Here are some NBA Playoffs questions everyone should be thinking about this week:
1) Why don’t more teams keep their eyes on the prize and rest their stars during the regular season like the Spurs did?
Tim Duncan just turned 36, Manu Ginobili is about to turn 35, and Tony Parker just turned 30. Considering San Antonio’s culture emphasizes winning championships over racking up career statistics and victories during the regular season, these three did a lot of sitting before the end of April.
The Spurs’ trio averaged only 28 minutes per contest during the season, and Gregg Popovich regularly rested all three of them for an entire game every few weeks, often ending a double-digit game-long winning streak. But they don’t care about the SportsCenter highlights from those streaks or any amount of career points they could be adding to their legacy on those nights, so now the aging core is well rested, healthy, and ripping through the playoffs while other, less-cohesive playoff clubs like the Lakers (Bryant, Bynum, and Gasol averaged 37 mpg) and Grizzlies (Gay, Gasol, and Conley averaged 36 mpg) overworked their stars during the regular season and have a long summer to show for it.
2) How can the refs so blatantly favor the Heat without more people talking about it?
Miami was certainly a much better club than the Knicks, they were probably a slightly better club than the Pacers (we’re talking sans Bosh), and they’re basically even with a more well-rounded Celtics club, so I’m not saying the Heat shouldn’t be winning games here. What I’m saying is that the refs seem to be doing a hell of a job of picking and choosing when to wreck momentum for opponents in ways that are often exceptionally well-timed for the Heat’s good fortune. The Celtics were leading by 5 with 4:05 left in regulation during Wednesday night’s Game Two match-up. From that point forward, the Heat shot 17 free throws, the Celtics 2, and guess who pulled out the squeaker in overtime.
Considering the two teams had a fairly even free throw count up to that point (30 to 27, Heat), it’s difficult to argue that their styles of play cause a disparity because it sure didn’t for the first 44 minutes. And of course over those last 9 minutes we saw plenty of Wade’s leg kicks for free throws, Wade’s barreling charges into stationary defenders for free throws, and Wade pulling Rondo’s head back with a hard swung forearm that mysteriously went uncalled (seems like the 2006 Finals again). Don’t forget Miami’s innumerable flops in the first two rounds that forced even the most ref-loving of announcers to question the crap LeBron is allowed to get away with.
3) What can the NBA do to ever convince fans the draft lottery isn’t rigged? Conspiracy theorists say it’s mighty coincidental the team the league still owns and operates just won the lottery in a year where #1 in the draft (Anthony Davis) is a much more important position than #2 (someone else). Conspiracy debunkers say you could invent a conspiracy for nearly any of the lottery teams that could have won the top spot, but keep in mind that one site actually ranked the possible lottery conspiracies before the ping pong balls did their magic and placed the Hornets second, behind only the Nets whose odds of winning Davis were much worse.
This marks about the 20th time in 29 drafts overseen by David Stern that something fishy/questionable/ripe for conspiracy happened in the lottery, which isn’t all that surprising after some guy named Tim Donaghy told us a tale about Stern’s control over the playoffs, a tale that the FBI believed (guess who wrote the intro for Donaghy’s book) and tons of circumstantial evidence supports. So one of two things needs to happen for this cycle of lottery questions to end: a) let Stern-nemesis Mark Cuban be the person to randomly select the order since he is far more transparent than Stern, we actually know who he is, and he never has a chance of winning the lottery, or b) Stern is gone and replaced by someone he and his circle had no hand in selecting. So yeah, good luck quieting those “it’s obviously rigged” theorists each May when the lottery, yet again, appears to be rigged.
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