.png?w=1280)
Biggest Winners and Losers from 2026 NBA Playoffs Conference Semifinals
The NBA playoffs have a very simple way of determining winners and losers. If you can't come out on top four times in seven tries, you don't get to play anymore.
Pretty straightforward, right?
To get a deeper sense of the postseason and its potential fallout, we need to go beyond who advanced and who didn't. To do that, we'll look at the players who used the second round to either establish or damage their reputations. Sure, the regular season still matters. But everyone knows playoff performance gives a much clearer picture of who's really up for competition at the highest level.
One note: Nobody from the Los Angeles Lakers deserves to be labeled a loser.
They entered their second-round matchup with multiple injuries and ran up against a juggernaut. There's no shame in being swept by the Oklahoma City Thunder. If you walk out of a matchup with that team with all four limbs intact, you're a winner by definition.
Winner: Karl-Anthony Towns
1 of 7
Karl-Anthony Towns' postseason performance has so far inspired surprise, respect and, more than anything else, a chorus of observers asking, "Where has this been all along?"
"This" is the new passing dimension Towns flashed starting in Game 4 against the Atlanta Hawks, when he operated as an offensive hub and handed out a postseason career-high 10 assists. That effort wasn't a one-off; Towns' passing persisted through the rest of the Atlanta series and remained a major weapon in the New York Knicks' four-game sweep of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Against Philly, KAT posted a 45.7 percent assist rate, the highest by any heavy-minute player in any series this postseason. Nikola Jokić's assist rate against the Wolves in the first round was 44.1 percent, just for reference.
That's a staggering development that doesn't just make Towns a more valuable player. It also alleviates pressure on Jalen Brunson, adds dynamism to a Knicks attack that is so far blowing out playoff opponents by a historic margin and presents a colossal new wrinkle for the Conference Finals.
Towns' postseason reputation was once defined by ill-advised fouls, defensive disappearances and general unreliability. What he did against the Sixers changed all that.
Loser: Jalen Duren
2 of 7
Jalen Duren will be a restricted free agent this summer, and his first-round efforts against the Orlando Magic had already reduced his potential earning power. His averages of 10.6 points and 9.4 rebounds on 52.8 percent shooting were respectable in a vacuum, but they fell well short of his regular season rates and were among the main reasons the Detroit Pistons nearly fell to an eighth-seeded opponent.
Maybe Orlando was unique in its toughness. Maybe it cleverly schemed to minimize Duren's impact. The Cavs, Detroit's second-round opponent, had a reputation for postseason softness and seemed an ideal victim in a Duren revenge tour.
Unfortunately for Duren's pocketbook, he was even worse against Cleveland.
When the Pistons' offense stalled out, Duren was of no help. He couldn't score in isolation, couldn't dominate the offensive glass and sometimes seemingly couldn't even catch the ball. The nadir came in a Game 5 loss to Cleveland, when Duren was benched for the entire fourth quarter and overtime.
Entering the playoffs, Duren had a real chance to command a max offer of up to four years and $177 million from another team or five years and over $240 million from the Pistons.
Both of those numbers seem laughable now.
Winner: Ajay Mitchell
3 of 7
Since they climbed into the contender class, the Oklahoma City Thunder occasionally had issues with secondary creation. Force someone other than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to make a play, and the results were iffy.
If there was a question about Jalen Williams, for example, it was whether he could run the show when SGA was out of the game or had to surrender the ball. OKC won the title last year, and Williams had transcendent moments during the run, quieting concerns.
Ajay Mitchell's work against the Los Angeles Lakers in the second round should silence those questions for good.
The lefty guard racked up 22.5 points and 6.0 assists and posted a plus-minus of at least plus-14 in all four Thunder wins. The only way Mitchell could have come out a bigger winner is if he'd done all that ahead of free agency, where some teams might have viewed him as the best guard option available.
Because the Thunder are the Thunder, and they never let anyone else have nice things, Mitchell is under contract for a total of $5.7 million over the two seasons after this one.
.png?w=256 "Oklahoma City Thunder v Los Angeles Lakers - Game Four")
Loser: Daryl Morey
4 of 7
After exiting the postseason via a 4-0 sweep at the hands of the New York Knicks, any number of figures within the Philadelphia 76ers organization could have earned a loser designation.
