I haven't been as tuned in to the NBA playoffs this year as I was in years past. I like to joke that the reason is because I am really looking forward to the start of the WNBA season, but that isn't entirely true. I'm only going to watch Indiana Fever games just like a vast majority of the newly found fans of the women's version of the game.
This year I started out rather uncaring about the NBA because I feel the season is too long, and then kind of started to pay closer attention toward the end of the regular season.
I am interested, but with 82 games for each team per season and 30 teams in the league, that is just too many games to keep up with. I have the same opinion about baseball. I simply cannot focus on that much and still have other things going on in my life.
If you do keep up with the league better than me, congratulations! I am not telling anyone that they shouldn't, I just don't have time.
The playoffs each year tend to go a certain way with the top seeded teams moving forward with the occasional crazy story of a under-ranked team that seems to have waited to the end of the season to start to be cohesive as a team. Normally this is Miami's job as they went to the finals after barely making the playoffs a few years back. That was a crazy time and I was rooting for them when this happened. This year we kind of have a situation where that could happen with the Minnesota Timberwolves, but I wouldn't get too excited about that actually happening. The Lakers are the only team they have eliminated from the playoffs thus far, and they have a long way to go with all the remaining teams they have to face. Other than that the playoffs have proceeded exactly like the statistics would indicate that they would.
There have only been 2 series that have even been close in terms of who was going to win it with the Houston vs. Golden State being the big one that will be determined in just a few hours from now. Statistically, the Rockets should have steam-rolled the Warriors and this might end up being one of the most exciting games that happen in the playoffs at all. It's been up and down for both teams involved and much of this could be attributed to Golden State going up 3-1 and perhaps getting a mixture of their own arrogance and Houston feeling as though their backs were against the wall. All of these games have been reasonably close but only one of the games (game 4) truly went down to the wire.
They say that most games are won in the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarter anyway. The fact that Houston is ranked 2nd in the west with 30 losses on the year is a bit telling as well though. The Lakers getting eliminated by Minnesota took some interest in the tournament as a whole out of the picture, but since I am sick of LeBron, I wasn't sad to see them go.
Statistically, OKC and Cleveland are very likely to continue all the way to the end with them being the only 2 teams in the NBA with fewer than 20 losses each. The Celtics could pull and upset and that could be really exciting but first, they have to get past the Knicks and even though I am a Boston fan, I have felt bad for the Knicks for a very long time as they have been in basically a 30-year slump and it would be nice to see them rise again. The Knicks are one of the most famous teams in the NBA and one of the only teams to keep both their name and which city they are based out of, but they haven't won a championship since 1973. I'd imagine they don't want to talk about 2004-2010 or 2013-2020 at all.
I believe that we are going to see an OKC vs Cleveland final and that would be fine with me. At that point I will likely tune in to watch each game but for now I am content with mostly looking at highlights and catching the box score after the fact.