this gutty fourth is solid, and HEY WHERE DID MY POWER GO

Due to the fact that my power being cut also managed to cut my internet, the tweet never actually got sent. But that was about how sudden it was. I was sitting at the edge of my couch with bated breath, tik-typing tweets into my work laptop with some work in a side tab. Seconds later, the lights all flickered and my TV made its "turning off" noise. I could hear my HVAC power down. I stared blankly into the darkness.

"... what."

So, fun fact. I moved into this new place about a week ago. I've had some nasty combination of strep throat and a crummy flu over the past week, so virtually nothing is unpacked. That includes the veritable menagerie of flashlights my father has passed down to me over the years. Seriously. Every possible moment my father could've given me a flashlight in the past 5 years, he's delivered. The only care package I ever received in college was a box with two flashlights and some gum in it. I have gotten flashlights for my birthday, for Hannukah, for Christmas, for "visiting", and for good measure. My father's love for giving me flashlights has never made any sense to me, but suddenly, it made my father seem like a literal genius.

Except for the fact that, again, I had unpacked none of them. Theoretically, I own enough flashlights that every single room of my new place can have a flashlight or two in easily-accessible locations. Unfortunately, every single flashlight -- EVERY SINGLE ONE -- was packed in a box. And my keys (which, hilariously, have two flashlights on them) were upstairs somewhere. I end up wandering around and tripping over two boxes. The first one was entirely filled with clothes, but the second one had exactly what I was looking for -- an enormous maglite that could kill a man without regret. Flashlight in hand, I headed for the circuit breaker.

0:59 REMAINING IN REGULATION: Boris Diaw makes 2/2 FTs. 104-103, GSW.

No problems there. But that did clear up a few things. Everything that was on -- my FIOS backup power and (weirdly enough) my irrigation controls -- were running on backup battery power. Nothing else had power. Entire place was out. I sat on my couch to look at my phone, realizing -- again -- that my phone only had 2% battery life. If this game went to overtime, I was screwed. I headed outside, flashlight in hand and my phone's AOL Instant Messenger client keyed to channel Dewey.

0:20 REMAINING IN REGULATION: Danny Green makes 25-foot 3-point field goal. 106-106.

Walking around my block, I found out three pretty hilarious things.

1. The power was out for everyone on my side of the block.
2. The power was NOT out for ANYONE on the other side of the block.
3. Thunderstorm conditions were nigh, which probably merited more clothing than pajama pants and a t-shirt.

Alright. Last one wasn't that hilarious. Still. I didn't know anyone on the block, and just about every house looked like their residents had gone to sleep. It WAS after midnight, after all. My phone was down to 1% power before I remembered the retrospectively obvious fact that I had a charger in my car. I knew what to do. I got in the car, plugged in my phone, and considered my options. I could either call the power company for what would inevitably be a fruitless call, or I could search for the game on the radio and follow along on twitter. My friend Mike texted me several possible radio stations -- none had the game, although I found a really intense mariachi station that I put on in lieu of game audio. I was down to the final option.

That's right, everyone: it was time for an Alex Dewey play by play.

• • •

[12:29] Aaron McGuire: dewey my power is still out i need a play by play

[12:29] Aaron McGuire: dewey please

[12:30] Alex Dewey: r u ready

[12:30] Aaron McGuire: yes

[12:30] Alex Dewey: heeere we go

[12:30] Alex Dewey: once upon a time not long ago

[12:31] Alex Dewey: when people wore adidas and lived life slow

[12:31] Aaron McGuire: dewey i will murder

[12:31] Alex Dewey: lol ok just a sec

[12:31] Alex Dewey: manu got called trying to strip bogut

[12:31] Alex Dewey: spurs get the board down three this is OT we run this

[12:31] Alex Dewey: manu runs the break slows it down throws around to green to manu to tony to manu to manu to manu

[12:32] Aaron McGuire: dewey are you stuck

[12:32] Alex Dewey: drobbin it droppin it the ball so hot it's in the corner BORIS THREEAW BORIS THREEAW

[12:32] Aaron McGuire: DESSERT FOR DINNER

[12:32] Alex Dewey: tie game 2:21 to go oh lord jack at the top dribble drobble dribble dropple

[12:32] Alex Dewey: TURNOVER TURNOVER THE BALL IS AN APPLE TURNOVER

[12:32] Alex Dewey: SPURS GO IN TRANSITION LENSES

[12:32] Alex Dewey: TWO POINT LEAD SPURS LEAD SPURS LEAD

[12:32] Aaron McGuire: I AM BECOME STEPH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS

[12:32] Alex Dewey: funny you should say that because steph just missed a shot spurs get the board

[12:32] Aaron McGuire: DESTROYER... OF RIMS?

[12:32] Alex Dewey: only if they spinnin ok so tony goes of a boris screen then k misses a 22 footer oh geez

[12:32] Alex Dewey: NVM MANU BOARDS MANU BOA--manu makes a bad pass ok then steph makes a layup oh god

[12:32] Aaron McGuire: o no tie game

[12:32] Alex Dewey: kawhi form the post he is the entire post

[12:32] Alex Dewey: spurs up two

[12:33] Alex Dewey: how am i typing this quickly

[12:33] Aaron McGuire: because i am telepathically lending you my 110 wpm typing ability please give it back later

[12:33] Alex Dewey: i refuse this is cool no wonder you were a transcriptionist

[12:34] Aaron McGuire: this game is insane

[12:34] Alex Dewey: hot damn warriors this is a crazy game. rj's finest moment. r j u bly?

[12:34] Aaron McGuire: it's the rjubilee for sure

[12:35] Alex Dewey: anyway it's tied with 20 seconds left, spurs running some vanilla stuff, warriors take foul to give w/ 6 secs left

[12:35] Alex Dewey: manu misses a three it's 2OT here in the ATT center

[12:35] Aaron McGuire: christ no not another OT of this i need my power back

[12:35] Alex Dewey: and by ATT center i mean alex-teaches-typing center by which i mean this chat window

[12:36] Aaron McGuire: nice

At this point, the mariachi music -- which I inexplicably never turned off -- gets especially intense for some reason.

[12:40] Aaron McGuire: ok desperately need an update what's going down son

[12:41] Alex Dewey: SEVEN TIMES OUT OF TEN WE LISTEN TO OUR MUSIC AT NIGHT

[12:41] Alex Dewey: THE WORD MARAUD MEANS TO LOOT

[12:41] Alex Dewey: WE MARAUD... FOR EARS.

[12:42] Aaron McGuire: alex what in the everloving christ does that mean

[12:46] Alex Dewey: SEVEN TIMES OUT OF TEN WE LISTEN TO OUR MUSIC AT NIGHT

[12:46] Aaron McGuire: alex these lyrics are the worst play by play in recorded human history

[12:46] Alex Dewey: THUS SPAWNING THE TITLE OF THIS PROGRAM

[12:46] Alex Dewey: THE WORD MARAUD MEANS TO LOOT

[12:46] Alex Dewey: IN SUCH A CASE THAT WE MARAUD FOR EARS THAT IS THIS CASE WE LOOT

[12:46] Aaron McGuire: alex you are killing me

[12:46] Alex Dewey: game is still tied after 1:16 of 2OT lol

[12:47] Alex Dewey: tony with a vicious spin move cuts the lead to one

[12:47] Aaron McGuire: wait did the warriors take a lead what

[12:47] Alex Dewey: shush chile

[12:47] Aaron McGuire: i am not chile

[12:47] Alex Dewey: you are now

[12:47] Alex Dewey: anyway 3:11 curry on top dogg is 2 assists and 2 boards short of a tripdub

[12:47] Alex Dewey: haha a dub w/ a tripdub that's classic

[12:47] Alex Dewey: anyway curry makes the scoop across court to the corner from opp wing

[12:48] Alex Dewey: everybody loves draymond takes it right and gets two FTs. cans both.

[12:48] Alex Dewey: dubs by 3, parker hits a j like he's a rasta or somethin

[12:48] Alex Dewey: so dubs by 1 bc the j was a two point j not a 3 point j if you are counting

[12:49] Aaron McGuire: i hope the scorekeeper is

[12:49] Alex Dewey: rj is so close and yet so far, but he may be coming into the game, or perhaps he is not

[12:49] Aaron McGuire: you are in love with rj and it is terrifying

[12:49] Alex Dewey: whet not your soul

[12:49] Aaron McGuire: same

[12:49] Alex Dewey: anyway DIAW JUMPER SPURS LEAD

[12:49] Aaron McGuire: SAME

[12:49] Alex Dewey: GREEN POKES AWAY A TURNOVER PARKER HITS FROM MIDPOST OH GOD

[12:50] Aaron McGuire: YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

[12:50] Alex Dewey: curry takes it to the rim danny green blocks the HELL out of it

[12:51] Aaron McGuire: dangreen my brothers

[12:52] Alex Dewey: jack makes one, misses another -- spurs up two, kawhi screen, pass to kawhi, reverse to green

[12:52] Alex Dewey: AND DANNY GREEN CANS A TRIPLE SPURS BY FIVE

[12:53] Aaron McGuire: DANGREEN MY BROTHERS

[12:53] Alex Dewey: a minute left in the game, spurs by five, curry drives and misses but boris fouls him

[12:53] Aaron McGuire: automatic two pts

[12:54] Alex Dewey: you're correct he made both, parker to manu, top of the k--what?!??

[12:54] Aaron McGuire: ???

[12:54] Alex Dewey: manu just shot a TERRIBLe three. the worst three. what was that.

[12:54] Aaron McGuire: for some reason capitalizing everything but the e in terrible makes the word a lot more impactful

[12:55] Alex Dewey: curry gets the floater, easy. spurs by 1. parker slows it down... misses the shot.

[12:55] Alex Dewey: warriors w/ the ball down 1, 9 secs to go

[12:55] Aaron McGuire: oh god that's enough time they have curry

[12:55] Alex Dewey: crap you're right bazemore gets a layup spurs let the dubs get out in transition

[12:55] Alex Dewey: warriors by 1, 4 secs left, spurs timeout...

[12:56] Aaron McGuire: at least the guys fought back. didn't let this be an embarrassing one.

[12:56] Alex Dewey: yeah

[12:56] Aaron McGuire: who's in for this last possession?

[12:57] Alex Dewey: kawhi has the inbounds, green/diaw/manu/parker are in the game

[12:57] Alex Dewey: warriors have jack, curry, bazemore, garnes

[12:57] Alex Dewey: additionally they have rj defending the inbounds

[12:57] Aaron McGuire: so you're saying there's still a chance

[12:58] Alex Dewey: lol

[12:58] Alex Dewey: warriors use their foul to give, spurs do another timeout

[12:58] Alex Dewey: setting up a play on the other side of the floor

[12:58] Alex Dewey: inbounds to manuuffjkklgweh

[12:58] Aaron McGuire: ???

[12:59] Alex Dewey: D BREADOWN 3MANU##333

[12:59] Aaron McGuire: WHAT?!?!?

[12:59] Alex Dewey: 3MANU

[12:59] Alex Dewey: 3

[12:59] Alex Dewey: MANU333

[12:59] Alex Dewey: MANU WING 3

[12:59] Alex Dewey: MANU OPEN THREE WING FROM WHENCE IT CAME

[12:59] Aaron McGuire: wgjaweglkjajfkjwfkljs;dguiwgwl;efdmlqw [Ed. Note: This was shockingly difficult to type on a phone.]

