6 Assumptions That Were Destroyed by the 2015 NBA Playoffs
Basketball has been around a long time.
As sports age, they develop. Baseball has evolved from the funky windups we used to see from pitchers in the 1920s. Football has progressed from a mostly running sport into a pass-first game. Basketball, the NBA namely, has changed, too.
The cliches we used to spit out in the 1970s, '80s and even '90s aren't always true anymore.
On the way to winning their first championship since 1975, the Golden State Warriors (among other teams) helped dispel some of those never-ending platitudes which have accumulated over years of basketball fandom.
Finally, we can stop spraying sayings like "Jump-shooting teams can't win it all."
Jump-Shooting Teams Can't Win
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This cliche actually should've been thrown out years ago, yet we keep hearing it over and over again.
There are somewhere between 14 and a million ways to argue that jump-shooting teams can (and often do) win championships.
You can make your argument statty and mention that the four teams who sat atop the playoff leaders in three-point attempts per game were also not-so-coincidentally the four who made their respective conference finals. Or you can just be basic and go down the list of recent champions.
Obviously, there are the newly crowned Warriors, but "Live by the jumper, die by the jumper" could've faded out before them.
What do we think the 2014 San Antonio Spurs were? That team schemed around pick-and-roll and perimeter ball movement. And if you're going to say, "Wait, they have Tim Duncan!" you'd be off. Duncan hasn't been a consistent post-up player in almost a decade.
The 2012 and 2013 Miami Heat didn't have a post-up threat either. We all know how they scored: LeBron James doing LeBron things, Dwyane Wade doing Wade things and Chris Bosh picking-and-popping or rolling.
The 2011 Dallas Mavericks? Mostly the same thing, aside from the occasional leg-kick fadeaway from Dirk Nowitzki.
The anti-jump-shooting argument died a long time ago. The Warriors' championship was just a delayed funeral.
The Transition Game Doesn't Work
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We hear this one every postseason, too.
The game slows down in the playoffs. You have to learn how to execute in the half-court. If you can't, it's over. But that's just another cliche...to a degree.
Of course you need to score in the half-court to find success in the postseason. Even during the regular season, the most transition-heavy team isn't getting out on the break nearly as much as it's operating inside its half-court attack. That's obviously a more viable form of offense, but it doesn't mean teams can't run come the playoffs.
Five of the teams who finished inside the top six in fast-break points per game during the postseason won at least one playoff series. Golden State finished third at 19.0 per game.
The Los Angeles Clippers beat the Spurs by playing fast. The Washington Wizards picked up their play by going with a more uptempo style than they did during the regular season.
Some teams slow down and find success in that, like the Cleveland Cavaliers, whose roster attrition and lack of depth forced them to play at a glacial pace, but it depends on the roster. Teams can succeed in transition come May and June. The scheme just needs to fit their personalities.
Refs Don't Call Fouls in the Postseason
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Remember when everyone said that James Harden couldn't be successful because he wouldn't get those "regular-season calls" in the playoffs?
Well, uh...this is awkward: That didn't really happen.
Harden's 60.5 percent postseason free-throw rate (number of free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt) wasn't just phenomenal, it was also significantly higher than his 56.1 percent figure during the 2014-15 regular season. Actually, 60.5 percent would be a career high for him if he posted that number in-season.
Because he shot so well from the line (almost 92 percent), he actually averaged more free throws made per 100 possessions in the playoffs than he did during the first 82 games.
Playoff games averaged about 1.7 more fouls a night than regular-season ones this year, though Deck-a-DJ, Hack-a-Howard, Smother-a-Smitty and Hackapela contributed a tad to the increase.
Still, fouls weren't necessarily harder to come by in May. So much for that.
If you add up all of basketball's playoff cliches, you'd think every May and June game was still tied at zero heading into its 147th overtime period. It's like we have a worse grasp of the meaning behind these stereotypes than Alanis Morissette does of what makes something ironic.
You can't score in transition because the game slows down. But you can't win shooting jump shots in the half-court. And you can't win going to the rim, because referees let more go in the playoffs, and guys like Harden don't get the calls they did during the regular season.
