🏀 The NBA playoffs really are different. The main reason is a simple one

My Week in Sport(s): postseason basketball, Mayank Yadav and Trinity Rodman's playmaking

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

In this edition:

• 🏀 A look ahead to the upcoming NBA postseason

• 🏏 Mayank Yadav and the risks that come with speed

• ⚽️ The USWNT’s young forwards combining in transition

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🏀 The NBA playoffs really are different. The main reason is a simple one

The Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green is rarely out of the headlines these days — for better or for worse.

But for all of his on-court indiscretions, his most lasting impact on basketball discourse might be his blunt summation of the commonly-held view that there are some of his peers who are simply built to excel in the high stakes of the postseason¹:

“There are 82-game players, then there are 16-game players.”

The magnitude of the supposed stylistic difference between the NBA playoffs and the league’s regular-season play might be overstated.

But you could certainly argue that — looking simply at wins and losses — Green’s view is borne out in the historical record.

Before the website was folded into ABC News, FiveThirtyEight addressed this topic fairly frequently — and found that incorporating the postseason experience possessed by each side in a playoff series markedly improved their ability to make accurate predictions.

It’s worth quoting from

Nate Silver

’s 2017 piece on this at length:

“Throughout NBA history, teams with extensive playoff experience have often found a higher “gear” in the playoffs. Put more precisely, they have a tendency to win more playoff games than you’d expect from their regular-season performance…In the NBA postseason since 1980, the team with the higher initial Elo rating has won 74 percent of playoff series. But if a team has both a higher Elo rating and much more playoff experience, that win percentage shoots up to 86 percent. Conversely, teams with the higher Elo rating but much less playoff experience have won just 52 percent of playoff series.”

In a sentence: past experience in the NBA playoffs seems to beget future postseason success.

From this starting point — if you’re so inclined — it’s easy to start suggesting superficially plausible stories about the ‘intangible’ factors that might underly this finding.

But I think we should be careful about rushing along this path too quickly². In the finer print of FiveThirtyEight’s notes on its NBA prediction model, they say the following:

“For playoff games, we make a few special changes to the team rating process explained above. For one thing, teams play their best players more often in the playoffs, so our depth-chart algorithm has leeway to bump up a player’s MPG in the postseason if he usually logs a lot of minutes and/or has a good talent rating.”

Some perennial contenders — completely understandably — make decisions in the regular season that sacrifice wins in order to maximise their chances of achieving their overall goal: winning a championship.

NBA teams are no more or no less than the players they put on the floor — and you could make a case that, for instance, Draymond’s regular-season Warriors and the playoff Warriors are two subtly different teams.

From this perspective — if you assume that franchises make similar decisions regarding balancing the regular season and the postseason from year to year — it’s not as surprising that knowledge of past playoff success helps you make better predictions³.

This trend is clear when you look at the league’s current crop of elite players.

There are 20 active NBA players who have made at least 3 All-NBA teams so far in their careers.

Together, those 20 have logged 164 individual seasons where they have started at least 41 regular-season games and at least 4 playoff games.

In almost three-quarters of those seasons — 119 out of 164 — the player played at least 5% more minutes per game in the playoffs than in the regular season⁴.

As it happens, the 2023-24 NBA regular season ends this weekend.

And we can use knowledge of this extremely clear trend to look ahead to the upcoming playoffs and ask some interesting questions.

For starters: are there are players in this cohort who haven’t been playing that many minutes this regular season — and whose teams we should consider bumping upwards in our postseason estimates, on the assumption that their playing time will significantly increase over the coming weeks?

We should adjust the list of 20 names slightly before going any further.

Three players — DeAndre Jordan, Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul — will end up having started fewer than half of their teams’ regular-season games, and aren’t going to be asked to carry them in the postseason.

Among the other 17, however, there are no season-ending injuries⁵ and each plays for a team currently in a playoff (or play-in) spot.

Only three players in this cohort have played as many minutes per game during the 2023-24 regular season as they tend to play in the playoffs, while eight are averaging approximately three minutes per game fewer than they do in the postseason.

The observed gaps for Stephen Curry and LeBron James — proven 16-game performers — are somewhat ominous for opponents.

LeBron’s career playoff average may be out of reach this time, though: he’s not played 40 minutes a night in the postseason since 2017-18 with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Curry has never carried the same load as LeBron in the playoffs — his career average is four minutes per game lower — but with relatively fresher legs coming out of this regular season he could be well set for another postseason run.

Green’s teammate on the Warriors has played fewer than 33 minutes per game this regular season — down two minutes from last year, and comfortably the lowest mark of any of these 17 players in 2023-24.

At the bottom of the chart above, a player like Joel Embiid will be hoping that he can stay on the court longer for the Philadelphia 76ers this postseason — his career playoff average is just under 35 minutes per game — and bend games to his will like the league’s other stars do.

