The NBA playoffs are full of unpredictability. For as much time and effort as people spend scrutinizing each and every detail trying to predict the outcome of each series in advance, there is a certain level of unpredictability that goes into each NBA playoff series, and it's the reason that the next two months are the greatest months of the year on the sports calendar.
For every "Cavs will blowout the Pistons" prediction that people get right, there is a "Ray Allen shot 1-12"-type, nobody-could-have-possibly-seen-that-coming moment in every series that makes the NBA playoffs must-see TV. It's like watching an episode of "Diary" on MTV: you think you know, but you have no idea.
In fact, the only thing that was predictable about the opening weekend of the NBA playoffs was the coachspeak. "It's only one game" was the cliché du jour in postgame press conferences around the league, and if Vegas were taking prop bets on things you'd hear in NBA press conferences this weekend, I would have taken the over on "it's just one game."
And while coaches will spit out "it's just one game" until after Game 2, when it will most definitely change to "it's a long series," you'll hear the phrase "statement game" used over and over by analysts over course of the NBA playoffs. After digesting the first game of each series, it's time to make some statements of my own.
Derrick Rose will never be a superstar.
If you watched even a minute of game one of the Celtics and Bulls series on Saturday, you probably think I'm crazy. Rose had 36 points and 11 assists in his first career playoff game and led his team to the biggest upset of the weekend. How is this guy not a superstar in the making?
Allow me to explain.
Derrick Rose is a great player. I've been saying it all season long. He's a year or two away from being in a three-way conversation with Chris Paul and Derron Williams as to who is the best point guard in the NBA. He's just starting to scratch the surface on how great of an NBA point guard he is going to be.
The problem: he has no personality whatsoever. On the court, he plays with the confidence and swagger of a seasoned veteran. He's as cool as it gets out there. Nothing rattles him, as you saw Saturday when he went 12-12 from the free throw line, including two huge free throws down the stretch that gave the Bulls a one point lead in the final seconds of regulation.
Off the court, however, is a completely different story. Getting him to say something quotable after the game is like pulling teeth. He's like the non-Steve Buscemi hit man from "Fargo." He averaged 16.8 points and 6.3 assists per game, only the ninth rookie in NBA history to average at least 16 and 6 in his first season, and he's yet to crack his first NBA smile.
Take a look around the league at the biggest superstars in the game right now: Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, Dwight Howard. All of those guys just ooze charisma.
Derrick Rose has the skills to play basketball on the same level as those guys one day, but unless he loosens up a ton and soon, he'll never have near the star power that any of those players has.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but you know the league is dying for him to come out of his shell so they can promote the hell out of him. Tim Duncan has had a Hall of Fame career with little to no fanfare because he has no personality. It'd be a shame if another once-in-a-generation player goes largely unnoticed because he has no marketability.
Cleveland will go unchallenged to the NBA Finals.
It's a little early to say that they'll go 12-0 against the East en route to the Finals, but I'm not far from going there. Obviously, they are going to have no trouble with the Pistons, Saturday's game might have been the most lopsided 18-point win in NBA history, but it's a little early to predict a conference sweep. But with No. 2 seed Boston looking like a shell of themselves because their best player is hurt, and No. 3 seed Orlando blowing an 18-point lead at home to a .500 team, finding a challenger in the East is going to be tough.
Atlanta was impressive, to say the least, in their 26-point blowout win at home against the Heat, but this is a team that's already proven that they can win at home in the playoffs as they showed last year against Boston. I'm not sold on the fact that they can carry that success over to games three and four in Miami, let alone steal at least one game from the Cavs at the Q. They look like the only team that can threaten the Cavs right now, and unless they prove me wrong and win a big game or two on the road, the threat level in Cleveland is currently green.
New Orleans will bounce back, Portland will not.
Let's face it, there aren't a whole lot of positives that you can take from a 30-point blowout loss in game one of the NBA playoffs. But there are two reasons why I think that Portland has no chance in their series and New Orleans does. First, and most obviously, Portland was playing at home. The Rose Garden was supposed to be one of the biggest home-court advantages in the NBA heading into this postseason, and Portland allowed the Rockets to come in and just dominate them. That's a terrible sign.
At least New Orleans can sell themselves on the fact that they were on the road. For them, Game 1 was a game that they were supposed to lose. They knew going in that they only needed to win once in four tries at the Pepsi Center to take the series, so what's the difference if it's Game 2, 5, or 7?
Secondly, New Orleans played hard. Sunday night's game was by far the chippiest (not really a word, but I'm sticking with it) of all the Game 1s this weekend. There was plenty of pushing and shoving and trash-talking going on from both teams. You just got the feeling that New Orleans came to play, they just didn't have an answer for the 21-0 run that Denver threw at them to end the third/start the fourth quarter. Really, aside from that six-minute stretch, the game was fairly close. The Hornets were in striking distance for two and a half quarters and fell apart. That happens to seven seeds on the road. It's not the end of the world.
Portland, on the other hand, played with a "deer in the headlights" look on their face the entire night. Yao Ming was 6-of-6 from the field before the first TV timeout, and that was the end of it. Houston came out and landed the first punch and Portland just completely folded. Basketball is a game of runs, and to be unable to put together any sort of counter to the early run that Houston went on was a bad omen for the Blazers. I'm not saying that they're out of this series, not by a long shot, but the Baby Blazers looked more outmatched than any team in this year's playoffs on Saturday night, and that includes the eight seeds.
San Antonio and Dallas will go seven games.
These teams are too familiar with each other for this series to be one-sided. The Spurs have too much experience, are too well-coached, and have too much talent to be taken out in a short series.
On the flip side, Dallas is relying on too many players at once to be able to control the entire series from start to finish. They basically went with an eight-man rotation, and six of those eight players shot 50% or better from the field on Saturday. Inevitably some of their role players are going to have off shooting nights.
The Mavericks are playing a big game of Jenga right now. All their pieces fit in just right in game one. As soon as one of them has an off-night, this whole team could come crumbling down on top of him. Expect the Spurs to come up with a game plan defensively for the rest of this series that basically allows Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Terry, and Josh Howard to get theirs, but prevents role players like Brandon Bass and J.J. Barea from scoring as efficiently as they did in Game 1.
It's only one game.
As much fun as it was to enjoy an entire weekend of playoff basketball, we still need to keep things in perspective. No one has ever clinched a series after one game, so no team should get too high or too low based on their performance in game one. Coaches don't just say this because it's the easy answer; they say it because it's true.
After one game in each series, there's only one thing that we know for sure: we don't know anything yet.
Look for Scott Shepherd's NBA column on Mondays and Thursdays during the NBA playoffs.
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