Making the NBA playoffs is an achievement worth celebrating, but the 16 squads that get in can't let the revelry last too long. After the thrill of postseason admission wanes, a harsh reality sets in.
Fifteen of the 16 entrants will go home in defeat.
Elimination can stem from any number of familiar sources: lack of top-end talent, broad weakness on one end or the other, a rotation hole, inexperience. Don't rule out combinations, either. There are tons of reasons why all but one of the teams that win enough to make the playoffs will end their postseasons with a loss.
All of these projected playoff teams are good, and some of them even belong in the "great" category. In some cases, we'll pick nits and seek out the tiniest cracks in what appear to be pristine facades. In contrast, many lower seeds have more than one obvious reason for us to doubt them. In a few situations, we'll even be able to point to the same lingering flaw that earned them a postseason boot in 2020.
This exercise is going to skew toward the negative. We're looking for shortcomings. But maybe the positive spin is that there's nearly a month left for each of these teams to address these problems and replace our doubt with faith.
1. Brooklyn Nets: Defense
If you know one thing about the Brooklyn Nets, it's that they aren't any good on defense.
Well, actually, if you know one thing, it's that they have Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving making up one of the greatest offenses in league history (when healthy, which has been rare so far). But if you know two things, it's that the Nets are going to need that unstoppable, superstar-driven scoring punch to offset a crummy defense.
Brooklyn's attack might be good enough to get the job done. But if the Nets pull this one-way run off, it'll be historic.
Raheem Palmer of the Action Network compiled the data, and the summation is jarring:
"Only three teams since the merger have won the championship despite having a defense that was ranked lower than 10th in Defensive Rating in the regular season: 2018 Golden State Warriors, 2001 Los Angeles Lakers and 1995 Houston Rockets. All three teams had won the title the previous season and played below their actual ability in the following regular season."
The Nets aren't a defending champ, and their rank in defensive rating (24th) is worse than any of those three teams listed above. The hope has to be that, like the title-defending Rockets, Lakers and Warriors, they're playing below their ability.
If they're playing at or above it, winning a ring will be impossible.
2. Philadelphia 76ers: Turnovers
Joel Embiid's health is the obvious pick for the Philadelphia 76ers, but it feels cheap to lean on injury risk in this exercise, even if Embiid's history is one giant red flag in that regard.
There's also a crunch-time offense concern: Can the Sixers balance the floor, find a place for Ben Simmons and get the ball to Embiid consistently enough to score against half-court defenses that can throw several bodies at the big fella?
So far this season, though, there's no statistical support for that concern. Philly ranks seventh in clutch offensive rating.
That leaves us with the Sixers' turnover troubles. They're in the bottom 10 in overall giveaway frequency and dead last in close-and-late situations.
Postseason defenses are more intense and better prepared to take away an offense's pet actions. It stands to reason that if the Sixers have a hard time ending possessions with a shot during the more relaxed regular season, their struggles could worsen against dialed-in (and generally better) playoff competition.
That clutch turnover rate is a small sample, but if it's a signal of how the Sixers might fare in the moments that matter, it's a scary one.
3. Milwaukee Bucks: Flexibility
The narrative of the last two years is undeniable: The Milwaukee Bucks used a rigid system to crush the regular season and then saw that system fail in the playoffs. They couldn't adapt.
Those series-specific adjustments great postseason teams make? Absent from Milwaukee's limited repertoire.
That the Bucks haven't dominated the 2020-21 season like they did the prior two is actually a source of hope. They're experimenting, switching more on defense, leaning on new addition Jrue Holiday to diversify their two-man game options with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton and are generally showing a greater willingness to tinker.
Developing flexibility comes at the cost of regular-season dominance, but the Bucks are wise to pay it. They've learned—twice—that the price of failing to implement different looks is far higher.
This is as optimistic as expressions of doubt get. Milwaukee knows what its issues are, and it's working on them. Still, until we see the Bucks actually succeed in practice at the playoff level, we have no choice but to remain skeptical.
