Denver’s Revenge Of The Regular Season
We’ve been conditioned to think it doesn’t matter. This year it did — in the end.
In no other sport is the regular season devalued quite like it is in the NBA. Whether the chicken or the egg came first isn’t fully clear, but the players quantifiably don’t invest in it anywhere near as much as they used to, and it doesn’t seem to predict the playoffs the way it used to, either. (These factors are correlated for reasons that make sense — if the best players suit up a lot less in the regular season than the playoffs, then the regular season is a less relevant sample of data to predict the playoffs from.)
But in a postseason that saw half the conference finalists be seeded 7th in their conference or lower, with a No. 8 seed advancing to the NBA Finals, the Denver Nuggets’ hard-fought but relatively straightforward championship march ended up preserving the last laugh for the regular season this year, in an era where those feel rarer and rarer.
How so? Let’s look at Denver’s path through the 2023 NBA playoffs.
The first round wasn’t much of a referendum on predictive power either way. Although the Nuggets had lost at that stage without Jamal Murray a year earlier, practically nobody was calling for No. 1 Denver to lose to the 8th-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves — and the Nuggets did take care of business, closing out the T-Wolves in a gentleman’s sweep. Every other matchup in Denver’s postseason, however, put the regular season’s significance on trial in some way or another.
For instance, the Phoenix Suns were betting favorites to knock off Denver despite winning 8 fewer games and posting a categorically worse PPG differential during the regular season. This was textbook regular-season-doesn’t-matter logic: In one corner, a team that had far more postseason experience and a proven championship talent acquired during the season in Kevin Durant, going up against a team that had made it out of the second round just once during the Nikola Jokić era. (Jokić himself was also frequently disrespected in superstar comparisons with KD, despite being a 2-time regular season MVP.)
The following round, the Lakers were a buzzy team — if not quite outright favorites in Vegas — to beat Denver as well, after knocking off the defending champion Golden State Warriors. L.A. had even more postseason experience than Phoenix did, and featured a star tandem (LeBron James/Anthony Davis) that handily outplayed Murray and Jokić when they faced in the 2020 conference finals. Again, looking at the regular season résumés, this would not seem like a particularly competitive series; introduce other factors, though, and you might have picked the Lakers for the win without thinking twice.
And then we have the Heat. No, I can’t act like Miami was supposed to beat Denver, no matter whether you look at the regular season — when the Heat actually had a negative point differential — or at other factors like star talent, size, or even the Nuggets’ altitude advantage. But Miami did have (you guessed it) more playoff experience, as well as a battle-hardened toughness that threatened to make this a real fight. If you were looking for reasons to throw out the big-picture data from the season, you might have even justified picking against the Nuggets here as well.
Of course, Denver won each of those series by a combined margin of 12 games to 3, part of a 16-4 postseason run overall. None of the reasons to discount the Nuggets’ regular season accomplishments ever came very close to materializing. The West’s No. 1 seed ended up as the No. 1 team in the league.
Sometimes I trace the regular season’s predictive degradation back to 2001, when the Lakers rattled off one of the all-time switch-flipping performances — following up an up-and-down regular season (they had a solid but far from dominating year) with what is still probably the most overwhelming playoff run ever. Postseason experience was more of a leading indicator for the defending champs that year than regular-season performance, as has often been the case in the NBA playoffs over time.
Since then, whenever regular season point differential and playoff experience disagreed on who should win the Finals, the series had been perfectly split (6-6) between which category picked winners best… until 2023, that is.
Denver’s win this season helped tip the scales toward the regular season again, after last year’s Warriors beat the Celtics in a victory for the counter-theory that previous experience trumps all. (Yes, I may have gotten egg on my face for questioning that theory when it came to the 2022 Finals. It happens!)
All of this just proves that hard-and-fast rules are hard to come by when we talk about the value of different attributes in a team’s championship résumé. If you dug into the nitty-gritty of in-season Durant trades or Playoff LeBron and Playoff Jimmy, Denver didn’t seem like a team that could win this championship. Only someone foolish enough to take the team’s performance since last October at face value would have thought that. And this time, it actually worked out.
Filed under: NBA