The Guard Has Changed
Welcome to the Conference Finals. No team that has won a title recently will be playing in them, unless you consider the Boston 2007-08 to be recent. (To be fair, it’d seem pretty recent to Rockets fans.)
The Celtics are old hands at the ECF, going to six of the last eight, but I wonder if it says more about the Celtics or the Eastern Conference? Boston got to the Finals recently, only to be dispatched by the Warriors “Last Hurrah”. They’re certainly good enough to win it all, but they also strike me as a team that despite being excellent at Plan A, has no real Plan B. They’ve shown themselves vulnerable to losing a sort of mental battle with opponents at the higher levels of the playoffs, and they’ve honestly not played anyone much, as both foes were missing their key players, and then some.
The Mavs Luka’d their way to the WCF in 2020-21, but never seemed like a threat to do much more that season. This is a different Mavs in that they can, and do, play defense, but neither team they’ve played so far has anything like dominant bigs inside, certainly not to the level of the Timberwolves. OKC, it could be argued, despite the twiggy majesty of Chet Holmgren, is really a smallball team, and Dallas largely beat them by shutting down the OKC small-ball blender attack and taking advantage of OKC’s weakness inside, rather than Luka and Kyrie dominating. (Dallas, I am informed, won the title in 2011.)
Meanwhile, it’s been a while since the Pacers, and the Timberwolves did anything worth noticing much. But this seems a very different team than the one where Clint Capela literally made Karl-Anthony Towns hide in the corner for a whole series.
The Pacers play fast, and score a ton. They’ll invite anyone to keep up with their pacering and scoring. With the acquisition of Pascal Siakam they have a hope of guarding someone good. Which Tyrese Haliburton shows up for Indiana might decide how competitive this series is. The Pacers haven’t really faced healthy opponents either, as the Knicks mostly fell because they simply ran out of healthy basketball players.
Minnesota is a bold experiment in having a Very Large team, with Gobert, Towns, Reid and some other really large players who play hard on defense. (Yes, this includes Towns, at the moment.). They also have Ant Edwards, who’s electric, and amazing, but very young, and totally inconsistent, though he gets a pass because he’s a great interview, and The New Thing. Possibly a lot of very talented young players are just inconsistent? I could imagine 6-24 in a Game 7 garnering more criticism if it was a different young player. Minnesota is thought of as a young team, but they essentially aren’t. They’re a mix of young and old, especially their starters.
Daishen Nix will be the first Rockets Rebuild player to make a Conference Finals and it’s clear the Wolves couldn’t have done it without him.
What we aren’t seeing in these Conference Finals is any of the Old Guard leading the way, unless you consider the somewhat tag-along (thus far in the playoffs) presence of Kyrie to represent that group.
This is a new group of stars on this stage in some ways, overall. It should be fun.