4. New York Knicks: Offensive Efficiency
If you only focus on the last two weeks, during which the New York Knicks have produced the highest offensive rating and third-best point differential in the league, there's no reason to doubt this season's most pleasantly surprising team.
Take the larger sample of the entire year, though, and you have some options.
Despite the scorching shooting that drove a nine-game winning streak, New York ranks in the bottom 10 in both offensive rating and effective field-goal percentage. Both figures are tied to a three-point attempt rate that ranks 24th in the league. It's hard to score efficiently when you eschew efficient shots.
The Knicks' offense sings with Julius Randle and Immanuel Quickley on the floor. Randle is legit, but it feels dangerous to rely on a rookie sustaining his performance under playoff pressure. Quickley has blown past expectations to this point, though, so who knows?
Ultimately, when an offense gives its postseason opponents such a clear optimal strategy—pack the paint and dare the Knicks to shoot the threes they've turned down all year—it's a problem.
5. Atlanta Hawks: Non-Trae Young Minutes
The Atlanta Hawks' lack of a shutdown defensive wing is an issue, but it's possible De'Andre Hunter will finally get through his worrisome knee injury by the postseason. If he's ready to go, Atlanta will have a good option against the most dangerous scorers at the 2 and 3.
Besides, the most glaring reason to be skeptical about the Hawks is more fundamental. They just can't score when Trae Young isn't on the court.
If the All-Star point guard is in the game, Atlanta cranks out 117.3 points per 100 possessions. Take him out, and that number plummets to 104.6. Among players who've logged as many minutes as Young, only Nikola Jokic and Bradley Beal have a larger positive impact on their team's scoring efficiency.
Bogdan Bogdanovic will be one of the biggest swing factors in the entire postseason. Atlanta scores just fine when he's in the game without Young and is actually winning the "Bogdanovic on, Young off" minutes overall. Lou Williams can help, too, but he might give up even more on defense than Young.
With that said, Bogdanovic and Young have exactly zero combined career postseason minutes, and we have yet to see how playoff opponents will scheme to reduce the latter's touches. If the Hawks aren't quite as offensively dominant with Young on the court, the pressure on Bogdanovic will intensify.
6. Boston Celtics: Inconsistent Focus and Energy...Maybe
In the 2020 postseason, only the Toronto Raptors were stingier on defense than the Boston Celtics. That wasn't much of a surprise, as the 2019-20 Celtics ranked fourth in defensive efficiency during the regular season.
This year's Celtics rank 12th, and that's only after a dominant but unsustainable first half of April.
Much has been made of Boston's defensive slippage this year, and the struggle to explain it only produces half-satisfying answers. Anecdotally, the Celtics appear a half-step slow. They rotate without the same crispness and botch simple sequences (like this blown switch) because of miscommunication. Boston also fouls too often, putting opponents on the free-throw line more frequently than all but four other teams. But that was a problem in 2019-20, too.
We've spent time discussing what looks like a reason to doubt the Celtics, but here's the thing: Based on the types of shots they allow, they should rank fifth in opponent effective field-goal percentage. Instead, they rank 18th. The Celtics are allowing the right kinds of attempts; they're just going in at a higher rate than expected.
It's hard to accept after several months, but the best explanation for Boston's defensive slippage may be bad luck.
Of course, it's also possible that the lack of focus, grit and urgency the team has shown this season is tied to the defensive decline. This is one of those cases where your eyes tell you Boston just doesn't have it, but the underlying numbers say your eyes are wrong.
The playoffs will settle that disagreement.
7. Miami Heat: Leveling Up Will Be Harder
The Miami Heat's experience, toughness and reliable defense are all reasons to believe they can shake off a mediocre regular season and become a threat to reach the Finals. It also doesn't hurt that they did something like that last year.
