Who's Felt the Injury Bug the Worst in the 2015 NBA Playoffs?

Injuries are a fact of life. They happen every year, and they affect the games more than we care to admit. The fate of entire postseasons often swings on how teams adapt and react when faced with an injury to an important player. 

This year, it seems like more teams have been hit with meaningful injuries than ever before. To wit:

• Before the playoffs even began, the Houston Rockets lost Patrick Beverley and Donatas Motiejunas to season-ending injuries.
• In the last game of the first round, Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers saw his season end due to a dislocated shoulder. He's sat out all four of Cleveland's games against the Chicago Bulls.
• The Memphis Grizzlies lost Mike Conley for three games after he suffered a broken face against the Portland Trail Blazers. 
• Chris Paul strained his hamstring in Game 7 of the Los Angeles Clippers' series win over the San Antonio Spurs, and he wound up missing the first two games of Los Angeles' battle with the Houston Rockets. 
• John Wall suffered five non-displaced fractures in his hand and wrist that caused him to miss the last two games of the Washington Wizards' series against the Atlanta Hawks. 
• Pau Gasol missed Game 4 of the Bulls-Cavaliers series with a hamstring injury. 

Two of those players have returned to their teams. But their absences were certainly still felt, and their injuries will likely affect their play for as long as their teams remain alive in the playoffs. The other teams have had to adjust to new realities, and the results have been mixed at best.  

Houston Rockets: Patrick Beverley and Donatas Motiejunas

Given that Houston has had the most time of any of these teams to get used to operating without its injured players, it should not come as a surprise that it's been the team that's adjusted best (at least until the last couple of games). 

Beverley has been out since March 23, while Motiejunas has not played since March 25. The Rockets then had 11 regular-season games with which to get used to the Jason Terry-Pablo Prigioni tandem at point guard and the Terrence Jones-Josh Smith combination at power forward.

Neither Terry nor Prigioni is the defender that Beverley is, but they can both approximate their offensive impact with long-range shooting.

Beverley did not have a very big role in Houston's offense while healthy this season—he had a usage rate of just 16.2 and assisted on just 17.1 percent of teammate baskets while on the court, per NBA.com. Prigioni has very Beverley-esque numbers in the playoffs (11.0 usage, 17.7 assist percentage) while his true shooting percentage is pretty much in line with Beverley's as well (49.0 to 50.9). 

Where Houston has found improvement is with Terry. His usage rate is low (just 13.7), but he's got a scorching 63.4 true shooting percentage in the postseason owed in large part to his 41.9 percent three-point clip. 

Similarly, both Jones and Smith have done fine work filling in for Motiejunas. Donatas was a post-up hub for Houston's offense and a particularly good one as the season went along, but both Jones and Smith are better rebounders, and the areas on the floor from which they operate clear a little more space for Dwight Howard to do his work in the post and pick-and-roll. 

It's telling that Houston's offense has kept humming right along in the postseason while its defense has dropped off considerably.

Beverley is the Rockets' only above-average defender at the guard position (though this was probably his weakest defensive season), and Motiejunas is generally a little more solid in his positioning than Smith and a bit stronger than Jones. The defensive end predictably is where the team has felt their absences.

Cleveland Cavaliers: Kevin Love

The Kevin Love injury completely changed the complexion of Cleveland's team. The ability to space the floor without playing small-ball lineups featuring LeBron James at power forward is gone because none of Cleveland's other bigs have the shooting skill and gravity of Love.

Using James Jones at that spot to approximate the same look has worked fined offensively—Cleveland has a 109.1 offensive rating through four games with Jones on the floor, per NBA.com's media stats tool—but it has been an outright disaster for defensive purposes. The Bulls have scored 117.0 points per 100 possessions in the 55 minutes Jones has seen the floor. 

The big shift in Round 2, then, has been Tristan Thompson soaking up most of Love's minutes with the starters. At the end of the first round of games, we anticipated this shift in our article on postseason outliers.

Noting the probable lineup change, we speculated that Cleveland's massive free-throw rate would come back down to earth while Thompson himself would continue destroying on the offensive glass, perhaps replacing Love's effect on Cleveland's offense in a roundabout way.

What has instead happened is that both Cleveland's free-throw rate and Thompson's offensive rebounding have bounced almost exactly back to their regular-season levels.

The biggest effect of Love's injury (and J.R. Smith's two-game suspension, to be fair) has actually been that LeBron has taken on far too big an offensive load, and it's not gone well for either him or the Cavs.

LeBron's usage rate has jumped from 32.3 in the regular season to nearly 40 against the Bulls while his true shooting percentage has dipped from 57.7 percent all the way down to 44.3 percent, according to Basketball Reference. Combined with the responsibility of having to guard Jimmy Butler for long stretches, carrying so much of Cleveland's offense has simply been too much.

Los Angeles Clippers: Chris Paul

For L.A., most of the burden shifted to the shoulders of Blake Griffin and Austin Rivers. During the two games Paul was out, Griffin assisted on an incredible 35.1 percent of his teammates' baskets while he was on the court, according to Basketball Reference. To put that number in perspective, consider that Conley's career high is 30.1 percent.

