Throughout the NBA play-offs, The National's resident NBA dudes Jonathan Raymond and Kevin Jeffers will be breaking down the key talking points of the night before, plus looking around the scope of the league. Here are our NBA Play-off takeaways.
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Monday’s score
Toronto Raptors 105, Cleveland Cavaliers 99 (Series tied 2-2)
My bad
You try your best. You soak up as much basketball as is possible. You study the game – its trends, its wider landscape, its stylistic shift right before our very eyes.
You think, having done all this, you are reasonably well-versed in the state of basketball. You think, being well-versed in the state of basketball, that up 2-0 the Cleveland Cavaliers will continue to rain three-point death upon the Toronto Raptors in the eastern finals. You think the Golden State Warriors rediscovering their mojo and levelling the series 1-1 against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the western finals is the sign of a of a righted ship ready to sail smoothly ahead.
You are wrong. You know nothing. More specifically, I know nothing.
The last days have been a real smack in the stupid face of anyone who thought they such a handle on these NBA play-offs. It looked so obvious how things should go.
Then you look up and it’s 2-1 Thunder and 2-2 in the Raptors-Cavs series and you’re wondering what just happened.
Oklahoma City winning Game 3, to be fair, is not all that surprising. They’ve already proven their chops by dismissing the San Antonio Spurs, and after taking one on the road against the Warriors it stood to reason they’d be fired up at home.
But destroying Stephen Curry and Co as they did, nothing short of embarrassing them, was a bit, ehm, surprising.
And Toronto, in front of their insanely impassioned crowd, could certainly have been expected to play better after losing the first two games of that series by 60 points combined. But neutralising the unstoppable looking LeBron-and-threes offence, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan finally rediscovering their deadly attacking best and storming back to even the series 2-2? That would have been, well, less expected.
It’s not too complicated, on the surface, what has transpired in these series. The Raps have started hitting threes, their defence has stepped up, Bismack Biyombo has done a superb job unsettling LeBron and DeRozan is realising the best of his slithery slashing game. Kevin Durant, meanwhile, reminding all of us he has as much an argument to being the best player on the planet as anyone, has overwhelmed the Warriors. Dion Waiters and Andre Roberson have stepped up. Oklahoma City killed it in transition (29-13 in fast-break points in Game 3).
And, in basketball, when you have the best player on the floor, more often than not it’s a fairly straightforward path to victory.
For the Thunder in Game 3, there were about four or five players who could’ve fit that bill before getting to a single Warrior. For the Raptors in Game 3, DeRozan was that, and in Game 4 it was Lowry (with DeRozan a close second).
That doesn’t make them the best players in the series. It’s still inarguably LeBron James in Toronto-Cleveland, and probably (though very much arguably) Stephen Curry in Oklahoma City-Golden State.
But the calculus has certainly changed. And many of us (hi there!) didn’t see it coming. Three days of shock after shock after shock have hit the basketball world like a Draymond Green kick to the groin.
The NBA play-offs have a reassuring sense that they are fluke-proof. What happens in a seven-game series, almost always, means something. Whether that's the exposure of unforeseen weaknesses in the favourites or the emergence of underestimated strengths in the underdogs, seven-game outcomes in basketball simply don't happen by accident.
I still think the Warriors are probably going to win their series, and I’m even more confident the Cavaliers will still win theirs.
But what we’ve seen over the past days in the NBA have been enough to make you question everything you thought you knew.
Turns out, it can be a lot less than you figured.
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