Whoaaaa, get a load of this! The NBA playoffs are starting tomorrow. Yes yes, there are more play-in tournament games tonight, but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the real playoffs, and get you caught up to speed so that you may witness these contests with all the basketball knowledge one could possibly need filling your skull.
Before we get to the previews, however, we wanted to talk about some other important issues facing the NBA. Below you will find a roundtable discussion between Defector's biggest basketball nerds about tanking, uncompetitive regular-season games, and the NBA's popularity crisis. There's a lot to discuss on those topics, so be sure to check that out.
Just kidding! God, that would be awful. OK, here are the previews.
Minnesota Timberwolves (6) at Denver Nuggets (3), by Tom Ley
When's this shit getting underway?
Saturday, April 18, 3:30 ET on Amazon Prime.
Explain to me what is going on with these two basketball squadrons.
What's going on with these two basketball squadrons is that they are getting ready to meet in what should be the most entertaining series of the first round.
A couple things feed into that entertainment factor, chief among them the Wolves and Nuggets developing a bit of a nasty rivalry over the past few seasons. When the Nuggets brushed aside a much younger and less complete version of this Wolves team on their way to the title in 2023, several of Denver's players later said that the series against Minnesota was their most difficult of the postseason. That analysis became prophetic the next postseason, when the Wolves spent seven games beating the crap out of the defending champs in the second round, and erased a 20-point second half deficit to beat the Nugs on their home floor in Game 7.
Ever since, Denver has been trying to prove that it can stand up to Minnesota's physicality, while the Wolves have been entering games against the Nuggets with the confidence of a bully who just stumbled upon a playground full of nerds. The Wolves stayed on top during the 2024–25 season, when they went 4-0 against the Nuggets in the regular season, though the two teams avoided each other in the playoffs. Denver took the season series this time around, however, going 3-1 against Minnesota and possibly moving past the vast amounts of psychic damage the Timberwolves have caused them since 2023. The overtime thriller that these two teams played on Christmas Day, a 142-138 Denver win, might have been the best game of the season.
And now they meet in the playoffs again. The Nuggets are healthier and deeper than they have been at any point since their championship run, and the Wolves are a more chaotic, thinner group than they were the previous two seasons. Most people will probably pick the Nuggets to win this one, which could prove to be a bad omen.
Who are the men involved in this contest?
The two main men are obviously Minnesota's Anthony Edwards and Denver's Nikola Jokic. Both had statistically spectacular regular seasons that were otherwise kind of a drag. Injuries kept both players out of the lineup for significant portions of the season—Edwards played in 61 games, while Jokic appeared in 65—and they each had to navigate some long, dispiriting stretches of basketball. When Jokic returned from his knee injury in February, he embarked on a weeks-long meltdown in which his main focus in every game was getting pissed off at the referees. Edwards, meanwhile, could never really get his team into a sustained groove, and was likely driven crazy by both Julius Randle's shot selection and Rudy Gobert's ceaseless requesting of the ball.
Anyway, Jokic and Edwards are great, two of the most dynamic and entertaining players in the league, and they will be great in this series.
The other two most important men, and the ones who may very well end up deciding how this all goes, are Denver's Aaron Gordon and Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels. These two cool guys occupy similar roles for their respective teams. They are there to be strong, competent, and versatile on both ends of the floor, and to just generally make life easier for their superstar running mates.
Gordon does this by being the one guy in the Nuggets' starting lineup who is quick and strong enough to defend multiple positions, and by being a highly competent third option on offense. When teams sell out to harass Jamal Murray in the backcourt, front and beat up on Jokic in the halfcourt, and do everything else they can to gum up the Nuggets' two-man game, it's Gordon they need on the floor to drive to the basket, hit open threes, and catch lobs for dunks.
McDaniels, meanwhile, will be tasked with generating good secondary offense on the rare occasions that he can pry the ball out of Randle's hands, and on defense he will likely be unleashed on both of Denver's star players. The Wolves became such a nightmare for the Nuggets partly because of how well they matched up with them. Karl-Anthony Towns was able to guard Jokic, leaving Gobert free to roam the paint and keep everything away from the rim. McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker were simultaneously unleashed on Jamal Murray, who looked like a little kid while he struggled to dribble through their full-court pressure. Towns and Alexander-Walker are no longer on this team, which leaves McDaniels and Gobert as the last remaining ingredients of that period of domination. Don't be surprised if you see McDaniels guarding Murray full-court for one portion of the game, and then fronting Jokic on the block during another. He's going to be very tired come next week.