So we're cornered into nothingness. No scoring. No baskets. Nothing.
Playoff cliches: They're the best.
Positions Matter
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It's similar to the jump-shooting concept. We think the back-to-the-basket game matters more because it used to, but times have changed. And the efficiency of the three-point shot hasn't just adjusted playing style; it's also switched who's on the actual court.
ESPN's Jalen Rose mentions it all the time: The NBA is transitioning to a style dictated by guys between 6'5" and 6'9". Wings are the new hot commodity, guys who are athletic and broad enough to defend multiple positions, switch when needed and can stretch out to the three-point line on the other end.
We thought of the Warriors as officially getting away from conventional positioning when they subbed Andrew Bogut out of the starting lineup before Game 4 of the Finals, only to throw eventual Finals MVP Andre Iguodala into the first unit.
With that change, Golden State essentially moved forward in the series without a typical center. Draymond Green, who would've been a small forward were it 1997, played the 5 the rest of the series and held fort.
But that wasn't their first out-of-the-box, to-heck-with-positions idea. Back in the conference semifinals, Golden State fell down 2-1 to the Memphis Grizzlies and adjusted, putting Bogut on Tony Allen, a non-scorer to the highest degree.
A 7-foot center guarding a 6'4" shooting guard? Never.
But pretty brilliant. It worked.
Bogut was able to help off on Allen without worrying that the Grizzlies shooting guard would hurt them offensively, and Memphis' attack basically mutated into a four-on-five offense with TA on the floor.
Golden State's coaching staff (it's not just Steve Kerr; Ron Adams, Alvin Gentry and the rest of the crew are wonderful as well) is one of the most creative in the league. We saw that this postseason with some of the risks taken against ordinary wisdom.
Now, let's wait for the copycats to come out...
The Rockets Are Soft
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Society has to stop pretending it can read minds.
There's a reason armchair psychologists get paid far less than the real ones. Opinions aren't based on any amount of expertise. It's just what we want to be true, what we think could be accurate judging from however many miles our couches are from the arena.
On that note, let's talk about the Rockets.
When Houston fell down 3-1 to the Clippers in the Western Conference Semifinals, it was soft. It wasn't trying. It wasn't playing hard. It was like one giant, basketball marshmallow.
The Rockets looked dead, right? It was as if they were conceding the series.
So people started to throw around the word "soft" or the term "mentally weak," but without any reference. We came up with ridiculous theories, like how Harden was throwing a temper tantrum after finishing second in MVP voting or how teams with Dwight Howard just can't win (even if he has in the past dragged an underdog Orlando Magic team to the Finals).
Then the Rockets won three straight during what was probably the greatest comeback in NBA history, considering they trailed by 19 in Game 6 with under 15 minutes to go.
They weren't so soft anymore.
A fragile team doesn't pull off the most improbable series win ever. A mentally weak group isn't capable of winning three straight after already falling down 3-1. It's just not possible.
Houston didn't just change its allegedly gooey center overnight. It simply wasn't soft. It just looked that way, so we believed it. Maybe we'd be better off merely evaluating games instead of minds in the future.
The Warriors Are All Offense
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Golden State's always had this reputation of being an offense-first team. Having the Splash Brothers will do that to you. When seemingly the entire SportsCenter Top 10 is made up of improbable Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson 32-footers, that rep is inevitable.
But the Warriors actually depend on their defense as much as anything else.
Even last year, before Kerr came to town, D is what carried Golden State, who finished just 12th in points per possession (offensive efficiency) compared to third in points allowed per possession (defensive efficiency).
This year was different. Golden State was dominant everywhere, finishing first in D and second in offense, barely trailing the Clips in points per possession.
Their stifling attack carried into the playoffs, where they had the best defensive rating of any team during the postseason; actually, they posted a better defensive rating in the playoffs than they did in the initial 82 games of the year.
Defense wins championships.
I guess that's one of the few adages which has yet to be disproved.
Follow Fred Katz on Twitter at @FredKatz.
All quotes obtained firsthand unless noted otherwise. Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are current as of June 17 and are courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.
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