NBA Playoff Panic Meter
The top three regular season teams lost their opening second-round game at home. Is it time to panic?
Entering the playoffs, it felt like only three teams had a real chance to win the title. The Oklahoma City Thunder, Boston Celtics, and Cleveland Cavaliers so thoroughly dominated the regular season that picking any team outside this trio of juggernauts to win it all would require abandoning the empirical and embracing the esoteric. The championship-trinity each won 60-plus games; the next best was 52. They all posted net ratings of +9.5 or better; the next closest was +5.1. And they buttressed the top three offenses in the league with top ten defenses. It doesn’t take any serious understanding of basketball statistics to understand that there were three teams far above the rest this season. And then they absolutely dismantled their first-round opponents.
The Thunder swept the Grizzlies with a net rating of +19.3 despite Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s struggles from the floor (44% eFG%). The Cavaliers wiped the Heat off the face of the Earth in their sweep with a +33.2 net rating and the NBA playoff record for point differential. The Celtics had a little more trouble, needing five games to dismiss the Orlando Magic, but they still cruised to a net rating of +14.1 and faced the toughest test of the three. After 82 games and easy first-round series, the cream of the NBA’s crop looked on a collision course to determine the title. Then the second round started, and they’re all down 1-0. So naturally, it’s time to panic.
Cavaliers
Starting with the Cavaliers’ 121-112 defeat to the Indiana Pacers, a few cracks in the armour might have been exposed. The Cavaliers were powered by the league’s best offense (121.7), but their defense, while stout, was a bit less imperious. Their defensive rating of 112.2 was the eighth-best mark in the league, but that only netted out to +2.3 points per 100 possessions better than the league average, and the average defensive rating of the 16 playoff teams was 112.275. If the Cavaliers are going to stumble, it’s going to be because of their defense, and that’s exactly what happened in game one.
The Pacers’ 123.3 offensive rating in game one was the 15th worst mark the Cavaliers have allowed this season, and it drops their record to 4-11 in those contests. Obviously, letting your opponent be the best offense in the league isn’t a great strategy, but there’s a chance the Pacers have found a vulnerability in the Cavaliers’ defense. Of the Pacers’ 36 3-point attempts, 25 were classified as wide-open, and another ten were deemed open. Generally speaking, most 3-pointers are not heavily contested, but allowing 69.4% of your opponent’s threes to be wide-open is not a good sign.
However, the Cavaliers are probably not in any real peril against the Pacers. They were without Darius Garland, shot 23.7% from three, and the Pacers hit 52.8% of theirs. Considering the Pacers only converted 39.8% of their wide-open threes during the regular season, you wouldn’t expect them to hit over half of their threes even if they were all wide-open. The 3-point shot quality in this game shows just how much of an outlier performance both sides put in.
That’s right, if the Cavaliers and Pacers had converted 3-pointers at their regular-season clip, and everything else stayed the same, the Cavaliers would have won by 20 points. If I were a Cavaliers fan, I wouldn’t begin to panic, but against a better team, their inability to contest 3-pointers could be a fatal flaw. The Pacers are a good enough team to make this a series, but it took the ultimate positive 3-point shooting variance game for them to beat the Cavaliers by nine.
Celtics
The Celtics’ 108-105 overtime loss to the New York Knicks is another shining example of the power of 3-point variance. The Celtics shot 25% on 60 3-point attempts, while the Knicks shot 45.9% on 37 attempts. Outside of the massive 3-point shooting disparity, the Celtics were the far better team.
Obviously, if the Celtics and Knicks had converted at their regular-season average from beyond the arc, the Celtics would have won easily. However, the Celtics’ insane 3-point volume in and of itself is a concern. With 6:19 in the third quarter, an Al Horford dunk put the Celtics up 72-52. While blowing a 20-point lead is one thing, that singular dunk was the Celtics’ only 2-point field attempt of the quarter. 19 of their 20 shots came from 3-point, and they attempted zero free throws.
The Celtics under Joe Mazzulla have been the most 3-point happy team in the league, but there is a significant difference between featuring the 3-point shot and exclusively bombing from deep. The point of being a high-volume 3-point team is to open up driving lanes to generate layups and free throws. The Celtics, to borrow a term from soccer, absolutely lost the plot in the third quarter and allowed a 20-point lead to slip to nine by abandoning the basics of basketball.
Much like the Cavaliers, the Celtics are unlikely to be upset in the second round. Kristaps Porzingis left in the middle of the game due to an illness, and they did muster a 20-point lead while shooting poorly, by their standards, from 3-point range. Jayson Tatum, who was fantastic against a far better defense in the Magic, was atrocious. It took just about everything to go wrong for the Celtics for the Knicks to squeak out a win, which bodes well for the Celtics’ chances in the series. That being said, these Celtics don’t look quite as dominant as last season, and this performance against the Knicks saw all their bad habits spring to the surface at once.
Thunder
Okay, now it might be time to panic. The Nuggets’ gutsy 121-119 victory over the Thunder wasn’t some black swan 3-point shooting event; the Thunder outshot the Nuggets from 3-point range, the Thunder forced their customary bushel of turnovers, and the Nuggets have the best player in the series. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander might win MVP, but Nikola Jokic is still the undisputed best player in the league, and he showed that in game one with a dominant 42, 22, and six performance.
The Nuggets were able to overcome a significant turnover difference (+9 for the Thunder) by absolutely dominating the offensive glass (+8 for the Nuggets) and winning the free throw battle (+13 free throw attempts for the Nuggets). The Thunder, for as great as they are defensively, are a poor defensive rebounding team and send teams to the foul line. Among playoff teams, their 74.6% regular season defensive rebound rate ranked 13th out of 16, and their opponent free throw to field goal ratio (FT/FGA) of .211 was the third highest. Will the Nuggets continue to manage a 41.2% offensive rebound rate and a .284 FT/FGA throughout the series? Almost certainly not, but it’s an area where they have a huge advantage, and they’re very likely to shoot better than 31.3% from 3-point range.
The Thunder should still be the favorite in this series, but the Nuggets, even when the Thunder’s defense is clicking, have avenues to generate offense. On the other side of the ball, the Thunder’s offense should find more success than they did in game one. Gilgeous-Alexander, by his standards, had a pedestrian game with 33 points on a 55.1% true shooting, Jalen Williams went five of 20, and Chet Holmgren was five for 11 and missed two crucial free throws at the end. However, SGA has yet to show he’s a true playoff riser, and Williams and Holmgren have both had their struggles in the playoffs. This Nuggets team has won a title together, has the best player in the world, and can generate offense even when the Thunder’s defense is doing what it does best. I’m not sure if the Nuggets can continue to hold down the Thunder’s offense, but this series looks more contested than I ever imagined.
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