Will it be good? Tell me if the series will be good!
Yes, it should be good, because it's very hard to predict. The Nuggets profile as heavy favorites, given that they are mostly healthy and sailing into the postseason on a 12-game winning streak. And yet this is also a team that went 22-22 over a large portion of the season and hasn't played good defense since November. The good feelings from the win streak will fade extremely quickly if the Timberwolves have 74 points at the end of the first half of Game 1 and Christian Braun, Denver's biggest weakness on offense, is 0-5 from three-point range.
The only thing that might prevent the Wolves from taking advantage of these weaknesses are their own vulnerabilities. McDaniels and Edwards have not been healthy in weeks, and although they are both ready to play in this series, it's entirely possible that they are going to be taking the floor as diminished versions of themselves. Meanwhile, Randle has spent most of the season playing like a guy who was designed in a lab to lose playoff games, and the whole team has gotten to the point where they are throwing their hands up in disgust every time Gobert takes a shot. The vibes are not good in Minnesota, which is why everything depends on Edwards's health in this series. Nobody's better at at performing vibes-replacement therapy than this guy, and so if he's hitting pull-up threes and talking trash to the Denver crowd by Game 2, the Nugs might be in trouble.
Who will win?
Don't make me LAUGH. The Nuggets will win, you fool!
Golden Phoenix Sunwarriors (8) at Oklahoma City Thunder (1), by David Roth
When does it start?
Sunday, April 19, 3:30 ET on ABC.
What are these teams' respective deals?
A long enough season will leave a person so inclined plenty of time to overthink things, and one as overlong as the NBA’s regular season will give such a person time to talk themselves into and out of all kinds of stuff. The fact of it, where the Oklahoma City Thunder are concerned, is that they have been the best team in the league all year both in terms of winning the most games and by more refined metrics like net rating. Both the dumb raw numbers and the fancy abstract ones suggest that the Thunder are not just better than any other team in the sport, but historically good—just as they were last year, when they won the NBA championship, if maybe not quite as much so.
There is more to say about it, but this just is what it is. The Thunder are good enough that even a person who doesn't watch a lot of basketball could pick their dominance up after watching a couple quarters of them playing against basically any other NBA team, and that assessment would be both valid and correct; the Thunder are that good, and this is not just evident but oppressively and a little obnoxiously obvious after a half hour or so of watching them do the things they do. But a season that sprawls over 82 games and nearly six months is long enough for that dominance to phase in and out of obviousness.
The Thunder started this year by winning 24 of their first 25 games; when the San Antonio Spurs beat them in December, it was meaningful enough that I 1) blogged it, and 2) did so in a way that implied that the achievement would be more or less impossible for any other team to replicate. Simply confront what was a moderately shorthanded Thunder team—Jalen Williams, one of the stars of last year’s championship team, only got into 33 games this year—with Literally Victor Wembanyama and apex-level De'Aaron Fox and a deep supporting cast of indefatigable athletes and you might, might, also stand a chance.
The Thunder were not "win 96 percent of their games" dominant after that opening tear, but basketball doesn't work like that. That they won merely a league-best 64 games, by a meager/league-leading 11.1 points per game, also means that the Thunder went 40-17 after that historic start. There is nothing there that suggests that the Thunder are much more vulnerable than they were last year, when they proved pretty well bulletproof.
But from one moment to the next, after that start, the Thunder were just normal enough that it was possible for someone so inclined—someone who was sick of the Thunder's cynically optimized approach or comparatively dorky aesthetics or defending MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's shelf-stable inevitability—to talk themselves into an outcome that was different than last year. This was wishcasting, and honestly still is, but it's not crazy: The Boston Celtics, regrettably, have That Feeling about them; the Spurs really spent a lot of the back half of the season looking like they were maybe actually as good as the Thunder, and also as if they were solving some longstanding basketball equations that previously didn't seem open to solutions; there are a handful of other teams that are good enough to, with some luck, stake themselves to a proper puncher's chance in a series. But nothing that happened this season really suggests that the Thunder are much less likely to win the title than they were last year, when they quite reasonably and inexorably won it. It's more the length of that season, and the way the randomness distributed itself across it, that suggested any of that. They are once again the best team in the league, and that is that until further notice.
