2016 NBA Playoffs: A True Marathon

Most pundits begrudge at the fact that the NBA lacks parity. To those who share such a sentiment, welcome to the 2016 NBA Playoffs.

The old adage goes: “The NBA season is a marathon and not a sprint.”

This year, however, the regular season and postseason have switched roles. More explicitly, the 82-game grind wasn’t much of a grind at all, with the Golden State Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs destroying anything and everything in their path at record-setting paces.

Sure, coaches were fired, and teammates feuded, but for the most part, the regular season this year played out much like a fairy tale, with Stephen Curry serving as the NBA’s very own Cinderella.

But as of today, with the month of May unfurling to an abrupt end, it is safe to say these playoffs have been anything but predictable.

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Groupthink opinions and general consensus have drastically changed week-to-week… nay, game-to-game.

Just look at the road the Oklahoma City Thunder has gone through since mid-April. When the postseason began, their coach Billy Donovan had no idea what he was doing, and their star player, Kevin Durant, was a playoff series loss away from bolting from the franchise who drafted him.

The sentiment remained unhinged as the Thunder struggled to beat out a feisty, but severely undermanned, Dallas Mavericks team during the first round. And by the time the conference semis commenced, most pundits considered OKC the sacrificial lamb for the manifest destiny that was Spurs versus Warriors.

Almost everyone would write them off after San Antonio trounced them by 30 in Game 1. But in just 10 day’s time, driven in large by some shoddy late game officiating at the end of Game 2, the Thunder found themselves the odds on favorites to win the series, after delivering a gutty Game 5 win at the Alamo with the series knotted up at 2-2.

After the Thunder extinguished the Spurs back in OKC in Game 6, they were once again the overwhelming underdogs against a historically dominant Warriors squad.

With Curry looking like his peak regular season form, announcing his comeback from an early postseason injury scare in grand fashion by pouring in 17-points in overtime during their conference semis victory over the Portland Trail Blazers, the Thunder’s rugged, bully style would be no match for Golden State’s knee-buckling pace.

However, with yet another 10 days into the series, the Thunder somehow have a commanding 3-2 lead on the once invincible Warriors. Their unflappable leader, Draymond Green, is clearly out of his element, and the league’s first-ever unanimous MVP, Curry, looks to be a step slow in general, struggling to beat the likes of Steven Adams and Kevin Durant off the bounce when OKC applies their switch-everything defensive scheme.

Most surprisingly, the Thunder are just outrunning the Warriors — an inexplicable thought if one were to suggest this back in February.

The Thunder are out Warrior ing the Warriors with this pace
— Andrew Carver (@drewbensandwich) May 25, 2016

On the other end of the spectrum, the Cleveland Cavaliers, who once looked disarranged and discombobulated for most of the regular season, suddenly became an unbeatable three-point shooting juggernaut once the postseason started.

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But just when everyone assumed the Cavs, and LeBron James specifically, were just going to waltz their way into yet another NBA Finals, dismantling their conference finals opponent, the Toronto Raptors, by 50 combined points in Game 1 and Game 2, the All-Star backcourt of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan would shake off their month-long slumps, and lead the North to two unexpected and exhilarating wins over Cleveland.

In accordance to the theme of these playoffs, though, just when we thought the Raps had a chance to pull off one the biggest upsets in modern NBA history, they would get dismantled at the Q by nearly 40 points in Game 4.

If this postseason run has taught us anything, it is that the playoffs are truly an entirely different season. No matter how a dominant, or conversely, how deranged a team is in the regular season, everything you so very much believed can change within a game’s notice when a particular team peaks just at the right time.

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Yes, the blowouts and lopsided beatdowns have made such mood swings more prevalent and evident, but this trend won’t go away anytime soon — not with the league’s ever-growing emphasis on three-point shooting.

For now, we are poised to experience a Cavaliers-Thunder Finals — KD versus LeBron 2.0. With the swings and unpredictability of these playoffs, though, I wouldn’t quite bet on it just yet.