Stakes

The NBA playoff's rules, conditions, and contradictions of pressure.

LeBron James calls them “a different beast.”

According to Steve Kerr “it’s almost a different sport.”

Russell Westbrook looks at them as a clean slate, a reset, saying, “You get in the playoffs, it's 0-0.”

Steph Curry’s called them a “chess match”.

“For me it’s the same thing, it’s another game that we’re supposed to win,” Nikola Jokic said just this past Friday, a day before the postseason got underway.

The big word you hear is “urgency”. Another is “intensity”. Then there’s “preparation”, lots and lots of it. My personal favourite is from Kawhi Leonard, who simply called the playoffs “fun”.

Every April we ask NBA athletes what the difference is between the playoffs and the regular season, and every April they attempt to distill what is in effect a vibe shift.

The numbers kind of bear out a difference. I say kind of because the numbers reflect what we see in playoff games — pace slowing, more fouls, isolation offence, teams shooting more threes — instead of any secret phenomena.

What actually changes is perception. There’s a narrowing focus, a sense of stakes. At a rudimentary level there are less games ahead, but to say the playoffs pack their unique punch because of supply and demand really does take the wind out of them.

I don’t want to downplay the stakes, Kyle Lowry said once after a failed season in Miami that the entirety of the regular season was worthless without winning a title. That’s a lot of effort, a lot of energy, expelled over nearly seven months. But stakes are also reflective of the world they’re born out of and bound to. The word itself (staak, to stake) indicate action, to bind something. The phrase “what’s at stake”, derived from punishment. Specifically, people tied to stakes for the purpose of humiliation or execution, the former often leading to the latter.

There’s a conscious line one walks in their fandom between what amount of energy expenditure feels appropriate given the backdrop conditions of day-to-day life. When it feels gross, weird, or uncomfortable to care and give so much attention to sports not because you’ve been personally reprimanded but because you have a conscience, and it nudges at the back of your skull. These are our own stakes for stakes.

I know it’s heavy on the recency bias to preface statements with “I can’t remember a time when”, but I can’t remember a time when this many global conflicts — and an American administration intent on stoking them and creating more — backdropped the NBA playoffs.

I think that’s why my personal interpretation of the postseason, this time around, leans closest to Jokic’s: more games that every athlete involved is supposed to win. Supposed to want to win, but that’s tougher to parse.

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Some athletes talk about the playoffs like a luxury in the sense of all the extra time they get to prepare. All that extra time is 24-hours, one extra day.

The playoff schedule is one day on, one off, as opposed to the regular season when teams play back-to-backs. For context, the average number of back-to-backs teams played this season was 14.9 — the Hawks, Clippers and Rockets had the most with 17 back-to-back stretches.

Those “off” days are still spent travelling, training, watching tape, practicing and recovering, but it speaks volumes about the physical and mental load of the regular season that these postseason down days have a tinge of reprieve. That time starts to feel like a luxury just as it begins to run out.

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The playoffs ratchet up one of the more incessant contradictions of the regular season: that pressure is necessary for stellar performance, but an excess of pressure manifested as nerves or stress felt by a player indicates weakness, unpreparedness.

Steph Curry used to feel so nervous during games early in his career that his leg would jump while he watched from the bench.

"It's an uneasy feeling," Curry said of the buildup of nerves, "And it happens fast. It's not a steady progression.”