They will be playing either the Golden State Warriors or the Phoenix Suns, for what promises to be a brief and inconsequential while. The Warriors, a dynasty in eclipse that's still capable of some fun stuff, would be an interesting foil. The Suns, who as presently constituted are a Suicide Squad–style assembly of talented players with extremely let's say polarizing personalities and/or games, could also deliver some intriguingly annoying opposition; they significantly outperformed expectations in what had seemed like a year of either rebuilding or retrenchment. Neither seems remotely capable of pushing this particular series to six games. This is nothing against either, to be clear. It's just that this is still the Thunder.
Who are their guys?
It is not quite right to say this about a team that features the league's reigning Most Valuable Player, but what makes the Thunder so good is that their whole team is Their Guys. Gilgeous-Alexander, who scored 31.1 points per game in implausibly efficient fashion, is as close to unstoppable as any player in the sport; he'll either get the shot he wants or some free throws. Chet Holmgren, who was already very good while figuring things out on the job last season, landed a small but notable leap this year and is fully a shot-altering and shot-blocking force. But the Thunder play a ton of players, and those players are by and large astonishingly effective in their comparatively limited roles. Jared McCain was the 16th pick of last year's draft by the Philadelphia 76ers, acquired at a discount, and instantly an important role player; Ajay Mitchell was a second-round pick of the Knicks who suddenly became an all-around contributor with the Thunder this season; Isaiah Hartenstein, who blossomed elsewhere as a versatile big and was the rare market-rate free agent signing, is a fulcrum on both ends of the floor; Alex Caruso, famously, was not drafted at all and nevertheless became Alex Caruso.
They all do the same shit, much of which amounts to a sort of DDOS attack on the limits of NBA officiating: What if every player really is fouling on every play? But they do it together, and in their respective lanes, and with a metronomic and entirely non-accidental efficiency. They're not inevitable, of course. The playoffs have too much basketball in them for that. But they are not really much worse than last year's champions, and that was one of the most dominant teams in decades. The Warriors' guys are all known to anyone who followed the NBA in 2018, and are all available for the first time in a while; Phoenix's Dillon Brooks remains the NBA player who seems the most like the chief henchman in a 1999 action movie called Futurecop. Draymond Green would also flourish in that role. Anyway, they are food.
Will it be good?
It should be brisk.
Who will win?
You, the viewer.
Philadelphia 76ers (7) at Boston Celtics (2), by Patrick Redford
When the hell does this crap start?
Sunday, April 19, 1:00 ET on ABC.
What's going on with these damn teams?
The Celtics are once again the toast of the NBA, having overcome Jayson Tatum's Achilles tear and the semi-annual shuffling off of core veterans right at the moment before they start to fall off. Nobody played like Boston this season, with presumptive Coach of the Year Joe Mazzulla eschewing many of the principles of hypermodern offense to play a low-turnover, isolation-heavy style that was nakedly disinterested in getting shots at the rim, choosing instead to generate kick-outs for guys like the be-mulleted Baylor Scheierman and Derrick White. That system worked beautifully this year, with Jaylen Brown playing so well that the Boston media propaganda machine briefly ginned up an MVP campaign when there wasn't much else to talk about in January.
And that was before Jayson Tatum came back, apparently having pushed the frontiers of Achilles recovery forward by like seven months. He has been basically fine since returning in March, shoring up the slight weakness across Boston's frontline by grabbing 10 boards per game. These guys could maybe win the title, and a lot of people are going to pick them to do so.
As for their opponents, Philly has had a really weird season. On the one hand, V.J. Edgecombe has had an incredible rookie campaign, Tyrese Maxey is an All-NBA guy, and they struck gold in signing Dominick Barlow. On the other, Joel Embiid has been mostly healthy yet not in a way that has really mattered, Paul George served a weird 25-game drug suspension, and the front office traded talented second-year guard Jared McCain for peanuts. This team is pure mid, though in a sort of exciting way when Edgecombe and Maxey get going. At their best, the Sixers are bullies. Their frontline is less skilled than beefed, and they function best when they can win the turnover battle, get out in transition, and spend the game pummeling the opposition. It's not the beautiful game, nor is it reliable, but it got them here, so.
Who are the guys of note?
Everyone knows about the Celtics guys. Oh wow did you know Payton Pritchard can dribble really fast? Cool, fine, whatever.
I would like to sing the praises of Edgecombe, by highlighting my favorite play from Wednesday night's play-in game between the seventh-seeded Sixers and the eighth-seeding Orlando Magic. Following a Franz Wagner dunk to cut Philly's lead to five with just over two minutes left, the Sixers called a timeout. Head coach Nick Nurse drew something up, seemingly a Paul George–centric pindown action with Tyrese Maxey flashing to the corner on a back screen, though they did not end up running any of it. Instead, Edgecombe saw Orlando's Desmond Bane glance over at the initial action for like a quarter of a second, which was enough of an invitation for him to assault the rim and get fouled.
