For the past decade, the NBA had been effectively ruled by a pair of super teams in the Miami Heat and Golden State Warriors. Both teams boasted a trio (or, in Golden State’s case, a foursome) of superstars that, while proven to be beatable in the Finals by another great team, didn’t have glaring, potentially fatal flaws.
This season, however, the three top contenders in the league entered the playoffs with real question marks beyond health that could lead to their downfall, which feels a bit strange. The Lakers, Bucks, and Clippers — the three teams with the best odds to win a title — all have shown their respective flaws thus far in the Bubble. All are great teams, but all of them have legitimate question marks and points of weakness that have led all three to losing games already in their first round matchups. What’s resulted is the most fun opening round of the playoffs we’ve had in years.
The Lakers and Bucks mirror each other in many ways, and the biggest questions facing both regard the role players that surround their superstars. These are players that were excellent in the regular season but, to this point in the Bubble, have struggled to regain their rhythm or effectiveness on either end of the floor. These were once two of the top defensive teams in the league, but in Orlando have yet to find the cohesiveness on that end to lock down opponents in the same way. This has led to a lot of good looks for opponents, and in the empty gyms of Disney’s Wide World of Sports, that has led to teams being able to light them up at times.
For the Lakers, the offensive woes come down to two things: shooting and creation. The former has been dismal in Orlando, which is strange because most everyone has noted how the fanless environment has made them great shooter’s gyms. The hope is that those shots eventually start falling, especially for the likes of Danny Green, whose chief offensive value is the ability to knock down shots. As for creation, the load in that area falls almost exclusively on LeBron James, who set a new playoff career high with 16 assists in the Lakers loss in Game 1, while the rest of the team combined for just six assists total.
Rajon Rondo’s return may help in that area, but certainly won’t provide a lift with shooting, and it’s the biggest issue of roster construction for the Lakers. There isn’t a perfect lineup that exists for the Lakers, as every effort to fix one area of need only further exasperates another. You can add a facilitator but take away a shooter. You can add a shooter but limit your defense and offensive creativity.
For Milwaukee, the same questions from years past persist. They’re a team that gives up three-pointers by design, and in a gym that, as I mentioned, has been described as a great shooter’s environment, those shots are going down at a higher rate. Add in some rust and you have a defense that is no longer an impenetrable force you have to bomb from the outside, but one where you can probe and collapse to create legitimately great looks.
On offense, they can still become extremely stagnant in the halfcourt, and when opponents aren’t turning the ball over and aren’t missing threes, they don’t get the easy baskets in transition that can mask some of their halfcourt woes. Teams load up on Giannis to build a wall in front of him, with a secondary focus on keeping one eye firmly on Khris Middleton to contain him. This means that until Eric Bledsoe shows he can step up in the postseason, the Bucks offense can be contained in the halfcourt. A look down the roster makes you believe in the Bucks role players, but when their two stars aren’t getting to the rim and the free throw line, things can turn ugly.
The other contender is the Clippers, and they face two different key questions. One is whether Paul George can consistently give them what they need in the playoffs, as we know what to expect from Kawhi Leonard come postseason time but George has shown in recent years (and in Game 2) that he can sort of waver in and out of effectiveness from game to game. A lack of cohesion for the Clippers is the other chief issue they face, as they’ve yet to get their guys on the floor together a lot this season and, especially, in the Bubble.
While Leonard may not need consistent time with his teammates to be effective in what he does, the role players do in order to know what spots to be in around him to be most effective. That has reared its head in the form of a sloppy offensive performance against a Dallas defense that has been woefully bad, as L.A. has been unable to get consistently easy buckets against them. With Montrezl Harrell, Lou Williams, and Patrick Beverley all in and out of the lineup recently, the lack of rhythm for a team with consistency issues makes for a real problem.
We’ve grown accustomed to being able to pencil a few teams into the Finals — or, at minimum the conference finals — in recent years. That has changed pretty dramatically this season, as the gap between the very top of the league and the “very good” teams has shrunk, and we’re seeing that play out in the playoffs. It’s quite possible we still get the Battle for L.A. in the West and the Bucks find their stride and steamroll through the East, but it seems increasingly likely that someone else spoils the party.
The layoff has exacerbated some of the issues these three teams face, as all three were knocked out of a rhythm they’d established going into the playoffs, and each one of them was an excellent home team who no longer has the benefit of home court advantage. Still, these were questions that persisted even before the hiatus and are rearing their ugly heads at the worst possible time. Part of what made facing the Warriors and Heat so difficult was knowing that in order to beat them, you had to play five near-perfect games of basketball, because even in one game where you played your best, they were still going to beat you.
That same pressure doesn’t exist against the Bucks, Lakers, or Clippers right now. The Blazers were far from perfect in Game 1 and gutted out a win. The Magic, sure, played about as well as they can in Game 1, but for a Toronto, Boston, or Miami, they have to be looking at that game and thinking they’ve got more than a real shot to take down the Bucks. Dallas was able to win the bench battle against the Clippers with the likes of Trey Burke and Boban Marjanovic, despite L.A.’s bench once being the best second unit in the league.
If the opening rounds of the playoffs once felt like a mere formality, 2020 is offering us a rare reprieve in the form of a thrilling opening round that only figures to get more competitive in the conference semis. Parity isn’t always the best thing for a league, as nothing draws eyes quite like an elite villain. If the top teams fall early, that could lead to a Finals that doesn’t meet the standards we’ve seen in recent years, but for now it’s making these early rounds much more intriguing.