Jimmy Butler is quietly playing even better than he did a year ago, and it's reasonable to write off some of Miami's more troubling habits (like playing down to the level of competition) to fatigue. The Heat joined the Lakers as the last teams out of the bubble in 2020. If they're taking nights off, they've earned the right.
Miami leveled up once, so it can do it again. Except, maybe not.
Last year's Heat finished the 2019-20 regular season with a winning percentage of .603 and a plus-2.7 net rating. They're at .516 and minus-1.0 so far this season. If they're counting on making a leap in the playoffs, it'll have to be even bigger than the improbable one they made a year ago.
With Goran Dragic and Andre Iguodala a year older, Tyler Herro enduring a sophomore slump and defensive keys Jae Crowder and Derrick Jones Jr. gone, the Heat's personnel is weaker now than it was in the bubble.
Speaking of which, few teams were better equipped for the spartan conditions in Orlando than the no-nonsense Heat. That "advantage" won't exist this time around.
Don't count the Heat out, but be careful expecting them to flip the switch as effectively as they did during last year's remarkable run.
8. Charlotte Hornets: Clutch Luck
If you've been following along over the last several weeks, I've been expressing my undying faith in the Toronto Raptors' ability to grab this last playoff spot in the East. But the Raps' conflicting incentives and related failure to close the gap on a play-in spot means we have to trust the numbers a little more.
That means forecasting the Charlotte Hornets as the team most likely to fill the East's final postseason vacancy.
However, they aren't likely to stick around long. Their crunch-time luck has produced a league-best plus-35.9 net rating and 3.4 more wins than their overall differential suggests they've earned.
The Hornets have already banked those wins, which is partly why they earn this spot in the first place. Past performance in clutch situations doesn't tend to say much about the future, though, so we should assume the Hornets will play like a normal team when the score is close down the stretch from now on.
Late-game standout Terry Rozier may have a different opinion on that issue, but we could also list a litany of other reasons why we should doubt Charlotte, which seems likely to enter the playoffs with the worst record and net rating of any team in either conference.
But we don't need to get mean about it.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Basketball Insiders.
Making the NBA playoffs is an achievement worth celebrating, but the 16 squads that get in can't let the revelry last too long. After the thrill of postseason admission wanes, a harsh reality sets in.
Fifteen of the 16 entrants will go home in defeat.
Elimination can stem from any number of familiar sources: lack of top-end talent, broad weakness on one end or the other, a rotation hole, inexperience. Don't rule out combinations, either. There are tons of reasons why all but one of the teams that win enough to make the playoffs will end their postseasons with a loss.
All of these projected playoff teams are good, and some of them even belong in the "great" category. In some cases, we'll pick nits and seek out the tiniest cracks in what appear to be pristine facades. In contrast, many lower seeds have more than one obvious reason for us to doubt them. In a few situations, we'll even be able to point to the same lingering flaw that earned them a postseason boot in 2020.
This exercise is going to skew toward the negative. We're looking for shortcomings. But maybe the positive spin is that there's nearly a month left for each of these teams to address these problems and replace our doubt with faith.
1. Brooklyn Nets: Defense
If you know one thing about the Brooklyn Nets, it's that they aren't any good on defense.
Well, actually, if you know one thing, it's that they have Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving making up one of the greatest offenses in league history (when healthy, which has been rare so far). But if you know two things, it's that the Nets are going to need that unstoppable, superstar-driven scoring punch to offset a crummy defense.
Brooklyn's attack might be good enough to get the job done. But if the Nets pull this one-way run off, it'll be historic.
Raheem Palmer of the Action Network compiled the data, and the summation is jarring:
"Only three teams since the merger have won the championship despite having a defense that was ranked lower than 10th in Defensive Rating in the regular season: 2018 Golden State Warriors, 2001 Los Angeles Lakers and 1995 Houston Rockets. All three teams had won the title the previous season and played below their actual ability in the following regular season."
The Nets aren't a defending champ, and their rank in defensive rating (24th) is worse than any of those three teams listed above. The hope has to be that, like the title-defending Rockets, Lakers and Warriors, they're playing below their ability.