[12:59] Alex Dewey: SPURS BY 2 w/ 1.2 SECONDS LEFT IN THE GAME

[12:59] Alex Dewey: but

[12:59] Aaron McGuire: they have curry

[12:59] Alex Dewey: reminder the warriors have stephen curry

[12:59] Aaron McGuire: we are different flavors of the exact same person and it is terrifying dewey

[12:59] Alex Dewey: heh duncan in the game, jack to inbound

[1:00] Alex Dewey: SEVEN TIMES OUT OF TEN WE LISTEN TO OUR MUSIC AT NIGHT

[1:00] Alex Dewey: THE WORD MARAUD MEANS TO LOOT

[1:00] Alex Dewey: WE MARAUD... FOR EARS.

[1:01] Aaron McGuire: WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS TO ME ALEX

[1:01] Alex Dewey: SEVEN TIMES OUT OF TEN WE LISTEN TO OUR MUSIC AT NIGHT

[1:02] Alex Dewey: anyway 1.2 seconds left

[1:02] Alex Dewey: RJ WILL INBOUND DUNCAN IS GUARDING HIM THIS IS THE GREATEST MOMENT OF THE PLAYOFFS

[1:02] Alex Dewey: JACK MISSED DEWEY DEFEATS RJ SPURS WIN

[1:03] Aaron McGuire: HOW DID THE SPURS WIN THAT

[1:03] Alex Dewey: well just re-read this play by play log it'll jog your memory probably

[1:03] Aaron McGuire: THIS IS MY ENTIRE MEMORY I HAVE NO POWER

[1:03] Alex Dewey: oh, i thought you were joking, is your power seriously out?

[1:03] Aaron McGuire: YES

[1:04] Alex Dewey: seven times out of ten you listen to my play-by-play at night

[1:04] Aaron McGuire: dewey i swear to god i will punch you

• • •

EPILOGUE: After getting out of my car, brushing my teeth in total darkness, wrapping myself in covers, and closing my eyes... the power came back on. I'm not kidding. Minutes after I closed my eyes.

Continue reading

Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. Sometimes Friday, like today. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. Today's short pieces are as follows.

• DEN/GSW: Should Karl Go? (by Aaron McGuire)
• OKC/HOU: The Thunder Will Beat The Rockets (by Alex Dewey)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

DEN/GSW: Should Karl Go?
Aaron McGuire

Most people slept on it a bit, but Scott Brooks had a really good playoff performance last year. In the first round, he arguably outcoached -- even relative to his team's hilarious talent advantage -- Rick Carlisle as his Thunder swept the Mavericks. He had a bit of a disappointing second round, with L.A. being essentially "in" 3 out of the 5 game of the series despite having a markedly inferior team due partly to Brooks' poor adjustments and generally odd strategies. But then... THEN, things got real. He proceeded to completely outcoach Gregg Popovich over the course of a six game series, making excellent adjustments and memorably forcing San Antonio to take a taste of its own medicine. Ball movement, ball pressure, expert closeouts, et cetera. He got his team to play an entirely different way in the Western Conference Finals. That's coaching, and he aced what essentially amounted to a four game PhD thesis to beat Gregg Popovich into the ground. He was riding a high of good-will heading into the finals, having put together his best string of coaching performances yet.

... only to fall flat on his face and completely irrevocably bungle a winnable finals series. He played Perkins too much. He played Fisher too much. He didn't put Westbrook or Durant in a position to succeed. His offense completely lacked the creativity displayed in the Western Conference Finals and his defense was easily schemed. To an equal and opposite extent to which the first few rounds gave his backers hope, the Finals gave his critics ammunition. "You need a better coach, Sam Presti. You need to stop relying on Scott Brooks to become something he isn't. You need a coach that puts his players in a position to succeed, not a coach that puts his players in a position to fail embarrassingly when the chips are down." Et cetera, et cetera. And the drumbeat of voices calling for a change in command grew ever-louder, and the cavalcade of mockery that fell when Presti resigned Brooks to a new three-year deal was all-encompassing.

This brings me to my actual subject of this particular post -- George Karl, and where his fate should stand in the aftermath of a series that saw a generally-more-talented Denver team lose to the upstart Golden State Warriors. Karl made several high profile mistakes in this series. Like Brooks in the finals, he seemed to be the only man in the room (with the possible additional exception of Andre Miller) who didn't realize that putting the wizened Andre Miller on Stephen Curry made Curry's threes about as easy to convert as layups. Like Brooks, his high-regarded regular season offense stalled in their series loss, although Brooks' offense stalled against one of the better defensive teams in the league, whereas Karl's offense stalled against a permissive unit that not a soul would confuse with a merry Memphis grindhouse throwback. The thing that I keep coming back to, though? With both Karl and Brooks?

Align the timing differently, and both coaches would be praised to high heavens. For instance, imagine if the Spurs had pulled out game five, lost game six, then won a narrow contest in game seven. Imagine of Scott Brooks' season had ended in the Western Conference Finals. Would anyone watching have anything other than positive-regard for the man? His extension wouldn't just be a no brainer, it'd be a must -- this is a man who very nearly outcoached the greatest coach in the game today, after all! If the disappointment against Miami doesn't happen, Brooks is scot-free. And he's free to continue being -- generally -- a so-so to poor coach for a team that does legitimately need a better tactician. All because of a single series.

As for the Nuggets, it's worth noting that they finished just one game out of second place in the West -- if they'd won their matchup against the Spurs in the late season, San Antonio faces the Warriors in the first round and the Nuggets face the Lakers. Given L.A.'s injury issues and general inability to cover a faster team, it's hard to imagine a world where this Denver team doesn't win in 5-6 games -- perhaps they even sweep it. And if the Nuggets swept the first round, every single Karl critic calling for his head gets silenced -- it doesn't much matter what they do in the second round against the SAS/GSW winner, it "proves" Karl's system can succeed in the playoffs.

Net and net? My point is thus. A single series is a__ completely terrible__ barometer for a coach. You have to assess a coach by his entire career, his creativity, and his ability to react to trouble in his roster on a wholescale level. George Karl has shown that he deserves the benefit of the doubt for all these things -- Scott Brooks has shown the opposite. Having obscenely high visions for Brooks after last year's WCF was silly. He isn't that kind of coach, even if Presti wishes he would be. And the people watching know that (especially with his flaws being hammered home in this year's first round.) Conversely, making rash judgments about Karl thanks to one terrible series is absurd. He makes the team better, and a few poor decisions that didn't pan out don't make him useless.

• • •

OKC/HOU: The Thunder Will Beat The Rockets
Alex Dewey

It's ridiculous to suggest the Rockets have a greater-than-50% chance of doing something that literally no one has ever done. There's no way the Rockets have a greater than 50% chance of winning first home at Toyota and then winning a Game 7 on the road. That's insane. And it's not true. It's insulting to the Thunder's great season to suggest that losing 2 games in a row is more probable than winning 1 of the two. It's not true, and it's insulting.

But... is there something a little less insulting? Because Houston's chance of pulling off an upset that would make the world quake with chaos is surely higher than zero. In conditional probability, gamblers and actuaries alike have to adjust our odds constantly to the world-at-large surprising us. It's ridiculous to suggest a team down 0-3 has a really solid chance of winning four in a row, short, say, of the 3-0 team trading LeBron James with the 0-3 team for present-day Muggsy Bogues, who must play every minute at every game, at center, before Game 4. Or the 3-0 team having to play literally 5v4 against the 0-3 team.

That would probably do it.

But there's something a little less absurd about the feat if you condition on what has happened since. Even without the Westbrook injury, which hangs in the air of every attempt to analyze this series.

Let's look at the present moment: the Rockets have won two straight, one at home, one on the road. Just like they have to in order to win the series. So they've done exactly what they will need to do already. They just have to repeat the feat. And, what's more, it looked remotely sustainable. The Thunder crowd couldn't rile up their dispirited team. The Rockets fed off of the crowd both at home and on the road. Omer Asik hit some free throws. Harden has struggled, and the Rockets have actually picked up the slack. The Thunder's offense seems eerily similar to the Lakers' attack against the Spurs in the other bracket of the West; 1-4-5 because it's the only offense they can run. (Granted, the Lakers had worse and fewer shooters, and Durant is a transformational offensive player. They aren't missing their best stopper Thabo Sefolosha, and Derek Fisher is much more valuable than Antawn Jamison in any game that matters at this point, which is pretty strange to type. Kevin Martin needs one excellent game to completely change the texture of this series, and by "completely change the texture of" I mean "win handily")

But the Rockets just look better, for what it's worth. It's not a 50% chance to win both games for the Rockets, but couldn't you make the case that it's pretty close to (or even better than) a coin flip for the Rockets in either game, individually? I think the Rockets are a better team than the Thunder right now, without any sort of irony. James Harden has not been outplaying Kevin Durant in this series, even at Harden's best. KD is playing at a transformational level, at least in the sense that he is almost singlehandedly the Thunder's offense (with an assist by Ibaka), and it's somehow not the worst offense in the history of the league, even though the Rockets are hurting him at the rim and from 3, he's making his bones at the line, and he's not exactly flopping to get there. A couple rip throughs and exaggerations a game don't explain 33.6 points, put it that way.

But Ibaka and Durant against Asik at the rim? So far I'd say (considering their relative importance) Asik has got their number, at least at the rim, at least when the Rockets don't need a secondary rim defender to slide over. Chandler Parsons, a quick and crafty scorer, against the pump-faking Ibaka and the slow-footed Perkins? That's almost unfair. Francisco Garcia has been checking Durant admirably, and not just in the "you tried hard, son." sense. Kevin McHale is having his guys play his and their game, and Scott Brooks and the Thunder look lost in the wake of Westbrook, in terms of offense obviously, in terms of defense subtly, but most of all in terms of energy. Reggie Jackson and Derek Fisher may have their skills (and obviously, for all his flaws no one can sleep on Fisher), but neither is deadly or especially menacing in any position on a basketball court. They just get open, and sometimes they hit it. And never having a deadly guard has a subtle price for the Thunder: The Rockets can afford to rest their attention and minds and bodies a bit when they aren't on offense. This allows them to play more frenetically on offense, it allows them to play a much more cerebral style in passing lanes. And it allows Omer Asik to have an extra full step that is all such a brilliant defender needs to get all the space he needs to be a deadly shot-blocker and contester. Asik doesn't need to step up on offense at this point, and neither does Garcia. And so the Rockets can essentially commit all their energy to precisely their best efforts. That's the real price of the matchup -- nobody on the Thunder can play his game, and nobody on the Rockets can fail to play his game.

Here's a thought experiment. Even if the Thunder would probably win 53 games without Westbrook and the Rockets would still win 45? I'm starting to think that the slack that Westbrook took up is potentially as valuable as the buckets that KD picks up, and those 8 games of difference are more a product of talent and experience rather than of sustainable playoff production. Westbrook takes shots with abandon, and yes, it's a frustrating prodigality, but the missing point here is that Westbrook only wastes possessions after creating them with abandon. The Thunder's futile attempts to pick up the slack for Westbrook suddenly makes him seem like the most irreplaceable player in the league, an ironic vindication of the Harden trade. If not a bit depressing for Thunder fans.