Rudy Gobert — who has had his own postseason issues in the past⁶ — will also be hoping to play more minutes for the Minnesota Timberwolves, surrounded by of one of the strongest supporting rosters he’s had around him in his career.

Of course, just playing stars for more minutes is no guarantee that they’ll get their teams across the line. Players like Embiid and Gobert are well aware that the best of the best are expected to shoulder that load with little to no downturn in efficiency.

I wouldn’t put it so strongly, but ESPN’s Brian Windhorst recently wrote of the Embiid:

“His 27-26 playoff record is a blemish on his career.”

Fairly or not, the ‘16-game player’ label is one that is exceedingly difficult to earn, and putting in extra effort at the climax of the NBA season is necessary — but not sufficient.

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🏏 Run the Numbers

21-year-old Indian cricketer Mayank Yadav’s debut IPL season — in which he has been recorded bowling at 97mph — has been thrilling.

But Yadav had to wait until his third season under contract before making an IPL appearance, at least partly because of his injury history — and he’s now being held back again by his team after limping off the field last Sunday with an injury.

There’s something at once beautiful and sad about watching an athlete do the thing they were born to do on the biggest stage, but knowing that the stress they’re putting on their body might be too much for them.

Pitching in baseball is a very different physical exercise to fast bowling in cricket, with the strain much more localised to the arm. But the same phenomenon exists: joy at the emergence of an exciting young flamethrower gives way to a form of vicarious grief all too often⁷.

Major League Baseball’s 2024 season has opened with a spate of reported injuries to the elbows of some of the sport’s best pitchers. What’s bleak, though, is how this year’s number isn’t anything like an outlier, according to analysis for The Score by Travis Sawchik:

“Spring is when most elbow injuries occur. Through the first 100 days of 2024, nine MLB pitchers had Tommy John procedures compared to the previous decade's 6.1 average. Elevated, yes, but there were a record 11 Tommy John surgeries involving MLB arms in the first 100 days of 2014 and 2021.”

In both sports, speed is inarguably effective⁸. The question is: what physical cost is it fair to ask those who can produce it to bear?

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⚽️ Watch the Games

When incoming Washington Spirit head coach Jonatan Giráldez finally arrives in the NWSL, 21-year-old Trinity Rodman will be one of the brightest young players at his disposal.

Rodman is also an important part of the US Women’s National Team’s present and future forward line, as the team looks to rebuild and rebound from an early World Cup exit last year.

Earlier this week, Rodman combined with a couple of the USWNT’s other exciting young attackers — Jaedyn Shaw and Sophia Smith — to devastating effect.

The most enjoyable counter-attacks in football often catch the viewer a little on the back foot, as well as the defending team — and, in the second half of their shootout win over Canada on Tuesday, the US went from back to front in just 10 seconds.

Receiving a pass in the centre circle, Shaw turns and knocks the ball into space between a pair of retreating Canadian defenders — and, crucially, into the path of the already-advancing Rodman.

Both of those opponents converge on her, leaving the speedy Smith in a foot race with the other remaining cover defender. Noticing that her teammate is already streaking ahead of her marker, Rodman plays the final pass early — giving Smith time to adjust the angle of her run, open up her body and bury the first-time shot with her right foot.

You can watch a clip of this sequence here.

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The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday April 27th.

1. For readers who may not follow the NBA closely: a team needs to win 16 games across four playoff rounds in order to win a championship.

2. Elsewhere in the ‘Methodology’ note I’m about to quote from, FiveThirtyEight mentions that they do make some adjustments to players’ expected offensive and defensive ratings based on historical playoff performance — but that, “[f]or most players, these adjustments are minimal at most”.

3. It is probably also the case that teams with more playoff experience are older teams — and need to take a more proactive approach to managing the minutes of their stars during the regular season.

4. Those are the seasons marked in green in the chart. Many player-seasons saw much greater increases than 5%: minutes per game increased by 10% or more in 71 out of 164 (43%). (Only 5 out of 164 player-seasons — those in pink in the chart — had an observed decrease of 5% or more.)

5. Although it’s worth noting that Giannis Antetokounmpo may yet miss the Milwaukee Bucks’ first couple of postseason games with a relatively minor calf injury.

6. Ben Golliver explicitly referenced Draymond Green’s line about ‘16-game players’ when talking about Gobert in a recent piece for the Washington Post.

7. For another example from cricket, consider Australia’s Pat Cummins — who had to wait more than five years to play another test match after a truly stunning debut at 18 years old.

8. Sawchik on baseball: “The math's simple: MLB batters hit .275 against fastballs thrown between 90 and 93 mph last season. Against fastballs 96 mph and up: .234.” In cricket: CricViz noted in 2018 that batters in men’s tests averaged around 33 runs per dismissal against ‘high pace’, compared to 36 runs against all pace.