Maxey halfheartedly shrugged at Edgecombe for having deviated from the set play, though everyone on the Sixers knew the rookie had made the right read. I like Edgecombe's burst to get into the center of the lane here, but more than that I like the confidence. Few rookies have the courage to wave off their highly decorated teammates and coaches like this, derailing a surely intricate scripted play to challenge the opponent at the rim, and I love Edgecombe for it. The Celtics' biggest weakness is lightning-fast guards, and the Sixers have two of those. And yet:
Will this series be good or bad?
Bad.
Who will win?
Celtics.
Houston Rockets (5) at Los Angeles Lakers (4), by Ray Ratto
When does this monumental battle commence?
Saturday, April 18, 8:30 p.m. ET, through the auspices of the ABC network. Since the other three games that day are on Prime, this may be your only choice if you refuse to give Jeff Bezos any more of your money.
What are we to make of these two teams?
The Lakers are down to the still-electric ghost of LeBron James, so on its face this matchup is a downscale version of the past vs. the future, and you know how basketball fans love the past. Los Angeles without Luka Doncic is 8-7, and nobody is fooled by the notion that they are anything better than that. Without Austin Reaves as the other wing man, they seem like shells of their former selves, a division winner without competition but a distance from the conference's two elites in Oklahoma City and San Antonio. On the other hand, the Lakers are still built on the notion that LeBron is the last magician in the world, even though the team has only the COVID title to its name since he got there, so him by his lonesome still seems like the less inspired choice.
Houston's gift to the game is lively legs and healthy lungs and the will to expend their gifts of preventing others from doing what they wish on offense. The Rockets are built along the same tactical lines as Oklahoma City, in that they hold teams under 100 almost routinely, which in general is a useful model in the postseason. The only valid reason to doubt them in this matchup is the obvious and persistent role of the galactic pixies in making the otherwise excellent Kevin Durant sad in the biggest moments, because Amen Thompson, Alperen Sengun, Jabari Smith Jr. and the still useful Clint Capela make the Rockets deeper and better than the Doncic-and-Reaves–less Lakers.
Tell me of the men involved in this clash.
We already did, you brickheaded lout. The playoffs are about the players, not the coaches or the history or the juju or whatever else the insiders imagine are factors, and the Rockets have more good ones. Frankly, you can revel in the waning moments of LeBronCorp all you want, but Durant is probably the most fascinating single story because he is decidedly weirder than his game, and his game is still as good as it has ever been. If you need something else, Houston coach Ime Udoka seems like he has a better handle on this than J.J. Redick does on the Lakers, but that may be a value judgment based on nothing, which is our specialty around here. The West has been transitioning away from the Lakers/Warriors axis for years now, and Houston is among the inheritors.
Will it be good or bad?
Without Doncic in particular, it will be brief, and therefore not good. The 4-5 series has produced no champions ever and only four finalists out of 630 series since the format changed to top-eight qualification in 1984, so let's be charitable and say it will be inconsequential.
Who will win?
Houston, because the Lakers are older, slower, and not fully intact, and because their history hasn't been worth retelling in the last 15 years despite people's insistence on telling it. They are the Sixers with more frontrunners, if that's your idea of a good time.
Charlando Hormagic (8) at Detroit Pistons (1), by Luis Paez-Pumar
When does this stuff commence?
After the Charlando Hormagic figure out their shit on Friday night at 7:30 p.m. ET on the damn Prime Video, the first game of this series will be at 6:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, April 19, on NBC.
Tell to me the deal of these teams.
There's a tendency in NBA analysis to proclaim that a team is on an Oklahoma City Thunder trajectory. Interestingly, this speaks to two different eras of Thunder basketball: first, the rise of the Kevin Durant–Russell Westbrook–James Harden 2010s Thunder, and now the dominance of the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander–and–company Thunder. Either way, it's simple in concept: A team acquires a young superstar-in-the-making, still stinks but shows promise, then slowly fills out the roster with enough talent to ascend into the top ranks of the NBA. This trajectory isn't promised to every young team with a bright young star, but it's thrilling to see it happen whenever it does. This is where the Detroit Pistons come in.
