The question gets buried under the one-sided build-up. So every ESPN analyst, all 17 of them, picks the Miami Heat to beat Indiana this playoff series. Only two even have it going the distance of seven games.
The question also gets lost amid the relative facts like the Heat won three of their four regular-season games and the Pacers are missing All-Star forward Domantas Sabonis. Take an All-Star off any mid-level NBA team and its world tilts down.
All that's why the Heat in six games seems not just doable this series but sellable. They're not just a little better; they're a lot tougher. Aren't they? Isn't that the essence of what Jimmy Butler shouted downcourt to T.J. Warren in their regular-season throwdown?
But there's this, too: The very thing that makes the Heat so fun and fresh and everyone's pick this series makes them a bit of wild card on the edge of this moment, too. This team Pat Riley built isn't like any playoff team he's ever built.
Four of the Heat's top eight players haven't played in a postseason. That fact, right there, makes the Heat the least experienced team still going in the NBA. And a fifth player, their most valuable one, Bam Adebayo, has a playoff resume that consists of coming off the bench to play 15 minutes as a rookie in an awful series against Philadelphia two years ago.
That leads to the question: Does youth matter? Especially in this basketball biosphere with no fans and no road court to fight through, does the age-old question of age in the playoffs matter at all?
The Heat are so young you can play this either way. Either they're too naive to feel any playoff pressure or will spit up on themselves the way babies often do.
Either way has a grooved path in sports during the playoffs, worn and accepted in the big picture, if not the moment. Young stars suffocate under the pressure. Young starts don't notice it, too.
For Kendrick Nunn, Duncan Robinson, Tyler Hero and Derrick Jones Jr. _ the guts of the team, if not the star power _ this is their first playoff appearance. Andre Iguodala, 37, with rings to his portfolio, considers the kids' ignorance as bliss.
"Early on, I wasn't nervous," he said. "Sometimes you're too young and too dumb to feel the pressure. It's really the older you get the more you start feeding into everything you shouldn't be seeing or hearing. Those kind of things can creep into your mindset."
Contracts. Agents. Media. Those things, he meant. Still, coach Erik Spoelstra called his first playoff experience, a seven-game loss to Atlanta in 2009, "overwhelming as a young coach."
Either way you read it, all this youth explains why big-mouth Charles Barkley is right when he says, "No one fears the Heat." Why would they? What has this team done?
The preseason idea about the Heat remains the realistic one: Advancing with a series win is the mark of a good season. Two series' wins? That's overachievement for who they are and whom they'd have to beat.
This reliance on youth isn't even the path the Heat planned in February when they traded for Jae Crowder and Iguodala. That signified a shift toward age, as everyone inside the team said.
"We're so excited about how the young players have grown," Spoelstra said then. "But for us to make this really about now, we need some veteran experience and guys who have done it at a super high level in the playoffs."
Crowder is a nice addition, strong and supportive. Iguodala? The apparent centerpiece of the trade hasn't done too much. Maybe, at 37, he was saving himself for the postseason. He does have a collection of Golden State rings.
"It's about confidence," in the playoffs, he said.
You've seen the confidence of young teams go both ways in the playoffs. You saw the Marlins in 2003 win the World Series with a too-young-to-know attitude. You saw young Dolphins teams in 2008 and 2016 unable to match the intensity on the other side.
Nunn, after a great rookie regular season, thinks he knows what's ahead.
"This is the real thing," he said. "We're ready to go."
Heat vs. Pacers. Six games sounds right if the young Heat aren't too young.
