What Happened To The NBA Playoffs
Oh brother these games stink!
There are four basketball teams left in the quest to win a championship, and I’m less interested than I've been all year.
The NBA playoffs are typically when the games get fun. There’s full, committed defensive efforts and the superstars are forced to carry more of the burden in order to carry their teams to the promised land.
But something has felt missing as the playoffs have progressed, and the clear answer is because the games just have not been very close.
The margin of victory is the easiest metric to see, but that would say that the second round has actually been the least interesting:
First round: 11.1 average margin of victory
Conference Semifinals: 16.8 average margin
Conference Finals: 14.3 average margin
But sometimes the final score can be deceiving, and as the best teams have supposedly risen to the top and sit just a few wins away from a championship, the games have gotten much less interesting.
To gauge this more accurately, I have considered three qualities to a “good” basketball game:
Final score within 10 points
Score after three quarters within 10 points
Eventual winner was trailing or tied after three quarters
Usually, if a game was close and interesting for the majority of the action, then one or multiple of these things was true. This is most certainly not a fool-proof system, but this is as much effort as you will get from me.
First Round
43 games
25 games with final scores within 10 points
25 games with score after three quarters within 10 points
11 games with winner trailing or tied after three quarters
In well over half (58.1 percent) of the opening round matchups, the final result was close, and in the same amount of games, the game was close headed to the fourth. These were not the same 25 games either. In total, 30 of the 43 games (69.8 percent) were either close at the start or the end of the fourth.
The least likely of these three outcomes — a team coming back to win after trailing through three quarters — happened 25.6 percent of the time. In my favorite outcome of the first round, the Memphis Grizzlies trailed by 16 entering the fourth before winning by nine, one of the many blown leads by the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Looking as a whole, 61 “cool” things happened by this metric to make games interesting, for a total of 1.42 per game.
Conference Semifinals
25 games
11 games with final scores within 10 points
13 games with score after three quarters within 10 points
4 games with winner trailing or tied after three quarters
Round one may have been more exciting generally here, but there was still a fair amount of enjoyment to find in this round. This was especially true for the start of a lot of these series, with all four opening games having at least one of the “cool” things I am looking for.
But the end of each series was foreboding for what was to come. In the final two games of each series in this round, just two — Game 6 of Miami-Philadelphia and Game 6 of Memphis-Golden State — had any “cool” thing, and neither of those games were particularly exciting either.
Still, there were 28 “cool” things in total, enough for 1.12 per game.
Conference Finals (so far)
9 games
4 games with final scores within 10 points
2 games with score after three quarters within 10 points
1 games with winner trailing or tied after three quarters
This is dreadful, and it is even more dreadful when considering that this is when the teams are supposed to be closer than ever. How is it that less than half of the games have finished with a margin of 10 or less.
Even worse, how could it be possible that just two, TWO, of the nine games have started the fourth quarter with a margin of 10 or less.
The more details you give, the worse it gets. Not one game has finished within five points yet. Three of the good final results are 9, 9 and 10 points, the latter of which was a Golden State-Dallas game where the Mavs entered the fourth with a 29-point lead. The only time the third quarter leader didn’t win thus far is Golden State-Dallas Game 2. There, the Mavericks held a lead for all of 18 seconds in the fourth, then never led again.
I don’t know exactly what’s going on in Miami-Boston, which is a 3-2 series and has yet to have a single good game. It’s pitiful, disgusting even, and I just want that abomination of a series to end.
Will the NBA Finals be worse? Will the rest of these current series get better? I sure hope not. All I know is I’ve chosen almost anything else to watch instead of the end of these games. The Stanley Cup Playoffs hasn’t been perfect, but it has certainly been better. Hell, the WNBA is at the start of the regular season and I’ve watched that instead of this.
Surely, this is some weird anomaly and it is bound to get better in these final games of 2021-22. But I am starting to lose hope. How are we nine games into the conference finals and the games are this bad?
I don’t have these answers, I just hope that I’ve jinxed it and that I can write about some fun games in the future.
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