Two seasons ago, the Pistons won 14 games. Then last season, they made a big jump to 44 wins and the sixth seed, losing in the first round to the New York Knicks in six games. Then this season, the Pistons finally hit the heights that their talent had hinted at, thanks to continued excellence from Cade Cunningham, acquired with the top overall pick in 2021, and the marked improvement of Jalen Duren, who went from an intriguing piece to a likely All-NBA Third Teamer. Detroit won 60 games, third most in the NBA and enough for the No. 1 seed in the East, and while I'd take every Western Conference contender over any Eastern Conference team this season, the Pistons might be the ones best suited to upset the West if they make the Finals. (Sadly for me, a Celtics hater, Boston also has a good shot to do that.)
How did the Pistons improve so steadily? There's no easy answer, because Detroit just improved at everything. Over the past two seasons, the Pistons went from a terrible offense and terrible defense to the ninth-best offense in the NBA and the second-best defense, behind only the all-time great Thunder unit. Behind Cunningham and Duren, the Pistons also have three other players with at least five win shares (Duncan Robinson, Ausar Thompson, and Tobias Harris), and depth with "B-ball" Paul Reed, Javonte Green, and Isaiah "Beef Stew" Stewart (as long as he doesn't try to fight someone). This is a rugged team that can also score on pretty much anyone in the East, which helped Detroit finish in a tie with the San Antonio Spurs for the second-best net rating (+8.4) in the league.
This first-round matchup should be as close to a freebie as there is in the NBA Playoffs. The Charlando Hormagic will settle their intra-squad differences on Friday night in a play-in scrimmage, and no matter who wins, they will enter this series as huge underdogs. The teal squad has somehow been the second-best collective in the NBA for the second half of the season, but were pushed into a ridiculous play-in finish by the Miami Heat (thank god that's over) on Tuesday. LaMelo Ball somehow escaped a suspension for taking Bam Adebayo's leg out from under him, so he'll be available for both Friday's scrimmage and any potential Pistons series. The Huggin' Hugos will go as far as Ball and Kon Knueppel lead them, though the latter had a real turd of a game against Miami; he might be the best shooter in the league, but he's still a rookie.
On the other side of the scrimmage, Stuff the Magic Dragon and his wizardly charges got beat by the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday, and frankly, I don't have much to say about them. The Illusionists squad seemed to be on a Thunder trajectory, but have regressed hard this season, and there are certainly questions to be asked about Paolo Banchero's ability to be a positive force on an NBA team, never mind a star. Honestly, Les Magiques bum me out, so I hope the Buzz City Buds win the scrimmage and take center stage for Charlando against Detroit. At the very least, we might get a replay of the wild February fight between the two.
Who are the important guys?
I guess I already told you about all the guys.
Is this series good or bad?
Honestly, it's going to be like shit from a butt. Detroit is very good, and Charlando is not. It could be an interesting series, though, if the bad blood lingering from February shows back up.
Who's gonna win?
Gone are the days of the Detroit Pee Stones, and so I feel pretty confident that, no matter what team comes out of Friday night's pebble-fight scrimmage in Charlando, the Pistons will take this series in, oh what the hell, five games.
Portland Trail Blazers (7) at San Antonio Spurs (2) by Patrick Redford
When the hell does this crap start?
Sunday, April 19, at 9:00 p.m. ET on NBC.
What's going on with these damn teams?
All eyes will be on Victor Wembanyama as he makes his playoff debut. Over the last two months of the regular season, consensus began to shift to the opinion that he was either the best player in the NBA, or was about to become the best player in the NBA. That is great and cool and ultimately fluff when the evidence is hanging 40 on the hapless Dallas Mavericks. The playoffs are what matters, where Wembanyama will have to do it against defenses whose gameplan is totally geared toward beating the shit out of him on every possession and denying him space to work.
Around Wemby, the Spurs have an incredible cast of ballhandlers, led by De'Aaron Fox. Wemby's defensive omnipresence allows those guards to play super aggressive against ballhandlers and also lets the Spurs get away with playing pure shooter Julian Champagnie a ton. This team has been essentially perfect for 10 weeks, going 32-4 since the end of January, finishing the season with the third-best defense and the fourth-best offense in the NBA. During that stretch, jumpy muscleman Carter Bryant has emerged, fellow rookie Dylan Harper has continued to improve, and Keldon Johnson has rounded out his Sixth Man of The Year candidacy. This team is deep and really well put-together around Wemby.