To put the most rudimentary numbers to the situation: When teams are evenly matched on a neutral court, it's a 50-50 battle. Say it's 60-40 for the home team, again, when the teams are evenly matched. So call it 24% for the Rockets, round up to 25%. So no, it's not 50% that they win both games. But, gosh, a couple coin flips? Doesn't that sound just about right?

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Hey, all. Aaron here. Both Alex and I have an enormous wealth of statistical expertise on our side -- I've got a degree in statistical science and work as a professional statistician in the banking industry, he has a degree in salamander geography and used a calculator once. Given this, as the 2013 Playoffs soldier on, we're planning to occasionally tackle statistical quirks and curiosities we find interesting or elucidating. Answer the questions that we forgot to ask in the first place. Et cetera, et cetera. Today's topic: Denver's mountain air. Or, more accurately, the diminishing returns thereof.

Entering the playoffs, things looked pretty simple for any garden variety prognosticator. Chalk looked poised to reign -- none of the one-through-three seeds in either conference looked even remotely prime for an upset. Teams had either finished the season strong (DEN), faced opponents that were so depressingly injured that they could solve their late-season struggles (SAS), or were simply in a class completely beyond their opponent (MIA). It just didn't look like there were going to be any upsets on the top-line -- if anything, perhaps there'd be an upset in the 4/5 spot, but those are scarcely upsets at all. Chalk, chalk, chalk. Chalk everywhere.

"Well..."

As we stand, the Warriors are on the verge of a monumental upset. Don't sell this Nuggets team short -- they won 57 games, posted a home efficiency differential that makes lambs bleat, and feature a wealth of talent with an excellent play-calling coach. The Warriors limped into the playoffs with a late season slide that took them from a contender for HCA to the verge of the eight seed -- for a short period of time, it actually looked like they were a threat to miss the playoffs. During the 2013 calendar year, the Warriors posted a regular season record of 26-25, just ONE game above 0.500 -- the Nuggets were 40-10. So you must excuse me if I'm hammering the point home a bit: this Nuggets team is a good team, and what the Warriors are doing is reasonably surprising (even if I wrote several good -- and strangely prescient -- reasons why the Warriors had a good shot at the upset in the Gothic Ginobili series preview).

One of the few things we thought we knew going into the playoffs was this: the Warriors couldn't possibly beat the Nuggets at home. That was part of why many smart analysts chose the Nuggets in 5 -- even if the Warriors match up reasonably well with the Nuggets, there was theoretically no threat of Denver dropping any of their home games in the first round. Simply impossible. The Nuggets were 38-3 at home this season. Entering their first round series, they'd won 23 straight home games. Of course, that ended up being a somewhat silly worry -- the Nuggets were a few errant calls and an Andre Miller explosion away from losing game 1, and they got thoroughly embarrassed in a game two blowout that wasn't as close as the 131-117 score made it seem. Down 3-1 with their backs against the wall, it's tough to figure out how to handicap these Nuggets. They WERE unbeatable at home -- are they, still? Or was the appearance of infallibility bunk to begin with? In our first installment of our stat-based playoff feature, I'll examine that question.

• • •

To start out, here's a bit of the "how" behind my examination. We could simply look at win-loss records to see if the Nuggets have lived up to expectations in the playoffs. That's sort of silly, though, because we have a wealth of other information. To try and take into account the severity of the effect and the true measure of Denver's home performances, we'll be looking at Denver's margin of victory in each series since the first round expanded to 4 games in 2003 -- that's 12 series results in 10 playoff appearances by Denver, so we'll have ample room to make a few observations. For each series played, I've compiled the following statistics:

• The basic stats -- Denver's seed in that year's playoffs as well as their W/L record.

• SRS -- Basketball Reference's "SRS" rating for both Denver and their opponent in the given playoff round. SRS is useful for this exercise because it's a pace-adjusted rating measured at a baseline of zero -- a team with an SRS of 7 is 7 points better than average, whereas a team with an SRS of -7 is 7 points worse than average. This means that you can create neutral court expectations with SRS -- that is, a team with an SRS of 2 versus a team with an SRS of -2 would be expected to win a neutral-court matchup between those two teams by four points. If they win by more, they've overachieved. If they win by less, they've underacheived.

• Playoff & Regular Season Home Stats -- how Denver performed at home during that year's playoffs and that year's regular season. Includes playoff W/L as well as the differential in those wins and losses. Same with the regular season. Nice side-by-side look.

• Home Expectations -- Finally, the crux of the analysis lies here. Very simple calculations, because in this case, simplicity lends itself to cleaner analysis. For Denver's "predicted" Home Court advantage, I assume that their home schedule "evened out" in any given season. That is, that their overall home court differential reflects Denver's performance against an average team at home. Then I use the difference in SRS ratings between Denver and their opponent to either add to or subtract from that predicted differential. If they're better than their opponent in SRS, that adds to their predicted home margin. If they're worse than their opponent in SRS, that subtracts from it. Then I simply show the actual playoff home differential minus the predicted home differential. In essence, that gives you a one number view as to whether Denver lived up to expectations, surpassed them, or underwhelmed in any given playoff season. Red indicates an under-performance, green indicates an over-performance, gray indicates too-close-to-call (remember, small sample size means large margin of error -- I rounded to five for this one.)

That's the rundown. Now here's your table.

A few observations to guide you through, here.

First, it's worth pointing out the obvious -- Denver has been astonishingly good at home. Over the past 10 seasons, the Nuggets have gone 3oo-102 at home during the regular season and 291-275 on the road. That's a heck of a split, and I'm reasonably sure that's the largest in the league. They've beaten teams by an average of 7.4 points per game on their home floor over, once again, the past 10 years. There's no low sample size at play in that part. That's a huge sample. They just dominate at home, period. Regular season teams have no remedy for Denver whatsoever.

Second, it's also worth pointing out the again-somewhat-obvious -- Denver isn't nearly as good at home in the playoffs. They're 15-14 at home in the playoffs over that span, and they posted an outright negative point differential at home in 6 of those 12 series outlined above. On average, they've outscored opponents by 3 points over the 29 home games in this study. Given their respective average ratings compared to their opponents and their regular season performance, Denver would be expected to outscore opponents by 6 points per game in those 29 home games. That means that the Denver Nuggets have on the whole underachieved in their playoff home games in the past decade, occasionally by large margins. (In fact, if you take out their outlier series against a wounded Hornets team in 2009, they've underachieved by an average of FIVE points per game below expectations.) Given the data, we can state with relative confidence that Denver simply isn't the same home team in the playoffs that they are during the regular season.

Something's different. But what?

• • •

I've got a few theories. None are airtight, but there's probably a grain of truth to each of them.

• THEORY #1: The atmospheric boon of the regular season is the bane of the postseason. I used to live in the Southwest. Someday, I plan to live there again. The atmosphere is invigorating, and the hiking is sincerely beautiful. Whenever I visit home for a long period of time, I undergo a day or two of calibration before I go on any hikes or big projects. Because it takes a little while to re-acclimate myself to the air and the weather. I have a suspicion that the same is true for an NBA team. The Nuggets have all season to acclimate themselves to the invigorating mountain air of the Denver expanse. In the regular season, though, most NBA teams have one to two days to do that at the very most. In the playoffs? They have significantly more time. As an example... before their game two blowout, the Warriors were in Denver for six straight days. I think they -- and many others over the years -- simply got themselves acclimated to the Denver air. And they nullified the usual Denver advantage.

• THEORY #2: Pace of play bears some responsibility. Over the last decade, the Nuggets have had a number of different teams. But they all seem to exhibit a similar general theme. They rely more on transition points and athletic brilliance than a methodical half-court game -- on both ends of the court! Most of the teams the Nuggets have played in the past decade have had the ability to play slug-it-out halfcourt grinds, slowing Denver to a halt and keeping fastbreak opportunities to a minimum. This obviously applies to their early-aughts playoff games against the grindhouse Spurs, but it also applies to this Warriors team. Consider -- this team relies on Iguodala to steady the foundation of a defense that's rudderless and flagging without him. But Iguodala works better in a free-flowing defensive schema. When you're facing a team that can kill you if you give even an iota of space in a prolonged halfcourt set to the best shooter in the game, a free-flowing defense like the one Karl schemed doesn't work quite as well. You need a dogged insistence on sticking to your man and keeping him from getting open, not a flowing system of switches and band-aids.

• THEORY #3: George Karl's few flaws can be magnified in certain situations. I'm not ready to be one of the hordes of people who are shoveling dirt on Karl's grave or calling him a terrible coach based on the results of a single series, or a somewhat underachieving past. Looking at the numbers, this isn't an insanely awful trend -- it's significant but it isn't life-threatening, I suppose you could say. I'd subscribe to theories #1 and #2 far quicker than I'd entertain anyone trying to tell me Karl's a poor coach, also. Those simply seem like bigger deals to me. And when it comes to designing out-of-bounds plays and building creative offensive systems, coaches I'd rather have at my side are few and far between. ... That said, he has a few odd tics that can doom teams in the playoffs. Those who've followed the Nuggets for extended lengths of time know what I'm talking about. As a recent example from this series in particular, his tendency to ride his veterans over the young talent has almost single-handedly doomed the Nuggets in several games. Andre Miller is one of my favorite players of all time, but he can't guard Stephen Curry at all and just about everyone knows that. Karl still put him on Curry for extended lengths of time, only for Curry to go NBA Jam-type hot against Miller's wizened defense. The Nuggets needed something different, but he stuck to his guns. That's something Karl does from time to time, and it can certainly shave a few points every now and again on a low-percentage move that simply doesn't pan out.

Now, let's step back a bit. The Nuggets can still win this series. They have two home games remaining, and although they're a sub-0.500 road team, the Warriors are as prone to a bad shooting night as anyone. A 3-1 disadvantage with two of three games remaining at home isn't a death sentence. But the Nuggets are on the brink, and it's worth wondering if maybe -- just maybe -- we've been overselling their home dominance all along, all based on a few regular season trends that simply don't apply in the postseason.

Or... it's just God disguised as Stephen Curry. Take your pick, really.

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For a background of and explanation of Prognostirank's purpose, click here. In a nutshell? It's a reverse-order ranking of all teams left in the playoffs, prognosticating on their playoff prospects and ranking them from worst to best. We then rate -- on a scale of 1 to 5 bullets -- our confidence in each prediction. Five bullets indicate a "very confident" prediction, one bullet indicates a "substantially wavering" prediction. Today's post outlines teams #5 to #3 -- or, the last second round exit and the results of our projected conference finals. See part one for first round ousters and part two for second round ousters.

• • •

TEAM #5: LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS____ (Western 4th seed: 56-26, SRS of 6.43)

• Series prediction: Clippers WIN in the first round, LOSE in the second round. ( • • )
• Three most likely end results: 7-7; 4-3 then 3-4 ( • • ), 11-10; 4-3 then 4-3 then 3-4 ( • • ), 3-4 ( • • )

This Clippers team is better than you think it is. It really is. I was incredibly close to picking them to upset the Thunder -- I'm on the fence just enough that I went chalk instead, but the Clippers are a good team, and they're better than most people think. While Clipper fans and general league aficionados have made a habit of noting that the Clipper team that won 17 straight games early this season isn't the Clipper team that's come to play in April, there are two main mitigating factors that make me think that particular storyline is becoming overplayed.