Griffin managed that while also handling a usage rate over 30, meaning he was responsible for over 65 percent of the Clippers offense while he was in the game. To understand how rare it is to both use over 30 percent of your team's possessions and assist on at least 30 percent of teammates' baskets, take a look at this list, per Basketball-Reference.com. It's only been done by 12 players in NBA history.

Rivers, meanwhile, went from averaging 14.2 minutes per night through the first seven games of Los Angeles' playoff run to playing 54 minutes in the two games Paul was out. He managed to chip in 27 points on 9-of-21 shooting and made five of his nine three-point attempts.

Memphis Grizzlies: Mike Conley

The Memphis offense sagged in the three games Conley was out. With Conley active for the first three games of the Grizzlies' series against Portland, the team scored 109.1 points per 100 possessions (per NBA.com's media stats tool), the season-long equivalent of a top-three offense and 6.0 points better than its regular-season average.

In the three games Conley sat out (two against Portland and one against Golden State), that figure dropped all the way to 98.9 points per 100 possessions. That's a Philadelphia Sixers-esque scoring rate.

Nick Calathes was stretched far too thin, often lagging around toward the end of games. Beno Udrih shot 39 percent. Zach Randolph took more shots, but his looks weren't quite as good. And his conversion rate dropped down to 40.7 percent. 

Marc Gasol was basically the only Grizzly whose production didn't drop off while Conley was on the sideline. He carried Memphis in those three games, averaging 22.7 points and 4.0 assists a night as he paraded to the free-throw line 30 times in three games. Still, he was dead-tired by the end of games, shooting 41.7 percent in the fourth quarters of those three contests.  

Washington Wizards: John Wall

The Wizards had the playoffs' best offense before Wall's injury. He scored at a rate that would dwarf the league-best Clippers offense from the regular season behind a barrage of three-point shooting goosed by smaller lineups that head coach Randy Wittman seemingly held in his back pocket until springing them on the Toronto Raptors and Hawks in the postseason. 

Washington was also playing terrific defense before Wall went down, allowing only 96.1 points per 100 possessions, a point-prevention rate far better than even its top-five regular-season D.

Wall played a huge part in hounding Kyle Lowry and Jeff Teague into subpar performances through the early part of their playoff run. Simply put, his backups are not good defenders. The defense has taken a big hit with Wall out even if the Wiz have managed to play fairly well and come away with a split in those two games. 

The three-point shooting has stuck in the two games Wall's missed, but the rest of the offense has collapsed. Washington's turnover rate has rocketed back up with Ramon Sessions manning the starting point guard spot, and the heaping of free throws that newfound spacing generated has dried up.  

Chicago Bulls: Pau Gasol

Taj Gibson started in place of Gasol in the Bulls' Game 4 loss to the Cavaliers. Some have criticized Gasol for putting up "empty" numbers (and I've been among those critics), but man, did Chicago's offense look brutal without him. The Bulls ended Game 4 having scored 84 points on 93 possessions, good for an offensive rating of just 90.3, a horrifically awful number. 

Without a post-up threat, nearly all of the offensive load shifted to Chicago's perimeter scorers, Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler. Combined they shot 19-of-44, and with no real off-ball threats (Joakim Noah, Mike Dunleavy and Nikola Mirotic were even worse, shooting 6-of-26), the defense collapsed on them often. And they had just six assists between themselves. 

Who's been affected most?

The Grizzlies and Clippers are lucky enough to have Conley and Paul back in their respective lineups, and they've both staked themselves series leads. Memphis has done so on the strength of its stifling defense, while the Clips have blitzed the Rockets with a barrage of threes, free throws and a vice-grip defense of their own. 

For the other teams, it's much more up in the air. It remains to be seen how the Cavs will really play without Love. They've still played just two games with J.R. Smith back in the lineup, but even then, they've shifted the starters around so that Iman Shumpert now begins the game on the court. It's a good help for their defense, but Smith brings more dynamism offensively. 

The Wizards without Wall are a much different team. Paul Pierce may have a million more daggers up his ageless sleeve, but if they can't manage to tighten their defense back up, the Wiz will be in some trouble.

Nobody yet knows the severity of Gasol's injury, but if Game 4 is any indication, the Bulls better hope he's able to come back soon. The other bigs just aren't threats to score on their own right now, and that's a problem. Rose and Butler are capable of carrying the offense, sure, but in addition to Butler's defensive responsibilities (Butler has to guard LeBron after all), it might just be too much of a strain. 

In all, it seems likely that the injury bug has impacted the Cavaliers the most, which makes a good deal of sense. Kevin Love might only be their third-best player. But he's incredibly important to their offense, and his absence has had a considerable deleterious effect on LeBron's play.

James has simply had to carry too big a burden on both ends, and it's shown. He may have made an incredible game-winner on Sunday against the Bulls, but his overall play has sagged. Cleveland is basically down to six real rotation players for the rest of the playoffs, and it'll need Kyrie Irving, J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert, Tristan Thompson and Timofey Mozgov to really step up and give LeBron some help. 

All statistics via NBA.com unless otherwise noted.