Portland is a nasty, defense-first team whose games I find pretty tough on the eyes. The stuff Deni Avdija is doing—dribbling with his right hand super hard into someone's chest, then recoiling as if yanked offstage by an oversized novelty cane—is bad to watch, and it's the entire foundation of Portland's offense. The Blazers were all hurt and banged-up this season, though they are just now getting healthy at the right time, which makes them oddly deep. Shaedon Sharpe, who kind of stinks now, is coming off the bench? Donovan Clingan, who is an incredible defensive anchor despite barely being able to move his feet, shoots threes? Scoot Henderson and Matisse Thybulle are doing stuff, but not well? Weird team. I don't think they can make this a long series.
Who are the guys of note?
De'Aaron Fox has had an incredible season, though if you merely looked at the stats, you'd see his lowest usage since his sophomore campaign in Sacramento. When you watch, you see a confident operator who knows how to make all of his teammates better. Fox is a master of creating space, typically by applying pressure to a defense with his speed. Nobody is faster with the ball, and his game really took off in 2022–23 when he learned to modulate his speed to engineer an endless supply of pretty much wide-open 12-footers in the center of the lane. He is a good enough shooter that you have to play him close, which created problems for defenses when he was hitting the T-Rex-armed Domantas Sabonis on the roll and spraying it to bad shooters on the wing.
Now, he not only has Wemby to play with and deadeye shooters like Devin Vassell to kick to, he has fellow attack-dog guards to clear the runway for. Perhaps the most impressive part of Fox's season is how he's helped unlock Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper. Castle is not a shooter, though he's such a violent athlete that he more than makes up for his seeming spatial liabilities. It might seem odd that the Spurs are so dedicated to playing two ballhandlers when only one of them can really shoot it, but the pressure they create is something to behold. Their interplay is extremely fun to watch, and for a forever De'Aaron Fox stan, it has been marvelous to see him fully activated.
Will this series be good or bad?
Good.
Who will win?
Spurs.
Toronto Raptors (5) at Cleveland Cavaliers (4) by Chris Thompson
When does this crap start?
This crap starts Saturday, April 18, at 1:00 p.m., on Prime Video. The East's 4-5 matchup tends to get the dreaded early Saturday start, to hurry it out of sight, because everyone is justifiably skeptical that either team is truly worth a damn. This is the second time in three years that the Cavaliers have played in this slot; last time they won a seven-game series over the Orlando Magic, and were then clobbered in the second round. But! Last season the Indiana Pacers went all the way from the 1:00 p.m. Saturday start to the Finals. Wow!
What is the deal with this crap?
For a sort of dreary lunchtime matchup of presumed also-rans, there's some fun to at least imagine in the contrasts between these teams. The Cavaliers are a really good offensive team with a middling defense, and the Raptors are a ferocious defensive team with a ho-hum, somewhat underpowered offense. Even if that were the plain size of it, you could imagine the series taking an interesting shape as the teams match strength on strength. I say "imagine" because, however valiantly I may argue on behalf of this series, certainly you will find something better to do on a beautiful spring Saturday than watch this crap on your television. Still, the replays might be fun!
The Cavs made a big move ahead of the trade deadline back in February, shipping Darius Garland to the Los Angeles Clippers for James Harden. This is a like-for-like swap, in the broad strokes: Garland is an electric ball-handler and shot-creator who doesn't do a ton off the ball and absolutely cannot hold up defensively, and Harden is an older and slower electric ball-handler and shot-creator who loiters off-ball and has a reputation for shoddy defensive work. But Garland is never healthy—he has the heft and musculoskeletal integrity of a wren—and Harden is a horse. It's an underrated accomplishment from Harden's career that he has played 70 or more games in 13 NBA seasons, including a few seasons where he shouldered basically unprecedented nightly responsibilities. For a Cavaliers team that won 64 games last regular season and can semi-credibly continue to think of itself as a championship contender, you can see the appeal of a guy who is Darius Garland, in ways both good and bad, while also reliable. True to form, Harden missed just four games after the trade to Cleveland, and only two of them were real, in that they were played against non-tanking teams during the meaningful part of the regular season.
The Cavs also have reason to believe that they can shape up their ho-hum defense for a playoff run. For one thing, the same basic core of players produced top-10 defenses in each of the last two regular seasons. For another, Harden is not precisely exploitable in the same way as Garland. Without getting too deeply into Garland's habits, he is simply too small and slight to hold up defensively; Wednesday night the Golden State Warriors punished him pretty mercilessly, to the tune of a game-worst 136.4 defensive rating, which more than offset the proud work he did as a scorer and table-setter. Harden's problem has been inattention and exhaustion, but he can guard a couple positions; importantly, he can defend up, because he is built like a refrigerator, which means that he can survive just fine in a switching defense, which teams tend to deploy late in shot-clocks during the playoffs.