• Paul was injured early in 2013. He's been working his way back to health since, and in recent weeks, he's finally looked as healthy as he was during the streak. The Clippers' general performance has reflected this -- L.A. made a strong push for the three seed with a seven-game winning streak to end the year, and what's more, they haven't lost a game in regulation to a lottery team since March 19th. Yes, the Clippers looked pretty awful for a few months, and lost to lottery teams galore. But they certainly haven't lately.

• The vast majority of L.A.'s trouble lies with the bench, not the starters -- I covered this in passing back in late March, and it's held true since. Their once-dominant bench lineups that led to an overestimation of the team's prospects have been absolutely abysmal in recent months. In the playoffs, a team's bench gets fewer minutes and the Clippers get to return to their starters, who are quite the effective bunch. So, yes -- L.A.'s bench was punching above their weight to start the season, then proceeded to punch well below their weight immediately thereafter. In the playoffs, it doesn't much matter WHERE the bench-as-a-whole punches -- on a team like this, the starters are going 40+.

Additionally, this could just be a gut feeling, but I get the sense that in a playoff scenario the Clippers would match up reasonably well against the Thunder. This may seem like an odd statement to make given that the Clippers were quite literally the only Western team the Thunder swept in the regular season -- the Thunder won 117-111 in OT in OKC and won by scores of 109-97 (no Chris Paul, and L.A. had it within single digits in the last minute) and 108-104 in L.A. And that's true. It IS a pretty weird statement to make, given that the Thunder are 4-9 against the other four best records in the league -- San Antonio, Memphis, Miami, and Denver. But 3-0 against the Clippers, and THAT'S their matchup disadvantage? "Sure, Aaron. Makes sense."

Really, though -- each of the games L.A. played OKC was a close contest, and that was despite the fact that L.A.'s bench was god-awful in every game. That bench won't be playing quite as much in a playoff situation. Chris Paul shot 2-14 in OKC's overtime win. I don't see that happening often in a playoff situation. And even with all those mitigating factors, OKC managed naught but a few close wins? Look -- the Clippers aren't unbeatable, and there's a reason I picked them to lose the series. But this isn't going to be some kind of evisceration. With a healthy Chris Paul and a healthy Blake Griffin, the Clippers run a non-systematic offense that thrives on transition buckets and a cobbled-together pick and roll with whatever parts and pieces Chris Paul can salvage from the refuse around him. The Clippers have a few individual pieces that thrive against the Thunder. Chris Paul traditionally does well against Westbrook, and Blake Griffin operates_ very_ well against Ibaka's block-happy ways when he goes up strong and makes it a point to finish. Jamal Crawford is markedly less efficient than Kevin Martin, but Kevin Martin relies on open shots in a Matt Bonner-esque way -- I don't think the gap between Martin and Crawford is going to be nearly as large in a playoff situation as it is in regular season production.

All that said? I still can't pick against a team that won games by an average of 9 points per game, even against an underrated and underappreciated Clippers team that's come a long, long way since the Chris Paul trade.

DEWEY'S TAKE: In D&D alignment terms, this team is neutral-neutral tending towards neutral-evil. Did I get that right, Tim Duncan? I'm sorry, I just don't know the game that well. :sweats: I only bring up alignment because back in the day, Aaron and I came up with an alternative alignment chart for players of a certain position: Solid-neutral-scrappy axis, and a solid-neutral-sketchy axis. This is a quality-independent alignment. You're solid in the first axis if you're like the Spurs or Warriors, getting wins through solid, fundamental play. You're scrappy if you're the underdog getting inexplicable wins. You know, like the Mavs or Jazz (even the Lakers!). Sketch is self-explanatory. Operative example being: Did you ever get a win by whispering a swear in your young impressionable opposing point guard to psyche him out? Then you're sketchy. Why all of this, Alex? Why? Well, because the Clippers are the solid-sketchy team to end all solid-sketchy teams and Chris Paul is their king. Chauncey Billups, Caron Butler, DeAndre Jordan... it's like this team took the old, weird Clippers of 3-5 years ago and made them good without fixing any of their ugly, jaw-chomping weirdness. It's wicked sketchy. And can you possibly be any more solid-sketchy than Vinny Del Negro? His name literally translates to "Lawyer of darkness, comically played by Joe Pesci." That's the literal translation. I think this about says it all.

• • •

TEAM #4: INDIANA PACERS (Eastern 3rd seed: 49-32, SRS of 3.34)

• Series prediction: Pacers WIN in the first & second rounds, LOSE in the ECF. ( • • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 11-7; 4-1 then 4-2 then 3-4 ( • • • ), 9-7; 4-1 then 4-2 then 1-4 ( • • ), 7-5; 4-1 then 3-4 ( • • )

I kind of used New York's Prognostirank capsule in the last post to discuss the many merits of the Indiana Pacers in a series against the New York Knicks. So it would be rather fitting to use this post to explain what I meant by the last line of my New York post, where I noted that the Knicks would be the stronger matchup against Miami, even if the Pacers are the better team with a significantly more elite defense. Essentially, it all boils down to their relative strengths. I discussed in the Rockets/Warriors posts why I felt the Rockets and the Warriors had a chance of throwing their first round matchups into possible upset scenarios despite being clearly inferior to the better teams they're facing. Essentially, it's the 2009 Magic theory -- take a ton of threes and barrel into the other team in an effort to force the refs to give you a lot of calls. The threes and the fouls add variance and throw the better team off their game -- it gives you a chance of closing the quality gap in 2 or 3 games of the series on variance alone -- you'll then have 4 chances to simply catch the better team on a bad night and hope you grind one out.

New York, Houston, Golden State -- they all do this. It makes all three of them susceptible to both sides of an upset. You can already see that happening in the NY/BOS series. If the Celtics had an even remotely functioning offense, they would've won game 1 and had a chance of snatching game two. They look weak. But look at the three point shooting -- if New York goes on one of their 45-55% three point shooting nights, they're completely unbeatable. They'd blow out the 1996 Bulls. That's where the variance helps in a series where a team is completely outmatched. Having a high leverage production point where one or two made baskets changes your overall game that much gives you an extra edge. If it can give you 2 or 3 "completely unbeatable" games in a single series, as it so often does? You're golden. You can get situations where the 2009 Magic beat the 2009 Cavaliers. Balky or not, that was an incredible upset and it came on the back of somewhat unsustainable three point shooting. The Knicks can do the exact same thing, every once in a while, and that's why they'd stand a shaky chance to make a series of it against Miami.

The Pacers? They're good. Don't get me wrong. And don't think I've completely given up on the idea that Indiana could upset Miami. There were only two teams in the league that won the season series with this year's Heat -- the Pacers and the Knicks. (Weird stat, huh?) They both have a shot at an upset, even if the Heat are a markedly better team. While the Knicks would try their luck by imposing high variance shot-making, the Pacers would try theirs by forcing low-percentage shot-taking. We often forget that the Pacers thoroughly dominated Miami in their first two contests this season -- the Heat continually lost Paul George off-ball and found themselves stymied by Roy Hibbert's dominance in the paint. In all of the matchups, Paul George did a very good job on LeBron and it made the Heat somewhat mortal. The Knicks could beat the Heat -- the Pacers could too. So... why not pick them instead of Miami?

Miami's better. That's all there is to it.

It's conceivable that the Indiana defense mucks up Miami enough that they can't blow out the Pacers, but it's tough to fathom how Indiana scores as easily as they did in the first two games of the season series over the course of the conference finals. Consider -- Indiana dropped the last game to Miami when they were in the midst of their run-for-the-ages win streak. The Heat found themselves thoroughly befuddled by Indiana's length defensive scheme in the first two games, unable to get good percentage looks up and unable to score when the game was on the line. But in that last win? Miami siphoned offense from an unfamiliar source -- the champs leaned on one of Mario Chalmers' best games ever and tried to feature Chris Bosh in a Toronto-esque Bosh-driven offense. And it worked. The Heat got up big to start the game and the Pacers offense could never quite get in gear enough chip away at the lead. Therein lies the little nugget that keeps me from picking Indiana to win the game -- the Heat are one of the better offenses we've seen in the last several years, and they STILL have wrinkles of versatility that defenses can't gameplan until it's too late. They have such a wide variety of different looks they can give you, and over the course of a series, I trust Spolestra to experiment and tinker each game until he finds a combination that works on that particular night. If Indiana gives Miami even a tiny bit of daylight, and lets them take a 10 point lead? I just don't see how Miami's improving defense lets Indiana's offense back into the game. The Pacers have a shot at the upset, but it's a shot at an upset -- they aren't the favorites, and I can't in good faith pick them to be.

DEWEY'S TAKE: In Hoosiers, there's a great scene where Gene Hackman wakes up in a restaurant, only to find that all the people there speak only in one word - "Malkovich." He has traveled through his own portal.... Wait, sorry, that was Being John Malkovich. Sorry. Anyway, yeah, the point is, that was a movie that took place in the same state as the Pacers now play. And just like Hackman's iconic "Coach Carter" from that film, Frank Vogel has inspired his Pacers to play a brand of defense that is as stifling as it is hip. Hip meaning "in style" and "how Roy Hibbert or David West checks you on a screen; that is, when they aren't outright shoving you". The Pacers are led by all-around savant Paul George, not to be confused with guard Hill George on the same team. The Pacers represent some sort of perfect combination between the Bob Knight and Ron Artest win-at-all-costs insanity on the one hand, and on the other, the total, relatively unimpeachable uprightness of the recent Pacers. They are the most Mike Brown team in the league, until (sources tell me) Mike Brown returns to slay them in the Conference Finals with the Cavs next season. Note: Information in this blurb was provided by many reliable sources, including, and limited to, Mike Brown.

• • •

TEAM #3: SAN ANTONIO SPURS____ (Eastern 2nd seed: 58-24, SRS of 6.67)

• Series prediction: Spurs WIN in the first & second rounds, LOSE in the WCF. ( • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 11-9; 4-2 then 4-3 then 3-4 ( • • • • ), 11-7; 4-2 then 4-1 then 3-4 ( • • • ), 7-6; 4-2 then 3-4 ( • )

Again, Oklahoma City? Why do you have to keep doing this? Why do you hate me?

Alright, that's not quite fair. The 2013 Spurs are an interesting bunch. They're hard to handicap. During this long season, the Spurs have had several moments where they've looked unbelievably dominant -- they've had stretches where they look to combine the all-time great offensive execution of the 2012 Spurs and the Duncan-led defense of the 2007 Spurs, with Bowen replaced by Leonard and Green as the de facto perimeter stoppers. Possession after possession goes by with strong stop after strong stop, not a rotation out of place or an easy shot allowed... all while they whip the ball around at the other end and get wide open threes and at-rim layups. From time to time, the Spurs see fit to embody beautiful basketball. They have moments of unbeatable guile.

And yet... they aren't unbeatable. At all. The biggest problem -- and the struggle that many Spurs fans are having this season -- lies in the disconnect between San Antonio's best moments and their worst moments. The Spurs are supposed to be a hallmark to consistency and dogged persistence. "Lock down every possession. Never take a bad shot. Move the ball." Et cetera, et cetera. This season, though, that hasn't been the case -- this Spurs team is prone to go on 5-6 minute stretches of lazy, uninterested, selfish play. For short stretches, they simply don't move the ball or rotate effectively. They complain to the refs and forget to get back on defense. They take tentative steps and they sulk as Popovich tears into the team with his customary fury. At its best moments San Antonio's defense looks like a title-winning throwback to the ones that won Duncan his rings -- at its worst, it looks like a yet more shoddy imitation of last year's flawed defense. At its best moments San Antonio's offense looks like another generation-defining tour de force in ball movement and brilliant playcalling -- at its worst, it's a ball-sticking offense with no creativity and a general air of disinterest.

