It’s really not that deep.
In this Anybody’s Ballgame Era of the NBA, a team needs enough dependable bodies to push it up to the mountaintop. A team needs depth.
Even more than it needs superstars, it needs to be a real squad.
That’s what the Lakers and Clippers ought to take from these NBA Playoffs, which have been whittled down to the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder vs. No. 6 Minnesota Timberwolves in the Western Conference finals, starting Tuesday; and the No. 3 New York Knicks vs. the No. 4 Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals, tipping off Wednesday.
Gone are the days where you could pencil in a playoff series winner based primarily on which team would have the best player on the floor. Gone, probably, are the days of shortened rotations of seven, max. Gone are the dynastic days of yore, those 70 years from 1949 until 2019, when seven teams claimed 77% of the NBA’s championships. (Hat tip to Sportsradar’s Todd Whitehead for doing the math first.)
Now we’re going to have a seventh champion in as many years. And in this era of aprons and attrition, parity is paramount. Depth isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.
That’s the inherent lesson in three of the final four teams being stacked stars in their roles, players who are options – to force fresh looks on opponents and to help carry the load.
The teams still swimming in the deep end this season have the thing that can help a team mitigate fatigue and some injuries and bad luck through a modern postseason, which gets abruptly more physical and comes with games and travel pancaked in short order, usually just a day in between. That thing? Depth.
It’s better to be lucky than good, but in this case, it’s better to try to roster-construct your own luck.
That means valuing depth, and not sacrificing it. Even, say, in a trade for a star of Milwaukee Bucks’ superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo’s stature, if he becomes available. Because what these playoffs are showing us is that this isn’t the time to be top-heavy; it’s time to rally some troops.
“It seems like the teams that have longer rotations, longer benches, are the ones who are winning,” said Denver’s perennial MVP candidate Nikola Jokic after Oklahoma City routed his team Sunday in Game 7. “Indiana. OKC. Minnesota…”
Indiana – led by the underrated Tyrese Haliburton, who this postseason has hit clutch daggers and is averaging 17.5 points and 9.3 assists – has nine guys playing 13 or more minutes per game, and two more averaging almost 10 minutes per contest. The Pacers have gotten more than 35 points per game from the bench.
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The Oklahoma City Thunder are led, yes, by guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who feels like the presumptive MVP. But what really got the Thunder – who have nine guys averaging 11 or more minutes, two more averaging nearly 10 and a bench accounting for 34.4 points in the playoffs – through to the conference finals was defense.
It was Alex Caruso, Lu Dort and Cason Wallace pressing the issue, three complementary players with the energy to wreak havoc all game.
And Minnesota? The Timberwolves who wore out the Lakers in five games in Round 1?
They’re committed to an eight-player rotation, with Nickeil Alexander-Walker averaging 18.9 minutes per game, least among Minnesota’s regulars. He, Donte DiVincenzo and Mike Conley are responsible for 12.9 of Minnesota’s 35 3-point attempts per game – floor-spacers and floor-raisers.
Only Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks are adhering to a strict-seven player rotation, and they’d probably be running on fumes if they weren’t being powered by the population of New York’s uncorkable frenzy. Now we’ll see if this Broadway cast of seven can beat the small army from Indiana.
And we’ll see what the L.A. teams do after their respective first-round exits, when the Lakers’ lack of depth was accentuated in historic fashion, Coach JJ Redick using the same five players for the entirety of the second half in a Game 4 loss at Minnesota.
It was the Clippers’ depth that carried them through the regular season and into the postseason, but their stars didn’t do enough to get them past Jokic and the Nuggets, who beat them in seven games.
It’s always been a high-wire act for teams who need their best players to be their best selves in the big moments and also enough willing, able talent behind them, backing them up in those most crucial of times.
But, anymore, teams can’t have it all; they can’t splurge on star power and power in numbers.
Not under the current CBA, with its second apron as a chokepoint for franchises who’d gladly break the league’s predetermined budget if it didn’t mean they’d lose access to tools they need to build a winner.
Going forward, good organizations will calculate how to roster stars that don’t blot out the constellation.
Others won’t be able to resist the super-shiny sensation who’ll light up a marquee – in the regular season and maybe the first round. But what happens when the big-ticket stars get swarmed in the postseason, when the physicality is ratcheted up, the pressure is highest, the work is most intense and the opponents in their path are all built for it?
Someone else plants their flag atop the mountain, that’s what. Maybe someone new, and definitely someone playing as a team.
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