The first round of the 2016 NBA Playoffs suffered from an abundance of games in which two teams couldn’t play well at the same time, but if you’re going to knock the level of play from the past fortnight, you have to factor injuries into the equation.
Yes, few series displayed the best the NBA had to offer in round one. The Eastern Conference provided much more compelling theater than the West, but even then, the second-best series of the whole first round (you could even make an argument it was the best) was a four-game sweep: Cleveland over Detroit.
The first round provided so much uneven basketball partly because teams took turns excelling and bottoming out, the representative instance being the seven-game battle between the Toronto Raptors and Indiana Pacers. More basketball — to the point of a Game 7 — didn’t necessarily translate to a better product.
Why, though? Why was there so much choppy basketball to behold over the past two weeks?
It’s very hard to look past injuries as the main culprit.
Stop and consider not just the injury- or illness-based absences of the first round, some of them total, others for only some games or portions of games: Chris Bosh, Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Marc Gasol, Mike Conley, Chandler Parsons, Steph Curry, Nic Batum, Avery Bradley, Kelly Olynyk… and that’s not even the full list.
That’s a lot of high-end talent which was either completely unavailable or largely limited in round one.
Then consider just some of the players who labored through round one with injuries, whether we knew it at the time or not: Marvin Williams, Cody Zeller, Ian Mahinmi, Kyle Lowry, J.J. Redick, Patrick Beverley, and Jae Crowder, just to name a few.
If all of those players had been at or close to 100-percent capacity, they could have given so much more to their respective teams. Only Beverley stands out as a player who wouldn’t have meaningfully changed the trajectory and ultimate outcome of a series. The others? Those were significant injuries, even if they played through pain.
It’s sad and something of a letdown, but it’s reality: When teams have players operating well below the ceiling of their physical capabilities — this doesn’t even touch on actual technical performance; it’s merely an observation of the ability to play at full strength — teams become diminished. Coaches might throw them into the fire, having little choice in the matter, but a coach’s options become more limited as a result.
If Jae Crowder had been the same player he was before his March injury, the Celtics might have been able to beat the Atlanta Hawks even without Avery Bradley. Crowder played, but his diminished post-injury abilities played a substantial role in shaping the ultimate outcome of that series. A similar conclusion can be reached regarding Marvin Williams’ shooting, which was a barometer of how well the Hornets fared against the Heat in the first round’s best series.
Consider the Charlotte-Miami series as a whole: Even though this series (we’ll accept arguments for Cleveland-Detroit) was the best the first round had to offer, the Hornets were widely diminished by all sorts of injuries, and the Heat couldn’t put Chris Bosh on the floor. If Hornets-Heat was the best series of the first round, the claim underscores how much other series, especially in the West, were irrevocably altered by injuries, chiefly to Memphis, Dallas, and the Clippers. Golden State was easily able to work around the Steph Curry injury, because it was playing the ultra-dysfunctional Houston Rockets.
Injuries are always a drag… and in the first round of the playoffs, they dragged down not just the level of play, but the ability to evaluate teams and coaches on their own merits.