The most frustrating part? The Spurs embody both on a game-by-game basis. In the last game of the regular season, San Antonio scored 23 points in six minutes of play against the Timberwolves, with strong defense and insane offense leading their run. They scored 72 points in the other 42 minutes of the game, shooting horribly and playing completely disinterested basketball in a blowout home loss to a terrible team. Same tale-of-two-teams story was true in their recent loss to the Nuggets -- they went a sterling 14-0 in 6 minutes to start the game, then proceeded to get destroyed 96-72 over the other 42 minutes. It's a Jekyll and Hyde thing. Early in the season, that pattern would reverse -- they'd have 42 interested minutes and 6 completely lazy minutes every game. I'd ask "which is the real Spurs team", but that's not right. They're both the "real" Spurs -- this year's Spurs team is an object in contrasts more than any other Spurs team in recent memory. They are a flawed team with a stratospheric ceiling and a subterranean floor, and a team that has an irritating habit of reaching both their ceiling and their floor in any particular game. No lead feels particularly safe -- as a fan -- when simply you don't know what Spurs team you're getting from quarter to quarter. It's a bit mortifying.

San Antonio's title shot hinges on the Spurs limiting their disinterested coasting as the playoffs go on. Their top-tier game is a game that can play with any team in the league. Their bottom-tier game is a game that can get beaten by anyone -- the Bobcats, the Kings, the Hawks without their 4 best players... anyone. For that reason, I just can't pick the Spurs to win the title. I wish I had faith -- I don't. If they play their best, and they play consistently, they can win it all. But because of their inconsistency and their inscrutable lows, I can't pick them to beat a team as good as the Thunder. I can't pick them to go on a hot streak and win the title. They could do it, certainly. They have the talent: in extended minutes, Duncan is the best center in the NBA and Tony Parker is a first-team All-NBA point guard, the 1b to Chris Paul's 1a. Kawhi Leonard is a budding all-star with all-defense potential, and I suspect Manu Ginobili may have one vintage playoff series left in the tank. That's a __killer four-man closing lineup, and it gives you a lot of versatility -- you can pair them with another perimeter stopper in Danny Green and play small, you can pair them with Tiago Splitter and play a modified two-towers, you can pair them with Gary Neal for instant-offense, and you can pair them with Matt Bonner if you want the internet to love you. But if they don't focus? If they coast?

They'll be out early, and their uncharacteristic foibles will be the only thing to blame.

DEWEY'S TAKE: What do I say about the Spurs that I haven't said about the Spurs? Take a thousand-yard view, Alex. The Spurs are a team that historically has combined the best of both worlds, of innocence and experience. Every title they've won has seen unfathomably young and inexperienced players stepping up... but also mentored heavily by unfathomably old and experienced players. Tim Duncan has gone from column A to column B, but he has maintained the best of both worlds himself, crafty worldliness and wiles on one hand, freakish athleticism and mental freshness on the other. A microcosm of the Spurs at large, Tim seems to be able to turn whatever he has on whenever the Spurs have needed him. The remarkable thing about the Thunder series wasn't that the younger team won, it was that the younger team won by elevating itself -- as if in an instant -- to the wisdom and experience of the Spurs. The Spurs' hopes largely hinge on young players such as Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green pulling a similar form of identity theft on the now-tested Thunder.

• • •

A few end-matter notes -- I'll be putting up the final part of the prognostirank series (with my run-down for the finals and my finals predictions) on Wednesday. Note that every single one of my predictions are already chosen -- I haven't been editing the picks to adjust for anything we see in the intervening playoff games, and I'm not gonna start now. I'd like to thank Hoopchalk for their excellent Playoff Preview Capsule series (used for some of the initial scouting here), as well as NBA League Pass and Basketball Reference for the game-watching experience and the stats to draw on when writing these.

Stay frosty, friends.

Continue reading

For a background of and explanation of Prognostirank's purpose, click here. In a nutshell? It's a reverse-order ranking of all teams left in the playoffs, prognosticating on their playoff prospects and ranking them from worst to best. We then rate -- on a scale of 1 to 5 bullets -- our confidence in each prediction. Five bullets indicate a "very confident" prediction, one bullet indicates a "substantially wavering" prediction. Today's post outlines teams #10 to #5 -- or, the last two first round exits and the first three second round exits. See part one for first round ousters.

• • •

TEAM #10: GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS____ (Western 6th seed: 47-35, SRS of 1.32)

• Series prediction: Warriors LOSE in the first round. ( • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 3-4 ( • • • • ), 7-6; 4-2 then 3-4 ( • • • ), 5-6; 4-2 then 1-4 ( • • )

I struggled with this one quite a lot. Probably more than I should've. All things considered, the Nuggets should pulverize the Warriors. They're faster, better, smarter, stronger. They're deeper, and they've got ample personnel to take care of Golden State's biggest weakness; that is to say, an at-rim sieve by the name of David Lee, who's consistently a step slow and weak to contest. With Lee in the game for 35-40 minutes, it's hard for me to really visualize how the Warriors intend to stop the Nuggets from scoring 70 points in the paint per game. And if the Nuggets get that done, it's hard to see how the Warriors keep them off the line enough to guarantee the win. If there's one thing that kills the Warriors, it's that -- their interior defense is simply not up to par when facing off against a team like the Nuggets that drives the ball straight into their heart. Simply not.

That said? The Warriors have a few advantages of their own, mainly centered around Stephen Curry. While Ty Lawson ended the year balky and injured -- as did Tony Parker, Steve Nash, and virtually every point guard in the West's playoff picture not named "Russell Westbrook" -- Stephen Curry ended the year on a crazy hot streak. Curry shot 51% from three over his final 4 regular season games, and he's been doing it on vastly increased shot volume. Broadening the sample size... over the final month of the regular season (17 games), Curry shot an average of TEN THREES A GAME. That isn't a typo. The man shot 47% over those 17 games on ten threes a night. That's incredible. To put it in perspective... the 2003 Minnesota Timberwolves, the Garnett-led team that won 51 games and finished with the 4th seed in the West, shot 10 threes a game. As a team. Stephen Curry, by himself, shot as many threes per game over the past month as everyone on the 2003 Minnesota Timberwolves combined. And he made 47% on them. The man is insane.

Outside of Andre Iguodala's defensive masterwork, the Nuggets are a relatively poor team when you get out to the perimeter -- whether shooting it or defending it. The key to the series, for the Nuggets, is simply going to be keeping the ball out of Stephen Curry's hands. If they want to make this a short series, they'll need to force Curry pass out of traps coming up the floor and to shut down all passing lanes to the Golden State superstar. He'll get his points regardless, but they need to keep his three point shooting under wraps. If Curry is allowed to shoot 10-12 threes a night, the Warriors have an excellent shot of winning the series outright -- Curry shot over 60% on threes against Denver this season despite Iguodala's defense, mostly because Iguodala's more important as a roaming defensive presence than as a lock-in guy in the Denver scheme. If Curry's presence forces Iguodala to function more as a shut-down player than he has in Denver's system traditionally, that could give the Warriors an opening for the upset. More likely, their porous interior defense dooms them in the end -- but I still feel like they'll give Denver a hell of a push.

DEWEY'S TAKE: One game over .500 this calendar year (26-25), a negative point differential against the Western Conference, and the best single season a three-point shooter has ever had. Deep bench, towel waves, bronze icons in the golden light of Oracle Arena, the Warriors are middling (occasionally stagnant) on offense and middling on defense over the course of the season, and don't have a center. On any given night two or three offensive savants plus a rookie or veteran stepping up. Effortful, relatively futile defense, pull-up jumpers in transition. Their coach is a minister and a showman and a legendary floor general. They also have Richard Jefferson as a comically irrelevant player and veteran presence. They send their tiniest player through a golden gate of big men to get some space to shoot an insensibly high-arcing 3 from the top of the key. One of the most fun and watchable teams ever when they're on.

• • •

TEAM #9: MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES (Western 5th seed: 56-36, SRS of 4.33)

• Series prediction: Grizzlies LOSE in the first round. ( • • )
• Three most likely end results: 3-4 ( • • • ), 3-4 after 4-3 ( • • ), 2-4 ( • • )

I oscillate back and forth on how competitive I view this series. On one hand, Memphis is the far superior defensive team, and they're good enough to make a legitimate title run. They really are. If you'd given me Memphis against anyone in the Western Conference -- yes, even OKC -- I'd pick Memphis in a hot second. Frank Vogel described Indiana's style of play as "smashmouth basketball" -- cute, Frank, but we all know you're jacking the Grizzlies' swagger. The Grizzlies kill you with screens, they kill you with reaches, and they muck your game up until you're screaming for help. They're incredible. But the Grizzlies have three massive problems heading into this series against the Clippers, and exactly none of the three involves the man once known as Udy-Ray.

1. Marc Gasol's abs. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure they're rippling, man, that's not the point. Marc Gasol suffered an abdominal tear on March 23rd, about one month ago today. I'm not entirely sure it's going to be a problem, but I can't be sure it won't be. If his mobility is compromised, the Grizzlies are a markedly more beatable team.
   _
2. Zach Randolph's everything. This is another big problem for the Grizzlies. Randolph is a great player, but he's older than you think -- the man's just about 32 years old and he's been suffering injuries and setbacks for virtually the entire season. Randolph averaged a career low in points per possession this season, and posted his least efficient performance from the field since his stint with the disastrous 2008 New York Knicks. A big man who spends much of the game operating on the block simply shouldn't be shooting 46% from the floor. That's not good. Worse yet, he's been slumping even more as of late -- Randolph averaged 14-10 on 41% shooting over his last 15 games. When Marc Gasol's mobility is a bit lessened and the Grizzlies are more and more dependent on Randolph's production, that's not going to beat the Grizzlies.
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3. They lack HCA. This is big. In last year's series, the Grizzlies very nearly pulled it out -- their loss in game one was an aberration of the highest degree, but of the 7 games in that series, there were only three blowout-tier games -- game one (which, again, the Grizzlies lost due to a Nick Young hot stretch), game five (which the Grizzlies dominated), and game seven (which... OK, yeah, the Clippers beat the Grizzlies at home to close out the series, the world's confusing sometimes.) The Grizzlies and the Clippers ended the season with identical home/away records -- both teams were 32-9 at home and 24-17 on the road. In the obvious absence of a health advantage, it'd behoove Memphis to have every tertiary advantage possible. Unfortunately, home court advantage won't be one of those.

Aren't those kind of a big deal? Compound that against the fact that they're facing the Clippers -- a team that matches up well with Memphis in the playoffs and a team that stars Chris Paul -- and I just have trouble seeing how they pull it out in seven. I'm picking the Clippers, and although I'm picking them to bow out in seven, I wouldn't be altogether shocked if they ended up bowing out a bit earlier. (And, that said -- if they make it to the second round, I imagine they'll be exactly as strong a challenge to OKC as LA would/will be.)

