The poor guys didn’t stand a chance. A day after the Cleveland Cavaliers completed their sweep of the Toronto Raptors with a 109-102 victory on the Raptors’ own court, the Golden State Warriors knocked the Utah Jazz out of the playoffs with a 121-95 win on Monday night. Cleveland and Golden State have both been perfect this postseason: the two teams have won two straight series in four, going a combined 16-0 without doing anything to challenge the growing perception that they will meet in the NBA finals for the third straight year.
All of this is great news if you root for the Warriors or the Cavaliers. It’s not so great if you’re a fan of compelling playoff basketball. Despite a handful of close games in the first round, this year’s NBA playoffs have been, objectively, an awful viewing experience. A part of this can be blamed on the aura of inevitably hanging over Cavaliers and Warriors: it feels like we’re just biding our time until their finals rematch, but it doesn’t help that we’ve been bombarded with boring blowouts these past few weeks.
It’s hard to put into words just how non-competitive the Warriors-Jazz series ended up being, but a few numbers might help. Not only did the Warriors beat the Jazz by double digits in all four of their games, but the Jazz led for a grand total of 11 minutes and 55 seconds for the entire series. In comparison, the Raptors fared far better, as they managed to spend a solid 26 minutes and four seconds on top of the Cavaliers on the scoreboard and lost a mere three of their four games by double digits.
The Warriors and Cavaliers played 384 combined minutes in the 2nd round. They only trailed for 38.https://t.co/8Kbsqw7F6e pic.twitter.com/DHTTKInqZJ
— SB Nation NBA (@SBNationNBA) May 9, 2017
And these weren’t even bad teams! Heading into the second round, many believed that the Raptors, of all the other teams in the Eastern Conference, had the best shot at, well, not winning, but at least making the Cavaliers squirm a bit. Heck, they might have found a way to win a game or two had they not lost Kyle Lowry to an ankle injury in game two.
Meanwhile, the Jazz were coming off their most impressive regular season in almost a decade, thanks to their typically strong defense and breakout years from Gordon Hayward and Rudy Gobert. They weren’t in the same league as the Warriors – it’s not entirely clear that anybody is – but they definitely weren’t as hapless as they looked for much of this series. (Like the Raptors, they were also missing a key player, in this case George Hill, but it’s hard to imagine his presence would have significantly altered the final result.) Both teams gave it their best, but it didn’t matter: Cleveland still has LeBron James, the Warriors continued to be the Warriors, and there wasn’t much they could do.
It’s bad enough that two of the conference semi-finals resulted in sweeps. It’s even more maddening that the two competitive series have been nearly as uneventful from a purely basketball perspective (although they’ve been outstanding from a “guys with the same first name fighting each other” perspective). At first, the series between the Boston Celtics and the Washington Wizards showed promise, with Boston managing comeback wins in both game one and game two. However, the Wizards responded by blowing the Celtics out the next couple of times in games that were essentially decided by the third quarter. Meanwhile, three out of the four games played between the Houston Rockets and the San Antonio Spurs have been decided by 20 or more points, leading to a 2-2 series that has so far managed to be stubbornly non-competitive on a game-to-game basis.
So the playoffs have mostly been a bust so far. Is there any hope that one or both of the remaining second-round series mutate into something more compelling? Well, maybe-ish?
Now, theoretically, the conference finals should provide more of a challenge for the Warriors and Cavaliers, but that’s also what we thought heading into the second round. The Warriors will either be facing the Rockets, who employ James Harden, one of the few players capable of stealing away a game from Golden State all by himself, or the Spurs, who history tells us to never count out. Meanwhile in the Eastern Conference, a series against the Wizards could lead to an entertaining LeBron v John Wall battle (and Wall’s been pretty good this postseason). Meanwhile, the Celtics would have home-court advantage should they be the ones facing the Cavaliers, which accounts for something – even if the whole “game seven will be at home” thing would require Boston to last seven games against Cleveland, which may be a tad unlikely.
Even if more competitive basketball is on the horizon, however, it won’t shake off the feeling that the first three rounds of this year’s playoffs might be utterly irrelevant, that the outcome is practically predetermined. On Sunday, James answered a question by saying that it doesn’t matter who the Cavaliers face in the conference finals, and he’s right in ways he probably never intended. The Cavaliers and Warriors have been playing so much better than their competition that it simply may not matter which team they’re facing until they face each other.