If they're playing at or above it, winning a ring will be impossible.
2. Philadelphia 76ers: Turnovers
Joel Embiid's health is the obvious pick for the Philadelphia 76ers, but it feels cheap to lean on injury risk in this exercise, even if Embiid's history is one giant red flag in that regard.
There's also a crunch-time offense concern: Can the Sixers balance the floor, find a place for Ben Simmons and get the ball to Embiid consistently enough to score against half-court defenses that can throw several bodies at the big fella?
So far this season, though, there's no statistical support for that concern. Philly ranks seventh in clutch offensive rating.
That leaves us with the Sixers' turnover troubles. They're in the bottom 10 in overall giveaway frequency and dead last in close-and-late situations.
Postseason defenses are more intense and better prepared to take away an offense's pet actions. It stands to reason that if the Sixers have a hard time ending possessions with a shot during the more relaxed regular season, their struggles could worsen against dialed-in (and generally better) playoff competition.
That clutch turnover rate is a small sample, but if it's a signal of how the Sixers might fare in the moments that matter, it's a scary one.
3. Milwaukee Bucks: Flexibility
The narrative of the last two years is undeniable: The Milwaukee Bucks used a rigid system to crush the regular season and then saw that system fail in the playoffs. They couldn't adapt.
Those series-specific adjustments great postseason teams make? Absent from Milwaukee's limited repertoire.
That the Bucks haven't dominated the 2020-21 season like they did the prior two is actually a source of hope. They're experimenting, switching more on defense, leaning on new addition Jrue Holiday to diversify their two-man game options with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton and are generally showing a greater willingness to tinker.
Developing flexibility comes at the cost of regular-season dominance, but the Bucks are wise to pay it. They've learned—twice—that the price of failing to implement different looks is far higher.
This is as optimistic as expressions of doubt get. Milwaukee knows what its issues are, and it's working on them. Still, until we see the Bucks actually succeed in practice at the playoff level, we have no choice but to remain skeptical.
4. New York Knicks: Offensive Efficiency
If you only focus on the last two weeks, during which the New York Knicks have produced the highest offensive rating and third-best point differential in the league, there's no reason to doubt this season's most pleasantly surprising team.
Take the larger sample of the entire year, though, and you have some options.
Despite the scorching shooting that drove a nine-game winning streak, New York ranks in the bottom 10 in both offensive rating and effective field-goal percentage. Both figures are tied to a three-point attempt rate that ranks 24th in the league. It's hard to score efficiently when you eschew efficient shots.
The Knicks' offense sings with Julius Randle and Immanuel Quickley on the floor. Randle is legit, but it feels dangerous to rely on a rookie sustaining his performance under playoff pressure. Quickley has blown past expectations to this point, though, so who knows?
Ultimately, when an offense gives its postseason opponents such a clear optimal strategy—pack the paint and dare the Knicks to shoot the threes they've turned down all year—it's a problem.
5. Atlanta Hawks: Non-Trae Young Minutes
The Atlanta Hawks' lack of a shutdown defensive wing is an issue, but it's possible De'Andre Hunter will finally get through his worrisome knee injury by the postseason. If he's ready to go, Atlanta will have a good option against the most dangerous scorers at the 2 and 3.
Besides, the most glaring reason to be skeptical about the Hawks is more fundamental. They just can't score when Trae Young isn't on the court.
If the All-Star point guard is in the game, Atlanta cranks out 117.3 points per 100 possessions. Take him out, and that number plummets to 104.6. Among players who've logged as many minutes as Young, only Nikola Jokic and Bradley Beal have a larger positive impact on their team's scoring efficiency.
Bogdan Bogdanovic will be one of the biggest swing factors in the entire postseason. Atlanta scores just fine when he's in the game without Young and is actually winning the "Bogdanovic on, Young off" minutes overall. Lou Williams can help, too, but he might give up even more on defense than Young.