DEWEY'S TAKE: Grindhouse. Memphis. Beale Street. Barbecue. Stax Records. Big men. Z-Bo eating a dozen ribs and then wiping the sauce on an opponent's jersey - for ever. Tony Allen. Mike Conley Jr., born in 1987, evokes a man 10 years his older, and from the early 70s, such is his beard. Lionel Hollins. Echoes of the 77 Blazers through and through, up to and including no three point shot. Bill Walton loves this team I bet. Ethereally possessed of "the right stuff," team's jersey should have a chip on its shoulder, and in basketball terms, they hold more than danger - they hold coherency and a superiority of aspect - to every team that they face. The team you'd least like to be in a fight with.

• • •

TEAM #8: BROOKLYN NETS____ (Eastern 4th seed: 49-33, SRS of 1.25)

• Series prediction: If Nets WIN the first round, they LOSE in the second round. ( • • • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 1-4 after 4-3 ( • • • • ), 2-4 after 4-3 ( • • • ), 0-4 after 4-3 ( • )

If this were a true ranking, where the prognostication wasn't feeding into the cardinality of my rankings, I'd probably put the Nets below the Grizzlies, the Warriors, the Lakers and the Rockets. This isn't to say that I don't respect what the Nets have done this season -- they're a really solid team, no doubt, and Brook Lopez has been everything everyone ever wanted him to be. With Deron Williams rounding into form to finish the year, they've finally taken on the shades of eternal bridesmaid swagger we expected going into the season. Not really good enough to seriously challenge for a title, but good enough to beat up bad teams. (NOTE: Without a healthy Noah or Rose, Chicago is a bad team. Sorry, Chicago.) I imagine this will come to a screeching, blood-curdling halt in the second round when the Nets face off against Miami. Just an educated guess.

And -- much like the Knicks -- we're looking at the best Brooklyn team we can expect to see in the forseeable future. Hence the eternal bridesmaid swagger; not really good enough to contend for a title, not bad enough to be an abomination to the game of basketball. Don't get me wrong, though. This is a step forward for the Nets. Over the past 4-5 seasons, the Nets have been legitimately unwatchable. They've been atrocious, and the fans have noticed. Cannibalizing Atlanta's eternal bridesmaid in an effort to relocate their eternal bridesmaid to Brooklyn may seem silly, but for a franchise that hasn't really done much of anything since Jason Kidd was around these parts, it's a decent step forward into respectability.

As for how they match up with the Heat? Badly, straight up. Chalmers and Wade (when both are locked in) do a reasonably good job cutting off Deron's lanes and keeping the Nets out of rhythm. LeBron James is just the sort of athletic freak of nature that Lopez and Wallace have trouble covering, and LeBron's knack for rebounding is going to give Miami extra offensive possessions when Brook Lopez is too busy boxing out Udonis Haslem and Chris Andersen to get the board. Their rebounding issues are going to necessitate playing Reggie Evans big playoff minutes, which is going to slash their offensive potential in order to barely stay even on the glass with the Heat. Problems! Compound all that with the fact that Joe Johnson's defense has fallen off a cliff this year? I don't really see how the Nets stop Miami. At all. In any way. I think they take a game, because sweeping teams is tough. But let's just say I wouldn't be wholly shocked if Miami entered the Eastern Conference Finals with an 8-0 playoff record, either.

DEWEY'S TAKE: I haven't watched them much, why are they eighth? They remind me of the Joe Johnson Hawks, and I can't figure out why. Maybe it's the slew of inexplicably underwhelming point guards. Maybe it's that they play big 1 to 4. Maybe it's the interchangeably gritty bigs with poor shot selection or the literal inability to hit shots (*cough* Gerald Wallace). Maybe it's the sense that they're a mediocre team with a lot of big names and nothing obviously fundamentally wrong on paper but a sense that a team that goes 13-17 against the West doesn't much belong in the playoffs. No, wait, I figured it out: They actually have Joe Johnson.

• • •

TEAM #7: DENVER NUGGETS____ (Western 3rd seed: 57-25, SRS of 5.37)

• Series prediction: If Nuggets WIN in the first round, they LOSE in the first round. ( • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 3-4 after 4-3 ( • • • • ), 1-4 after 4-3 ( • • • ), 3-4 after 4-3 & 4-3 ( • • )

I grappled with this one a while. Let's be clear -- the Spurs have been playing absolutely abysmal basketball to finish their Regular Season. They shot 31% from three in their final 10-15 games and allowed teams to pulverize them, both in the paint and on the perimeter. San Antonio's contests became sluggish, their rotations befuddling, their demeanor lifeless. They looked like a team that would get blown out in the first round, regardless of who they faced. That said, there were some mitigating factors. Diaw was injured and playing scant minutes. Tony Parker was in and out of the lineup with an ankle problem that Pop refused to let him play through. Kawhi Leonard was dealing with a bum elbow, and Tim Duncan showed the sort of on-again off-again focus you'd expect from a 37-year-old big man in the last stretch of a virtually meaningless regular season. If THAT Spurs team shows up to play in the second round, Denver sweeps the series. I'm not kidding around.

But you know what? I'm not letting the Spurs fool me. I don't know how much faith I have in this squad to win the title. At their best, this San Antonio team is a unit that can play with any other team in the league. The Clippers, the Thunder, the Heat all included. The Spurs aren't likely to be at their absolute best against the Nuggets in round two, given that Diaw (a surprisingly important part to San Antonio's strategy) will return to action in game two of the series and will require a game or two to get back into his trailblazing new definition of "game shape." But Manu Ginobili looked somewhat healthy in practice footage and in-game play to close the regular season, Tony Parker has an entire series against a paper-soft L.A. perimeter defense to get his mojo back, and Tim Duncan at his worst is still worlds better than any big man that Denver puts on the floor in this series.

And honestly? I won't let Denver fool me, either. Denver has had a wonderful season. With Gallo healthy, I could see an outside chance of them making a run. But let's be straight for a moment. Without Danilo Gallinari, the Nuggets lose their primary perimeter threat and one of their best defenders. The Nuggets are a team with enviable depth, but "enviable depth" and "completely replaceable stars" simply aren't one in the same. They lack perimeter threats that are going to kill you if you pack the paint, and their defense is predicated on Andre Iguodala legitimately doing it all over a seven game stretch. Ty Lawson's defense has taken a step back with his injured season, and George Karl has yet to find a rotation of bigs that really challenges elite teams defensively.

Furthermore, although the Nuggets have one of the better home court advantages in the league, I'm not sure I buy the idea that their home court dominance can be cleanly translated to the playoffs. In a playoff situation, teams get 2-3 days of relaxing and preparing in the city to adjust for the altitude and the general idiosyncrasies of the Colorado climate. Heck, think of it this way -- when Golden State plays game two of their first round series against the Nuggets, the Warriors will have spent a full six days in Denver, preparing and practicing. Whatever advantage the Nuggets get from the altitude-related hangups fade when the team's rest time is completely equivalent. This bears true over the last few years of Denver playoff games, too -- the Nuggets were 2-1 at home in 2012 (6 seed), 1-1 at home in 2011 (5 seed), 2-1 at home in 2010 (5 seed), and 8-2 in 2009 (2 seed).

Small sample size, but the general point remains; the Nuggets aren't an unbeatable home team in the playoffs, and given that this incarnation is such a poor road team, I find it hard to see how they pull out a close series against another Western elite. Of course, if the Spurs play like they've been playing lately, they aren't a Western elite. And the Nuggets can book their trip to the Western Conference Finals. I just don't see it. Not with the Nuggets missing Gallo, not with the Spurs getting all their players back right as the series starts, not with Denver's home court advantage being a mite bit more shaky when they aren't facing garbage teams every other night with rest advantages and less than 24 hours to adjust to the air. The Nuggets are a wonderful team, and they're a credit to Masai Ujiri's teambuilding and George Karl's incredible coaching. But I still think their run is going to end tantalizingly short of their second Western Conference Finals berth.

DEWEY'S TAKE: If you were Andre Miller you could see the universe from the top, could see all of time in a single unbroken line, you would find flowers from Big Bang to star fuel to lava to soil to seed to bloom and then to decomposition of the aforementioned in reverse order. You would find that you had planted many flowers in the form of basketball plays, and you would know mercy. And, knowing eternity, you, Andre Miller, would be placid, whatever comes of this series. Because you have set dunks in motion, you have sent missives to a cutter saying "Just in Time". You are irreducible. If a lock of hair falls out during a game, another immediately replaces it. And you know that this Nuggets team is not really as good as +11 at home, nor as bad as +0 on the road. You will know balance. You see the unbroken flowering from JaVale McGee to the NBA Finals.

• • •

TEAM #6: NEW YORK KNICKS____ (Eastern 2nd seed: 54-28, SRS of 3.73)

• Series prediction: Knicks WIN in the first round, LOSE in the second round. ( • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 3-4 after 4-1 ( • • • ), 4-3 after 4-1 ( • • • ), 1-4 after 4-1 ( • • )

While the Knicks aren't a great team, predicting them to bow out to the Indiana Pacers would represent a slightly strange result for the league. After all, Carmelo Anthony is an MVP candidate that seems assured to get a top-5 spot in the voting. Mike Woodson is a coach of the year candidate with the greatest goatee in the history of the craft. Tyson Chandler is the reigning defensive player of the year. The Knicks won 5 more games in the regular season and enter the series with home court advantage. The Knicks are one of the best offenses in the league, and the Pacers defense has been collapsing over the season's final stretch. The Pacers offense is putrid. All of those things are true, at least in part, but they miss a few key caveats to each point that change the game.

First, yes, Carmelo Anthony IS an MVP candidate. He was virtually unguardable for a month to start the season and a month to finish the season. He was also eminently easy to guard for several months of the season while he was working through injury and keyed on by good defenses. Those aren't mutually exclusive, and it points to the difference between the LeBron/Durant/Paul tier of MVP candidates and the lesser lights below them. Those three are legitimately impossible to consistently guard. They don't have any particular tells. You can't goad them into taking bad shots. You can't force them to a place of discomfort. Traditionally, when you slow the game down into a halfcourt contest? You can do that with Melo. You can goad him into bad shots, and you can keep him in check. He's an MVP candidate because he's having his best season -- he's not an MVP candidate because he's an impossible-to-guard force of nature with a chip on his shoulder. There's a difference. It's important.

Second, you have the coaching matchup -- Woodson IS a coach of the year candidate, but Indiana coach Frank Vogel's no chopped liver. He's shown himself to be an excellent tactician and a grade-A motivator. Woodson's proven that he's a decent coach, but the coaching matchup is a push at best. Tyson Chandler IS the reigning DPoY, but he's also had an incredibly disappointing season that's seen the New York defense take a furious nosedive into impotence and woe. Chandler's great, when he's healthy. He's not. He hasn't been all season, and New York's defense has essentially fallen apart in his absence. The Knicks DID win five more games, but that's a really misleading stat -- even after Indiana's late season slide and even considering their early season fog, the Pacers and Knicks have virtually identical overall efficiencies, and if you translate their efficiency differential to projected records, the Knicks would be projected a record of 53-29 and the Pacers would be projected a record of 52-29. They're simply not as far apart as the NBA standings would indicate. This is a wholly even matchup, star power be damned.

