Most Unfair Scapegoats of 2013 NBA Playoffs

With the NBA Playoffs beginning to wind down, just three teams remaining as the Eastern Conference Finals rage on, the blame game is running rampant. 

We're seeing just one game every other night, and it will be that way until the season ultimately ends following the NBA Finals.

That gives us all nothing but time to over-analyze everything that's going on.

With the NBA draft still nearly a month away, free agency following soon after and no player movement happening until the end of June, the only thing left to do is look back and determine what went wrong.

We're past the point of asking what went wrong during the regular season and we're well on to figuring out why certain playoff teams didn't fare any better.

A few teams, namely the Golden State Warriors and a few of the lower-seeded teams, don't have much witch hunting going on, as their playoff foray went as expected or better than expected.

However, a few teams who were eliminated too early, or even one recently eliminated, have to wonder where things went wrong.

So before we go on crucifying certain people, players or coaches for a team's demise, we should probably do a thorough job evaluating each individual situation.

10. Patrick Beverley

Surprisingly enough, Patrick Beverley didn't get nearly the chastisement I expected after being involved in the play that tore Russell Westbrook's meniscus.

Sure, he did get the odd death threat here or there, but after the series ended he was pretty much let off the hook.

Beverley had hate heaped upon him after Westbrook went down, and it was his lunge toward the ball that took out the Oklahoma City Thunder point guard.

It's hard to directly blame Beverley, especially when looking at how many star players went down this season.

Sometimes things fall one way, sometimes they fall the other.

9. Lionel Hollins

There seems to have been an anti-Lionel Hollins sentiment brewing in the Memphis Grizzlies' front office for some time now.

Despite the fact that Hollins just coached the team to its most successful season in franchise history, he remains without a contract.

The new ownership group, led by Robert Pera, is a part of the new-school, statistics-based NBA minds, evidenced by his hiring of John Hollinger back in December.

Hollins was, is and always will be an old-school coach, which is a big reason why he didn't put Ed Davis on the court much following the Rudy Gay trade.

He's not being outwardly blamed for the sweep in the Western Conference Finals yet, but the time could come very soon when he's kicked to the curb for a more modern-minded head coach.

Regardless, Hollins should be coaching somewhere next season if he's got the desire.

8. George Karl

George Karl has been a head coach in the NBA since the mid-'80s. In that time he's made the playoffs 22 times, missing altogether in just three seasons.

He was this year's Coach of the Year Award winner, and he coached what was arguably the best Denver Nuggets team in his tenure with the team.

They were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs and the usual "Fire George Karl" chorus started from the final buzzer against the Golden State Warriors.

This is one time where I'm going to have to completely defend Karl. His Nuggets ran into a Warriors squad that matched up well with his fast-paced style and ended up putting together one of the best shooting displays in a single series in the history of the NBA.

As a team, Golden State shot over 40 percent from the three-point line, while Stephen Curry hit at least four three-pointers in five of the series' six games. 

Denver's defense had holes at times, but the kind of shooting that Golden State displayed was just otherworldly.

7. David Stern

I'm as far from a conspiracy theorist as you can get when it comes to the NBA. 

There are a few fishy things that have gone down in the past, but just a handful of instances in the past decade are anywhere near "suspicious."

This year's playoffs should prove just that.

If David Stern wanted to push ratings and big markets, Golden State would have surprisingly upset the San Antonio Spurs, Oklahoma City and Kevin Durant's ability to draw eyeballs certainly would have beat the Memphis Grizzlies, and the New York Knicks would have waltzed past the Indiana Pacers.

This year's conference finals teams were all in the bottom half of the league in terms of market size.

At 16th in the United States, Miami leads the way, with Indianapolis coming in at 27th, San Antonio at 37th and Memphis at 48th.

If anything it seems like Stern is specifically pushing small=market teams in order to prove that there isn't a conspiracy going on in the league. 

6. Any Referee, Ever

Blame a referee for a specific blown call, that's fine. However, to think that certain referees are out to get certain teams seems to toe the line of tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.

The reason why people are so suspicious of referees has to do with the league's spotty past, and the fact that refereeing in the NBA is horrible by nature.

Most of the time refs don't have the benefit of instant replay, so they're forced to make a judgment call in the middle of a fast-paced game.

When they do get to use instant replay, they end up getting lambasted for taking too long.

In the end, a bad call one way generally gets made up later on in the game with a bad call going the other way.