With that said, Bogdanovic and Young have exactly zero combined career postseason minutes, and we have yet to see how playoff opponents will scheme to reduce the latter's touches. If the Hawks aren't quite as offensively dominant with Young on the court, the pressure on Bogdanovic will intensify.
6. Boston Celtics: Inconsistent Focus and Energy...Maybe
In the 2020 postseason, only the Toronto Raptors were stingier on defense than the Boston Celtics. That wasn't much of a surprise, as the 2019-20 Celtics ranked fourth in defensive efficiency during the regular season.
This year's Celtics rank 12th, and that's only after a dominant but unsustainable first half of April.
Much has been made of Boston's defensive slippage this year, and the struggle to explain it only produces half-satisfying answers. Anecdotally, the Celtics appear a half-step slow. They rotate without the same crispness and botch simple sequences (like this blown switch) because of miscommunication. Boston also fouls too often, putting opponents on the free-throw line more frequently than all but four other teams. But that was a problem in 2019-20, too.
We've spent time discussing what looks like a reason to doubt the Celtics, but here's the thing: Based on the types of shots they allow, they should rank fifth in opponent effective field-goal percentage. Instead, they rank 18th. The Celtics are allowing the right kinds of attempts; they're just going in at a higher rate than expected.
It's hard to accept after several months, but the best explanation for Boston's defensive slippage may be bad luck.
Of course, it's also possible that the lack of focus, grit and urgency the team has shown this season is tied to the defensive decline. This is one of those cases where your eyes tell you Boston just doesn't have it, but the underlying numbers say your eyes are wrong.
The playoffs will settle that disagreement.
7. Miami Heat: Leveling Up Will Be Harder
The Miami Heat's experience, toughness and reliable defense are all reasons to believe they can shake off a mediocre regular season and become a threat to reach the Finals. It also doesn't hurt that they did something like that last year.
Jimmy Butler is quietly playing even better than he did a year ago, and it's reasonable to write off some of Miami's more troubling habits (like playing down to the level of competition) to fatigue. The Heat joined the Lakers as the last teams out of the bubble in 2020. If they're taking nights off, they've earned the right.
Miami leveled up once, so it can do it again. Except, maybe not.
Last year's Heat finished the 2019-20 regular season with a winning percentage of .603 and a plus-2.7 net rating. They're at .516 and minus-1.0 so far this season. If they're counting on making a leap in the playoffs, it'll have to be even bigger than the improbable one they made a year ago.
With Goran Dragic and Andre Iguodala a year older, Tyler Herro enduring a sophomore slump and defensive keys Jae Crowder and Derrick Jones Jr. gone, the Heat's personnel is weaker now than it was in the bubble.
Speaking of which, few teams were better equipped for the spartan conditions in Orlando than the no-nonsense Heat. That "advantage" won't exist this time around.
Don't count the Heat out, but be careful expecting them to flip the switch as effectively as they did during last year's remarkable run.
8. Charlotte Hornets: Clutch Luck
If you've been following along over the last several weeks, I've been expressing my undying faith in the Toronto Raptors' ability to grab this last playoff spot in the East. But the Raps' conflicting incentives and related failure to close the gap on a play-in spot means we have to trust the numbers a little more.
That means forecasting the Charlotte Hornets as the team most likely to fill the East's final postseason vacancy.
However, they aren't likely to stick around long. Their crunch-time luck has produced a league-best plus-35.9 net rating and 3.4 more wins than their overall differential suggests they've earned.
The Hornets have already banked those wins, which is partly why they earn this spot in the first place. Past performance in clutch situations doesn't tend to say much about the future, though, so we should assume the Hornets will play like a normal team when the score is close down the stretch from now on.
Late-game standout Terry Rozier may have a different opinion on that issue, but we could also list a litany of other reasons why we should doubt Charlotte, which seems likely to enter the playoffs with the worst record and net rating of any team in either conference.
But we don't need to get mean about it.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Basketball Insiders.