Finally, you have what I consider the most important part of my "Indiana beats New York" prediction. Yes, the New York offense is one of the best in the game, and the Indiana defense has looked a bit shaky lately. But if you watch the tape -- and I watched entirely too much to make this pick, let me tell you -- the Pacers defense simply isn't struggling as much as the numbers make it seem. It really isn't, and I think Frank Vogel understands that. Teams ended the season making an inordinate amount of tough shots against strong contests and strong rotations. Sure, the Pacers got a bit lazy -- and Vogel benched their best players a bit to freshen them up for the playoffs. But the fundamentals of Indiana's defense are absolutely still there, and their biggest fundamental strength (that is, the fact that everyone in their core rotation is monstrously huge and lengthy for their position) isn't going to evaporate just because a few opponents made tough shots to end the season.

More interesting, to me? Indiana's offense -- admittedly putrid for most of the year -- is finally starting to show some signs of life. All season, Indiana's had to run plays through David West and pray that things work out. Roy Hibbert has finally seen a return-to-form for his previously absent jump hook, Paul George has been getting open more successfully than he was in the early stretches of the season (although, to be fair, he's been missing a lot of open shots too), and the Pacers in a general sense look like a team whose play has been besieged by missed open shots on their end and made contested shots on the other end. Their struggles don't really resemble San Antonio's complete collapse in the last quarter of the season, at least not to me -- their struggles seem far easier to fix, and for that reason, I think the Pacers shock this Knicks team.

As for why things look grim on New York's end? They're a team that's reliant on Steve Novak getting the space to shoot in a playoff situation (Hey, look! It's Bonner 2.0!) against a stout defensive team, Melo/Cope/Shump shooting over 37% from three against the kind of length Indiana will show them on the perimeter, Jason Kidd shooting 35% from three against ANYONE, and their defense keeping West/Hibbert out of the paint and Paul George out of his comfortable spot-up shots. I just don't see it. (... Which is quite the shame, because New York going on a 2009 Magic-esque shooting streak is probably the only way the Heat bow out before the finals. But I'll get to that later.)

DEWEY'S TAKE: This is a team that seems to ebb and flow based purely on chance in the Melo Era. 2.5 years, and there is still no correlation between anything that happens. Linsanity happened, and then it didn't. Amar'e got injured and then he wasn't. Same with all the others. They'll probably at least make a solid case to go to the ECF and with all their 3-point shooting (and Miami's), they at least have variance on their side for a Finals Run. They have a knack for looking like the best team in the league for stretches and a middling faux-contender for stretches. I don't know. I don't really like their chances, and I could see them, like, going scoreless for entire quarters when Miami closes out on their shooters, I could also see them taking care of the ball, not allowing Miami to get into its deadly transition, and just flipping a coin ten times and having 9 of them come up heads.

• • •

A few end-matter notes -- I'll be putting up the next part of the prognostirank series (with the last second-round exit -- my pick for the loser of LAC/OKC, if you're counting -- and my conference finals predictions) on Wednesday. Note that every single one of my predictions are already chosen -- I will not be editing the picks to adjust for anything we see in the intervening playoff games. I'd like to thank Hoopchalk for their excellent Playoff Preview Capsule series (used for some of the initial scouting here), as well as NBA League Pass and Basketball Reference for the game-watching experience and the stats to draw on when writing these.

Stay frosty, friends.

Continue reading

For a background of and explanation of Prognostirank's purpose, click here. In a nutshell? It's a reverse-order ranking of all teams left in the playoffs, prognosticating on their playoff prospects and ranking them from worst to best. We then rate -- on a scale of 1 to 5 bullets -- our confidence in each prediction. Five bullets indicate a "very confident" prediction, one bullet indicates a "substantially wavering" prediction. Today's post outlines teams #16 to #11 -- or, the six teams most likely to bow out early.

• • •

TEAM #16: MILWAUKEE____ BUCKS (Eastern 8th seed: 38-44, SRS of -1.82)

• Series prediction: Bucks LOSE in the first round. ( • • • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 1-4 ( • • • • • ), 0-4 ( • • • ), 2-4 ( • • )

All things considered, the Milwaukee Bucks are not a very good team. They're the only playoff team that ended the year with a losing record, and their final point differential was actually worse than three teams that miss the playoffs. While they made a mid-season trade with the intent of bolstering their rotation, there's been virtually zero evidence that the Redick trade has improved their team and ample evidence they made a slight miscalculation in sending out Tobias Harris. Live and learn, I suppose. To make matters worse, they happen to be matched up against the best team in the NBA. The question with the Bucks is less "can they beat the Heat?" and more "can they take a few games from the Heat?" Popular opinion says no -- I'd say they've got a fighting chance at snagging a game or two, and possibly pushing it to seven. It's not incredibly likely, but it wouldn't be some kind of game-changing shocker either.

A few reasons for that. First, the turnovers -- for all of Milwaukee's numerous faults (poor shooting, confused offensive playbook, lack of free throws), they've always been particularly good at taking care of the ball. That's what happens when three of your players are legitimate NBA ballhandlers and your bigs don't tend to fumble, I suppose. While that doesn't exactly scream "upset potential", it DOES scream "they can win a home game", if you consider Miami's occasional over-reliance on ballhawking on the defensive end. Second, you've got the talents of John Henson and Larry Sanders, two bigs who have traditionally had relative success against Miami's defense, particularly when matched onto the smaller Shane Battier. Finally? Sheer statistical randomness. If Ellis or Jennings have a game or two where they get unreasonably hot and start draining guarded three point shots, the Heat are going to have a bit more trouble sweeping this team away.

All that said, this isn't exactly rocket science. I just outlined reasons that the Milwaukee offense could (and should) rally to win a game against the Heat -- I didn't outline reasons they could win the series. Barring a massive upset the likes of which the NBA hasn't seen in eons, this is a 4-5 game series. The Bucks have no particular defensive scheme that handles the Heat's multifaceted offense, and they're absolutely screwed if the Heat actually come out to play every night. If the Bucks push this series to six games -- getting their requisite 6 home games -- it'll be a big upset. Sorry, Milwaukee -- you're the first team gone.

DEWEY'S TAKE: A tremendous collection of talent, loosely tied together. Unintentional feeding factory for every other team, in terms of prospects. Have - at any given time - seven players that will be part of an NBA championship in the next five years, none of them with the Bucks. Trade machine stimulant, perennial 38-win team, alternately likable and mechanically unworkable, except in stretches. Richard Jefferson's Inferno.

• • •

TEAM #15: ATLANTA HAWKS____ (Eastern 6th seed: 44-38, SRS of -0.08)

• Series prediction: Hawks LOSE in the first round. ( • • • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 1-4 ( • • • • ), 3-4 ( • • • ), 2-4 ( • • )

The Hawks confuse me. A lot. In a much-publicized move, the Hawks chose to essentially cede the final 3 or 4 games of their season in an effort to tank from the 5 seed to the 6 seed. The end goal wasn't some expressly outlined matchup advantage against the Pacers -- it was simply to avoid the Heat in the second round, manipulating the bracket such that the first time they could possibly see Miami would be the Eastern Conference Finals. On one hand, that made sense -- the Heat are far and away the class of the Eastern Conference, and by manipulating your matchup advantages to ensure you meet them later, you're taking the long view and trying for an Eastern Conference Finals instead of a second round ouster.

All sounds good in theory, but then you get to the whole... actually looking at the matchups thing. And of all the teams in the Eastern Conference, not a single one -- perhaps not even Miami! -- matches up better with the Hawks than the Pacers. Not a single one. Larry Drew's post-Johnson offense relies on a fluid give-and-take around the perimeter, shooting the ball around from player to player and relying on Al Horford and Josh Smith's pivot passing to keep the shots flowing. It hasn't worked quite as well as Larry Drew would perhaps hope, with their final product rating out as a below-average offense with relatively poor spot-up shooting (despite the usually open looks) and a penchant for semi-guarded midrange shots besides. This Hawks team makes more of its noise on defense, where the combination of Smith and Horford tends to shut things down in the post (especially against smaller opposing bigs) and where their perimeter defenders (Teague, Stevenson, Korver, et cetera) gamble as a general rule. It works reasonably well against most teams.

Here's the issue -- Indiana isn't most teams. Atlanta's motion offense requires open passing lanes; Indiana's punishing defense requires obliterating them. Atlanta's defense requires that Smith and Horford can match the size of the opposing bigs; Indiana's bigs are stronger and smarter than Atlanta's. Atlanta's overall game requires a decent helping of two-point smallball with Harris and Teague on the court at the same time (their best two-man combination, on the season); Indiana's end-state goal is to goad other teams into smallball that gives Indiana a 2-3 inch height advantage at every single position. Atlanta was 2-2 against Indiana on the season, but the record is something reflecting fool's gold -- one of their wins was in Indiana's first few Grangerless games, and the other was a tight home win where Lou Williams went off for 22-3-12. With Williams, this Hawks team was a significantly better squad and had a much better chance of winning a series like this. Without him? I just don't see how they get it done, unless Indiana completely breaks down. And, let's be fair, Indiana's looked pretty bad lately. But they still should have enough in the tank to beat the Hawks. And beat them handily, too.

DEWEY'S TAKE: Every game is a plea to the Basketball Gods to stop the game forever. Always cosmically, deceptively unwatchable. Every year, like the spring, we hope for a cool rain of justice to fall upon us and give us a watchable Hawks team and justice, and the gods, simply deny us. Often in theory the Spurs, in practice the Blazers, but less fun, and if the Rose Garden were replaced with a warehouse in Atlanta.

• • •

TEAM #14: BOSTON CELTICS____ (Eastern 7th seed: 41-40, SRS of -0.62)

• Series prediction: Celtics LOSE in the first round. ( • • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 1-4 ( • • • ), 3-4 ( • • • ), 6-7 ( • )

This is the first one I'm not exceptionally confident in. I don't see how exactly the Celtics win the series, but after years and years of outperforming my expectations, I'm not quite ready to completely write off Doc Rivers' boys. I'm still ready to partially write them off. Because my lord, they've looked bad this season. Look. When the Celtics have been slept on in previous years, they were never quite this bad. They had Rondo, and they won their Division every single year of the Big 3 era. That means they had a top 4 seed waiting for them, and a shot at one of the East's worst teams in the first round as something of a tune up. And they needed it, too -- with the exception of their 2011 sweep of the Knicks and their 2010 win-in-five against a talentless injured Miami team, first rounds have been a little nerve wracking for Celtics fans. Seven game nail-biters in 2008 and 2009, six tough games in 2013, and a general sense that the Celtics needed the first round as a tuning period to iron out the kinks.

Well, bad news. This year, the Celtics are the bad team -- they're one of the worst teams by-the-numbers in the playoffs, with a dismal offense and a defense that can only be described in true Red Green Show style as "alright, I guess." Avery Bradley has put himself in contention for an all-defensive team with his defensive play (although he's still a bit behind Tony Allen and Andre Iguodala to these eyes) and Kevin Garnett is still a beast on that end. Jeff Green is a competent defender individually, even if he takes off rotations and doesn't quite know the system yet. But nobody else on the team beyond those three guys really can execute Doc's system with any considerable success without Rondo or a younger Pierce, and their offense is a confused jumble of Jeff Green breakout nights, Jeff Green tepid nights, and the occasional times when everything comes together.