Joel Embiid couldn't stay healthy again, Paul George bowed out with a combined 16-of-43 shooting effort across the series' final three games and head coach Nick Nurse ran Tyrese Maxey into the ground for nothing. All of them could have been worthy choices here.
Fortunately, the Sixers took the decision out of our hands by officially designating former president of basketball operations Daryl Morey as their loser. They let him go after six seasons on the job.
While Morey's defenders could point to the fully healthy upside the team showed for stretches of the playoffs, the reality was that he'd created a team with virtually zero championship equity because too many of the principal figures had no chance to stay healthy for an entire season and title run.
Morey did a lot of things right, like drafting Maxey and VJ Edgecombe, but Embiid and George have two of the worst contracts in the league—both executed on his watch. The Sixers are expensive, inflexible and don't have a title-winning ceiling.
The sheer difficulty of flipping the roster made the top exec's ouster the easy choice in an effort to change, well...something.
Winner: San Antonio Spurs Fans
5 of 7
As if it wasn't enough that San Antonio Spurs fans get to enjoy Victor Wembanyama for as long as his home planet allows him to stay here on loan, they also get to savor the developing greatness of Dylan Harper.
When a player as exciting and relentlessly competitive as Stephon Castle rates no higher than third on the list of a team's "he's fun to watch" hierarchy, you know you've got it good.
Harper didn't get a start against the Wolves in the second round, but De'Aaron Fox needs to be on notice that he's very close to making max money as the third-best guard on his team. Whether he's knifing into the lane, calmly tying defenders in knots with footwork that'd make Jalen Brunson jealous or flashing finishing craft nobody this side of Kyrie Irving can match, Harper's conference semis were the continuation of a year-long breakout.
In fact, his ascent may have created another loser. Between the Spurs and Thunder looking so dominant, 13 other West teams should be viewing the conference crown as off limits until sometime in the 2040s.
Loser: Julius Randle
6 of 7
Financial components aside, one of the main reasons the Minnesota Timberwolves swapped Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle a couple of years ago was Randle's ability to function as a secondary creator.
Minnesota determined it needed someone to score, facilitate and attack defenses that compromised themselves to force the ball out of Anthony Edwards' hands. Throughout these playoffs and particularly in the second-round series against the Spurs, Randle failed to meet those demands.
After hitting 43.0 percent of his shots and 30.0 percent of his threes against the Nuggets in the opening round, Randle's efficiency and production trended even lower in Minnesota's tilt with the Spurs. Sure, Victor Wembanyama makes it harder for every opponent to produce offensively, but Randle's struggles were alarmingly conspicuous—particularly against a San Antonio team that didn't have anyone in the rotation with enough physical heft to guard him.
Across six games against the Spurs, Randle hit just 34.2 percent of his field-goal attempts and 19.0 percent of his threes while logging 18 turnovers against nine assists. In sum, he failed to do the one thing Minnesota hoped he could—all while Towns morphed into one of the postseason's top facilitators for the Knicks.
Winner: Rui Hachimura
7 of 7
Stephen Curry. Klay Thompson. Reggie Miller. Ray Allen. Pick your favorite sniper from any period of NBA history, and that player will have a worse postseason three-point shooting percentage than Los Angeles Lakers forward Rui Hachimura.
The 28-year-old drilled 16 of his 29 long-range tries as the Lakers were swept out of the second round, just slightly worse than his 17-of-29 effort across six games against the Houston Rockets in the first. All told, Hachimura's career postseason hit rate now stands at 51.6 percent, the highest percentage in league history.
Now seems like a good time to mention that Hachimura is ticketed for unrestricted free agency.
If the Lakers don't spend what it takes to bring him back, plenty of contenders will happily swoop in. The scoring-starved Pistons would relish his spacing. The Spurs could cast him as a bigger, more accurate Julian Champagnie. In fact, there's not a team in the league that would turn away a player with legitimate power-forward size and three straight years of at least a 41.3 percent conversion rate from deep to go along with that record-setting postseason marksmanship.
The Lakers lost, but Hachimura's elite shooting will make him a big offseason gainer.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
.png?w=480 "Oklahoma City Thunder v Los Angeles Lakers - Game Four")