Toronto didn't swing any midseason deals. They're long and strong and mean, and they've got a couple of hellacious one-man defenses in Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl. Barnes is a do-it-all forward and Poeltl is a delightfully old-timey rim-protecting center, and the Raptors can stagger them as needed to keep their defense stout for 48 minutes. It's hard to imagine them scraping together enough offense to win a series, but they're well-coached and diligent about pulling advantages from the crevasses of an otherwise cramped offense. If they are in a tight game late they have guys who can generate a cool-looking shot for themselves, and sometimes that attribute plays as a postseason superpower, when the sound game theory of pace and space breaks down and the goal becomes to win the next three possessions. The Cavaliers, unfortunately, also have cold-blooded individual shot-creators, so this may not be an advantage for Toronto.
Whew, I have already said a lot about this series. No one's even going to watch this crap.
What guys will be doing all the crap in this series?
The Cavaliers have a powerful backcourt, with Harden and Donovan Mitchell. Mitchell is another True Hooper of a ball-handler, a guy who loves to do moves and make highlights. He can feel himself a little bit too much at times—if he makes two three-pointers in a row, like clockwork he is going to follow them with a reckless one—but he's good for a couple of highlights a night and in general is great to watch. Mitchell has become a metronomic regular-season performer—his per-game and efficiency numbers have basically not wobbled at all for six years running—and fair though it may be to doubt his viability as the first option on a championship contender, certainly he has not failed to produce numbers. At any rate he might not need to be the first option for the Cavs, who now have Harden. Unfortunately, Harden's playoff track record is marred to really astounding depths of scarring by some of the really legendary personal flameouts in the history of the sport.
The Cavs get their defensive juice from a well-oiled scheme, yes, but primarily from center Jarrett Allen and forward Evan Mobley, the latter of whom is a former Defensive Player of the Year. Allen's been hurt but head coach Kenny Atkinson said Wednesday that he's been a full participant in practice and is cleared for action. Mobley has not been the all-court destructor that he was last season, but he still kicks ass and he will need all his powers to bother Toronto's several large shot-creators in this series. Mobley and Allen also have some fun passing chemistry, and they are both terrifying receivers in the pick-and-roll.
Barnes is a star. He's become a great defender, and he is also fine as an offensive engine. There are limitations in his game that will put a cap on the kind of efficiency he can produce on that end—he's not a great three-point shooter, and even more importantly he's a reluctant one—but in a given possession he's got the size and floor game to generate a comfortable shot against most individual matchups, and in the playoffs that's a long way from nothing. The Raptors also have Brandon Ingram, who is slightly more polished offensively and slightly less disruptive defensively, but profiles similarly as uncommonly large for a ball-handler and uncommonly skilled for bonafide rim-protector. Ingram is aces from the mid-range and a tough cover, but the fact is Toronto's offense can bog down from relying on a couple of guys who would prefer not to shoot three-pointers, especially while they share the court with an interior ogre like Poeltl.
Poeltl is not a star, but I personally enjoy the mere fact of him: an awkward brick-handed oaf with zero offensive range who in the recent past has managed to make himself indispensable due to a downright spooky mastery of rim-protection. As longtime Raptors beat reporter Eric Koreen describes it, for the two seasons before this one Poeltl was pretty much single-handedly "the difference between the Raptors being an average team and a horrible one." Poeltl's been hurt this season and limited to just 46 games; more irritatingly, for those of us who enjoy his deal, the Raptors have actually been better defensively this season with Poeltl off the floor. The Raptors were a switching team for much of this season, but switching neutralizes Poeltl's great strength, which is walling off the restricted area in drop coverage. There are teams that could probably play Poeltl off the floor; the Cavs, who run two bigs in their best lineups, might seem to be excluded from the group, except that Harden and Mitchell absolutely must not be allowed to dribble into three-pointers from the top of the key, which will put pressure on Poeltl to get up the floor when his man is screening. Switching seems a better strategy. All of which is to say that Poeltl is sometimes a guy who is doing crap, but in this series he may find himself a guy who is sitting on the bench.
The Raptors also have Immanuel Quickley and R.J. Barrett, a couple of former Knicks who frankly I do not enjoy watching. It is fun to say "Sandro Mamukelashvili" and it is fun when Sandro Mamukelashvili is feeling good, as he was in Toronto's absurd 31-0 run against the Magic last month. I am ready to move on to the next section of this preview.
Lay it on me: Is this series good or bad?