All that said, I have trouble picking strongly against them. I'm still picking them to lose the series, and I have a feeling it'll be one of those matchups that either ends in five lopsided games or goes down to the wire. But I wouldn't be completely shocked if Pierce had a throwback series, Green had a breakout series, and the Celtics got everything together just in time to rally past a high-variance Knicks team that has a few poor shooting nights. It's not likely, mind you, which is why I'm still picking New York -- they were a FAR better team this season, and they deserve to be the favorite. But the Celtics are not a team one can simply look past and scoff at, even with their troubles this season. This one's one of the few Eastern match-ups I'm actually interested in.

DEWEY'S TAKE: Grindhouse. Welcome to it. TD Garden. Tradition. Sportswriters. Bill Russell. Larry "The Legend From French Lick" "But Not a Hawk" Bird. Al Jefferson. Tony Allen. Kevin Garnett. Grindhouse. Age. Wisdom. Hurtin'. 5 years after.

• • •

TEAM #13: CHICAGO BULLS____ (Eastern 5th seed: 45-37, SRS of -0.01)

• Series prediction: Bulls LOSE in the first round. (• • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 3-4 (• • • • ), 2-4 ( • • • ), 5-7 ( • • )

Were I making this prediction early in the season, I'd probably have picked Chicago. But recent events have me a lot lower on their chances. Thibodeau recently announced that Joakim Noah is likely to miss some or all of Chicago's first round series with a variety of soreness-related injuries and general maladies. With Noah around, this Bulls team is an excellent defensive unit that can put a scare into anyone. Without him? I'm not entirely sure how they keep the series competitive. The Nets are a better-than-most think team, and putting Nazr Mohammad on Brook Lopez is going to work about as well as casu marzu on pizza. Jimmy Butler is really, really solid -- he's an excellent prospect and an excellent value pick, but Butler and a burnt-out Deng doesn't give me a ton of confidence against a Nets team that's entering the playoffs relatively healthy and coherent.

Additionally, I just don't see how New Jersey has to fight to defend the Bulls. Brooklyn is an abysmal defensive team, but they don't have too many injuries to speak of and Chicago's offense is just as lifeless and drab as their defense. Defending a team with an offensive "system" like Chicago is defense on easy mode. Chicago's offense basically boils down to a movement or two back and forth between a guard and a big, some aimless dribbling as their teammates refuse to seek out position, and a sudden realization that the shot clock is down to 5 seconds and they need to shoot it. End result? A lot of midrange jumpers -- a LOT of them. Most of them reasonably well contested, too. This has gotten even worse as of late with Joakim Noah out, who augments his defensive value with essential post passing and strong screens to free up their guards. It's rough.

All that said, if Noah comes back mid-round and the Nets punch under their weight (neither of which are particularly outlandish thoughts), the Bulls could win the series pretty handily. This series strikes me as one of those "Hawks/Heat 2009" type affairs -- it will be well-contested, long, and (probably) vindicating for one of the two fanbases at war. But by dint of combining an offense so terrible with a defense so terrible, the series will also be virtually unwatchable by anyone who doesn't love pain. Come back soon, Derrick! (Not this season, but someday, please.)

DEWEY'S TAKE: Main story's always Thibodeau because his players come and go because of injury. As you well know, Thibs' Bulls innovatively have seven players on the court at any time, plus Thibodeau himself torturing his opponents with his heavy-metal, sleep-deprivation-for-listener-and-speaker voice. He packs the box (the basketball court) with more players than the other team, because of a clever (and tenacious) misreading of zone defense rules. His players' minutes always threaten to break Wilt's 48+ record every season. Thibs hates Nate Robinson, but is more willing than you to immolate himself with the pain of Nate Robinson to win games. That's why he's a champion.

• • •

TEAM #12: HOUSTON ROCKETS____ (Western 8th seed: 45-37, SRS of 3.34)

• Series prediction: Rockets LOSE in the first round. ( • • • • )
• Three most likely end results: 3-4 ( • • • • ), 2-4 ( • • • • ), 1-4 ( • • )

I know what you're thinking. "Why, pray tell, is Houston so high on this? They're an eight seed going up against a historically strong first seed in a tough Western conference. Isn't that an easy call?" Yes, it is. On its face, sure. The Thunder are knocking on the doors of history -- they finished the season with an average margin of victory of 9.2 points per game. Some important context on that: only eight teams in NBA history finished with a differential that high, and seven of those eight went on to win the title. The only one that didn't? The 1972 Bucks, who lost the title because they had to play the best team within those eight, the 1972 Lakers! Very few teams put together that kind of a dominant regular season and don't finish it off with a title. In fact, all but one of them swept or gentleman-swept the first round. So why should the Thunder be worried about the Rockets?

Simple. Variance.

One of the advantages of modern statistical team-building is that it has keyed in a few smart underdog franchises to a variety of strategies to even the playing field. And the Houston Rockets are a stat-heavy dreamboat. Morey, McHale, and the powers that be knew that the Rockets would face a talent deficit this season -- they're one of the youngest teams in the league, superstar or no, and they were going to need a way to swing the odds in their favor when they played against teams that were markedly better. And what's the best way to do that? Force the issue. Play at an obscenely high tempo, constantly setting up your offense in semi-transition and jacking up more three pointers than the world thought possible. A low percentage three pointer is a better shot for an underdog than a slightly-better-percentage midrange, because every possession you can deign to outscore your opponent by 3-0 or 3-2 adds to your team's handicap. Speed the game up, force the opponent into an uncomfortable foul situation, and take as many high-variance scoring opportunities as possible. It isn't Moneyball -- it's upset-ball. It's how the We Believe Warriors upset an amazing Mavericks team. It's how bad teams beat good teams.

Fun fact, though. That cuts both ways. This Rockets team can play with anyone in the league if they err on the side of a good shooting night, and they can upset -- quite literally -- anyone in a single game. But they also can get blown to kingdom come if they err on the side of a poor shooting night, as seen in their 30 point loss to Golden State, their dual 22 point losses to OKC, and their 20 point blowout at home to San Antonio. The Rockets are great, but if their threes stop falling, they don't just become beatable. They become waif-thin, and they can get blown out even if your team has a bad night. For this reason, I can't see anyone really picking the Rockets to beat OKC. But I do think they'll have a game or two where their threes start falling and the Thunder can't quite keep up -- nobody could. So I'll predict a 6 to 7 game series -- one that the Thunder will win, and win well, but one where the Rockets put a bit of the fear of God into OKC's heart. Should be a lot of fun, regardless.

DEWEY'S TAKE: The exact opposite of the Bulls, a team that plays defense a) incidentally or b) because Kevin McHale is a very kind man and gee, it wouldn't be right for him to have to play you less than you deserve, young man. You don't want me to play Omer Asik 48 minutes, do you? He doesn't play very good offense, at all. You wouldn't want that. But he does defend. Can you defend? Good, do it. Here's a tasty protein shake filled with nutriments. I swear it's not so chalky when you actually try it. Best, Daryl.

• • •

TEAM #11: LOS ANGELES LAKERS____ (Western 7th seed: 45-37, SRS of 1.49)

• Series prediction: Lakers LOSE in the first round. (• • • )
• Three most likely end results: 2-4 (• • • • ), 3-4 ( • • • ), 5-7 ( • )

I toyed with picking the Lakers to win against the Spurs, but I can't do it. I'll get to my assessment of the State of the San Antonio Union in a later Prognostirank post, but for now, one must pay the Lakers their due -- the plucky $100 million underdogs have scrapped their way into the playoffs. That's not meant to be mocking or facetious, either -- it's a solid accomplishment that this injured and disappointing team should be quite proud of. You may remember Alex once wrote a piece outlining how well the Lakers would have to play in the later stretches of the season if they intended to make the playoffs. Guess what? They played exactly that well. They won a lot of close games, completely erasing their exceptionally unlucky start to the season. They spent the first 2-3 months losing games they should've won and winning once by 20 points for every three losses by 2 points. They proceeded to spend the last few months winning games they should've lost and losing once by 20 points for every three wins by 2 points, which amounted to a final record that's -- somehow -- almost exactly what it should have been, given their margin of victory and their strength of schedule. Fun stuff.

Still. After the season ends, there will be ample time to write billions more words about the Laker team we can't stop talking about, so we'll axe the retrospective and start a series prospectus. How do the Lakers match up against the Spurs? Pretty well, on an individual-to-individual basis. Tim Duncan is a wonderfully deserving first-team All-NBA player who -- at his age -- has a mite bit of trouble with athletic big men, much like Dwight Howard's currently revitalized form. Ron Artest has the bulk to cause Kawhi Leonard a bit of trouble, and the cryptkeeper form Steve Nash is bumming about should wash out Tony Parker until Parker's rehab starts taking effect. Danny Green and Gary Neal can shoot, but so can Jodie Meeks in small portions, and Pau Gasol's recently revitalized play should realistically outduel Tiago Splitter. On an individual-to-individual basis, one's tempted to pick the Lakers. Even without Kobe around to tip the scales further in L.A.'s favor.

Here's the issue. It's not a one-on-one game, and even if you accept that the Spurs' bench looks like crap lately, one has trouble ignoring just how poorly L.A.'s general defense matches up against San Antonio's motion-offense playbook. Laker rotations this season have been somewhat predictable. They rotate well on one to two movements, but they miss the boat entirely if you complicate things further. And if you force a switch? Congratulations -- you've earned a completely wide open shot. Howard's recovery has gotten better over the past few months, but it doesn't erase L.A.'s general lack of quickness at anticipating the third motion of a play. Nor does it erase the fact that half of San Antonio's current perceived weakness is based around the fact that their threes simply aren't falling. The Spurs shot -- not a typo -- 31% on three pointers over the last 10 games of the regular season. They shot 39% on threes over the other 72 games of the 2013 season, and they shot 39% from three last season. If the Spurs shoot 31% from three over the course of the series, yes, they'll probably lose.

But that seems a bit unlikely. My take? The Lakers will upset the Spurs in one of the first few games, much like the 2011 Hornets split the first two games with a vastly superior Laker team. The Spurs will split the series in L.A., then take care of business in the last two games and head into the second round a healthier team than they are now, with Diaw back, Manu in decent shape, and Tony back to a decent facsimile of his MVP-3rd-place form. Teams can -- and often do -- slump badly heading into the postseason without suffering too much for their late-season sins -- just look at last year's Thunder (7-7 in their last 14) or last year's Heat (11-9 in their last 20). The Lakers have a shot, and if Kobe was around, I'd be tempted to pick them further. But I just can't do it.

DEWEY'S TAKE: If they win any game they will win every game and if they lose even once they will never win again. This is what I've been told about the Lakers season, and, remarkably, it was pretty true to life. They haven't lost that big one yet, though. What more can you say about them except they were bad but then they were good. They can't defend a box but they can get to the line and nothing about this team makes any sense even after watching what seems like 50-60 games. I watched them spitefully in lieu of the Spurs. I regret this immensely. The Hawks are a plea of the Basketball Gods to end basketball; the Lakers are Satan.

• • •

A few end-matter notes -- I'll be putting up the next part of the prognostirank series (with the last two first-round exits and my second round predictions) tomorrow. Parts three and four, outlining my conference finals picks and my NBA finals pick, will go up early next week. All of the predictions are already chosen -- I will not be editing the picks to adjust for anything we see in the intervening playoff games. I'd like to thank Hoopchalk for their excellent Playoff Preview Capsule series (used for some of the initial scouting here), as well as NBA League Pass and Basketball Reference for the game-watching experience and the stats to draw on when writing these.

Stay frosty, friends.

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