Until we see some jarring free-throw discrepancy that can't be explained away with a team's style of play (2006 comes to mind for some reason), then I'll fail to be swayed on this year's officiating.

5. Carmelo Anthony

Carmelo Anthony's play in the Eastern Conference Semifinals wasn't an example of his best stuff, but that's the story that most members of the New York Knicks can tell.

Anthony shot under 41 percent throughout the playoffs and under 30 percent from the three-point line.

However, he did noticeably better against the Indiana Pacers, shooting over 43 percent and nearly 35 percent from the three-point line.

He averaged 28.5 points and 7.8 rebounds, yet he's still been chastised for the loss to no end.

Take away Anthony's production and the rest of the Knicks combined to shoot 136-of-341 on the series, a rousing 39.8 percent.

Not only that, the team's second-leading scorer and Sixth Man of the Year, J.R. Smith, shot 28.9 percent from the field in the series.

There's your scapegoat, people, not Carmelo for having a rough fourth quarter in Game 6.

This series was lost well before that point, and it was a collective effort to get there.

4. Kevin Durant

2013 is the year that Kevin Durant lost his title as a clutch player, at least that's what you would assume had you taken everything from the Memphis-Oklahoma City series at face value.

Durant was 7-of-20 from the field and 2-of-5 from the free-throw line in "clutch" situations in Western Conference Semifinals. Amidst his failures, he hit a game-winning shot in Game 1 and a game-tying shot to send Game 4 into overtime.

He wasn't without his Durant-ian moments, but he wasn't pretty either.

What seemed to go ignored was that he was playing a completely different game than he had ever played in his professional career.

Durant had played ever single game with Russell Westbrook at his side for five years leading up to his torn meniscus.

Tossing him out there and expecting Oklahoma City to waltz back into the NBA Finals was short-sighted and left him without much help on offense.

3. Mike Woodson

We've heard plenty about head coaches after eliminations in the past month, and that's generally the guy who gets chastised before anybody else.

Mike Woodson was given endless criticism following New York's ouster from the playoffs, mainly for the lack of creativity in calling plays.

The only problem is that he is stuck coaching a roster whose top two offensive players are isolation players first and foremost.

Not only that, he's got a point guard in Raymond Felton who is good at working inside an offense with many options, but not great at creating offense otherwise. Elsewhere, Jason Kidd stopped making shots, Pablo Prigioni refused to shoot, Tyson Chandler looked a shell of himself, and his second-best player ended up being Kenyon Martin.

No amount of motivation or scheme changing would have fixed the huge problems they fell into against Indiana.

Woodson played the roster he was given, and they flopped. If anything New York's elimination should call into question the make of the team, not the mettle of the head coach.

2. Mike D'Antoni

Off with his head! Fire him! Worst coach in the history of anything, ever!

Or, you know, this Lakers roster might have been fundamentally flawed, but whatever.

Mike D'Antoni was probably the wrong coach to hire from the get-go, so does that mean we should place the blame on him for his tactics failing with a laundry list of injuries knocking out the ranks of the team.

Los Angeles' experiment was a complete failure this season, and it's not the first time we've watched super teams go wrong.

The Lakers had the same thing happen back in 2004 when they added Karl Malone and Gary Payton to the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, and the first year of the Miami Heat "Big Three" ended up without a championship.

Sure, both of those teams made the NBA Finals, but they were relatively injury-free throughout much of the playoffs.

It's not D'Antoni's fault that this team was swept out of the playoffs, you can blame that on hard luck, lack of chemistry and a mediocre group of players outside of the top four.

1. Derrick Rose

The blowback at Derrick Rose for not playing a single game for the Chicago Bulls this season reached its apex before the start of the playoffs, before many just began scoffing every time he was shown sitting on the bench in a suit.

Rose was cleared to play back on March 9. That means his knee was physically capable of performing within the constraints of an NBA game.

So because Rose didn't return with a miraculous turnaround like Adrian Peterson did for the Minnesota Vikings, he became a bum in the eyes of a large portion of the population.

However, cleared to play physically doesn't mean he was ready to play mentally.

It's not as if Rose chose to put off his return for some mysterious reason, he just felt that he wasn't ready to return after having major knee surgery.

Sometimes there's more to an injury than just the physical side, and sometimes it's smarter for both the player and the team—both with huge investments in the health of a young superstar—if he doesn't play.