Basketball sickos might find it interesting. If you are normal, and thus only really available for one playoff game per day, and really only have the attention for one or two matchups per conference, I think you could do better.
Who is going to win this crap?
The Raptors went 3–0 against the Cavaliers this season, but all of those games happened before Thanksgiving. I don't feel great about this, but I am picking the Cavaliers. I do not expect either of these teams to matter very much in the long run.
Atlanta Hawks (6) at New York Knicks (3), by Giri Nathan
When do the beatings commence?
This Saturday, April 18, at 6:00 p.m. ET on Amazon Prime.
What even are these teams anymore?
These teams have rich beef that is now irrelevant. Their 2021 playoff series established Trae Young as one of history's great Knick antagonists, and Julius Randle as one of history's most pantsless men (miss you, Ju). But neither of those poor souls have anything to do with these teams anymore. This is an encounter between two overhauled franchises with entirely refreshed goals and timelines.
The Knicks find themselves freighted with Actual Expectations for the second straight postseason, having spent much of their future to nail down this particular roster concept. At the 1 and 5 they play Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, our goofy offensive maestros who can create any shot for themselves in the half-court, and who, until the remarkably recent past, refused to develop much chemistry setting screens for one another. Surrounding them are various wing-sized fellows who eat the two stars' defensive sins, hustle, and space the floor. Historically the Knicks have fallen back on a viscous brand of half-court offense that involves Brunson dribbling the orange off the ball for 40 minutes, and despite new head coach Mike Brown's attempts to electro-shock them with ball movement, I suspect we will be seeing a lot of the same once the postseason rolls around. Over the course of Brown's first regular season, the Knicks seesawed hard enough to induce severe nausea in the fanbase: a brilliant start culminating in an NBA Cup win; an apocalyptic winter full of Towns trade rumors and general bile; a return to stability in the silly season. They appear to have gotten their shit together just in time for the hard work to begin.
The Hawks are in the middle of a reinvention. They attempted an intriguing—maybe I was the only person intrigued by it—new build with Trae Young and Kristaps Porzingis, who—maybe this is why no one was intrigued by it—were only healthy enough to play three games together. They promptly abandoned this concept at the trade deadline, salary-dumping their franchise player in what read as a referendum on the diminutive no-defense point guard archetype, and shipping the unicorn to the Bay Area in exchange for the Warriors' most accursed son, Jonathan Kuminga. These moves reflected the front office's deep belief in Atlanta's newly anointed franchise player: Jalen Johnson, a sproingy driver and perceptive passer who can do a half-decent LeBron James impression in transition even as he continues to solve the puzzles of the half-court. Johnson is backed up by a throng of cool wings and his unlikely co-star Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who has broken out of his old 3-and-D role to become a volume scorer in his own right. Since ditching Young and rejiggering their roster they've been one of the top teams in the league, and they now embark on their first-ever postseason with Johnson at the helm.
Who are the relevant men?
The offensive stuff will be familiar. There will be Brunson, rumbling into the paint with the inexorable force and approximate shape of a boulder. There will be Towns, flapping around his appendages like a child descending from sugar rush, displaying his catastrophic non-understanding of a referee's whistle, but still somehow dropping 35. On the other side, there will be Johnson's downhill masterworks, Alexander-Walker's newfound self-creation, and perhaps also some vintage small-guard bucket-getting from C.J. McCollum.
I find myself more drawn to the defense and rebounding guys in this series. Stoppers like Dyson Daniels and Alexander-Walker will be entrusted with shutting down the Brunson offense, and I suspect they will be reasonably effective, which will force Brunson to play more as a distributor. On the other side of the floor, pay attention to my favorite Knick, OG Anunoby, who gums up opposing offenses with his wingspan, cunning, sheer density, and athleticism; he often feels like the least replaceable Knick, the one man holding their defense together. Coming off an ankle injury, his health could determine their longevity in the postseason. Their other premier defender, Mitchell Robinson, has an enjoyable task laid out for him: Bully an egregiously undersized and shallow Atlanta frontcourt. We've seen what a playoff series looks like when Mitch can overwhelm his foes—the 2023 beatdown of Cleveland—and there's no one on the Atlanta roster with the BMI to bang with him on the glass. He can't and won't play a lot of minutes, but if in those minutes he's grabbing nonstop offensive rebounds and allowing the Knicks to dominate the possession game they will be difficult to beat.
Who will win?
The Knicks will win.
Will it be good?
It will be good. The Hawks are spicy and the Knicks are incapable of making anything simple.
