There’s more experience in the Western Conference, but even there, teams such as the Minnesota Timberwolves have key players like Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins who’ve never been in a playoff game. The New Orleans Pelicans will be counting on Anthony Davis (four playoff games total in his first five NBA seasons) to lead them, when the officiating is different and the game plans are more detailed, with the best coaches in the world devising ways to stop you.
Maybe I’m overthinking this.
“In 2008 when we won, we had (Kendrick) Perkins, (Rajon) Rondo, Baby (Glen Davis), and (Leon) Powe,” said Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge. “Late firsts and second-round picks. They all contributed a lot. It's nothing new. In managing the salary cap, you need rookie scale and or minimum contracts.”
The Timberwolves have several young players who will bear a heavy playoff burden.
Or, maybe I’m not.
Philadelphia 76ers coach Brett Brown noted that his young players, who handle the ball the most on his team, have to cut down on their turnovers going into the playoffs -- a belief he reiterated over the weekend. In doing so he sounded an awful lot like Steve Kerr did when he took over the Golden State Warriors in 2014, when he lamented the “plays of insanity” by his young guards, primarily Stephen Curry, which produced unforced turnovers.
Now, the fact is, someone’s kids will play well, and come through, and be a big part of a long postseason run. But whose?
“First, you’ve got to make it,” said Timberwolves coach Tom Thibodeau, who has seen both sides of the playoff divide, having sat on Boston’s bench when the Kevin Garnett/Paul Pierce/Ray Allen team of tough-minded vets won The Finals in 2008, and then coaching a painfully young Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and their teammates through a long playoff run two seasons later.
“If you’re fortunate enough to make it, you understand that there’s another intensity level when you get to the playoffs,” Thibodeau said. “This is what you play for. If you love competition, this brings out the best in you.”
Towns loves competition. But he hasn’t experienced it for himself yet.
Young star Victor Oladipo has Indiana primed for a playoff run.
“It’s just a fight,” he said.
“One play throughout the game can change the whole course of it. It’s a feeling of trying to be perfect. You’ve got to be perfect. You have to go out there and try your best, but you can’t make those simple mistakes you make in the regular season and be able to get away with it. It’s a different philosophy ... the playoffs is a different animal. The biggest thing in the playoffs is who’s the first team to switch up their game plan.”
But nothing does like doing.
“I was nervous,” said Washington Wizards All-Star guard Bradley Beal, whose first postseason series came in 2014 against Chicago. “We had Sam Cassell, and Witt (former Coach Randy Wittman), and Nene was crazy. The level of play, the fierceness, the competitive edge that everybody had, they treated every game like it was a win or lose situation. Both teams. Every time I’ve been in the playoffs it’s been that way. It’s nothing like the regular season.”
Washington is one of the few East teams that will bring a core with no first-timers to the postseason. The Houston Rockets, Portland Trail Blazers, San Antonio Spurs and Warriors are similarly seeded throughout their rosters. But increasingly, those kinds of teams are the exception, not the rule.
Jakob Poeltl and Pascal Siakam come up with a big play against the Rockets.
The Raptors may have the biggest postseason learning curve of any contender. Their young guys were in the lab all last summer -- Siakam handling the ball, VanVleet and Wright working on their shooting. They have been crucial to Toronto’s “culture reset,” as GM Masai Ujiri put it after his team was swept by Cleveland in the East semifinals last season. Their presence and production have cut the minutes of All-Stars Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, while also changing the iso style that the Raptors had maxed out at over the previous few years.
None of them dominate the stat sheet -- veteran C.J. Miles is tops off the bench in scoring, at 10.4 points per game in just under 19 minutes a night. But they all contribute.
Some of Toronto’s kids got a taste of things to come when they played on the team’s G League team, Raptors 905, in the championship series last year, which it won over Rio Grande Valley in three games.
“It was the first time for me being in a series situation; in college, it’s one-and-done,” said VanVleet, who got to the regional semis in the NCAA Tournament as a junior at Wichita State.
“I think I was thrown in there like, Game 2, of the three games of The Finals. Pascal played the whole playoffs. But just being thrown in a championship environment, it’s big. It’s not the same type of feel like a March Madness, but it’s the same kind of intensity in terms of you want to get the job done in a playoff series. I think we were down 0-1 at the time, and try to come back and win the next two. It was just good experience getting under your belt, and you hope it can continue this year.”