The Celtics' cakewalk to a championship might signal its time to change the NBA's playoff format

Happy Friday, folks! Welcome back to Layup Lines. Thanks so much for joining me today. I hope you’ve had a fantastic week and have an even better weekend ahead of you.

Celtics fans, I don’t want you to be mad at me today. Your team will probably win the NBA championship tonight — it feels like a sweep is coming. If it doesn’t happen tonight, then it’ll probably happen the very next game.

READ MORE: The Mavericks and Oilers have given us two incredibly awful Finals

Congratulations! The Celtics deserve it! Boston has been the best team in the NBA all season long. This team deserves to win the NBA Finals for plenty of reasons. The Celtics have earned their place among the greatest teams in NBA history.

That said, I think it’s fair to mention Boston’s relatively easy path to this point. The Celtics had a cakewalk through the Eastern Conference. Boston didn’t have to play a 50-win team until the Mavericks in the Finals.

As we discussed, injuries decimated every team the Celtics saw in these playoffs. That’s not uncommon — you need a bit of injury luck to make deep playoff runs and the Celtics have had plenty of it outside of Kristaps Porzingis. But, in the East, their competition wasn’t up to snuff.

Meanwhile, in the West, the Mavericks had to claw their way through the Clippers (51 wins), the Thunder (57 wins) and the Timberwolves (56 wins). The West has generally been a tougher conference than the East over the last 30 years, but this season shows us exactly how stark that difference is. The best teams in the West totally beat each other down while the Celtics just cruised to the Finals.

To be fair to Boston, that’s not the Celtics’ problem. The team played who it had to play and dominated the competition. This team had three 50+ point wins in a season — we can’t (and shouldn’t!) try to take anything away from that. There are no asterisks here.

I just think that if there was ever a time to consider switching the NBA’s playoff format from a two-conference situation to a 1-16 seeding format, then this is that time.

The league has discussed it before—it was even reportedly close to happening at one point when the NBA was restarting during the pandemic. With how dominant the West has traditionally been, it makes sense to consider it.

Obviously, logistical issues would need to be resolved. Boston traveling to, say, Sacramento for a 1-seed vs. 16-seed matchup would be an issue. But I think there are creative ways to get around that, whether finding neutral sites to host playoff games or even shortening early rounds so that the travel is less hectic.

But I think this format would solve a core problem the NBA has had over the decades: Teams in the West are presented with tougher matchups early on in the postseason than their counterparts in the East. This year’s Nuggets and Timberwolves series felt like the NBA Finals. I’m not sure the Celtics have played a series that’s felt like the Finals yet.

Part of that is just how good that team is. Another part, though, is that they just haven’t gotten any real competition. And maybe there isn’t any. Maybe they’re just that good.

But, man, I would’ve loved to see it.

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It’s not Luka’s time

I really, really hate the word “exposed” when it comes to discourse about the NBA today.

Folks always use the term in a way that feels so absolutist. If a player’s flaws are “exposed” then the book is written on them. Everyone has to be this weird image of perfection, but no one ever is. So it doesn’t matter.

That said, I do feel like “exposed” is the right word to characterize what the Celtics have done to Luka Doncic in these Finals. He’s not a great defender. I wouldn’t even call him a good one — especially at his size. And the Celtics have driven right at him over and over and over again in these Finals to kickstart their offense. It’s been a huge problem.

Down 3-0 in the Finals, Doncic is acknowledging his defensive shortcomings, our Robert Zeglinski writes. And he’s ready to learn from it.

“It’s not unprecedented for stars of Doncic’s mold to experience a little heartbreak before they finally break through. Losing and learning where you have to improve to succeed has been a rite of passage for every major star in NBA history. Everyone from Michael Jordan and LeBron James to Nikola Jokic went through this kind of challenging trial in some capacity.

Doncic knows what next steps he has to take to lift the Mavericks over the top. That’s half the battle. And no matter what happens during the rest of these Finals, he still has plenty of time to grow.”

The path is there for Doncic. You don’t lead a team to the NBA Finals by osmosis – you’ve got to be good enough to do this. He is.

Let’s see if he’s ready to do what it takes to get better.

Shootaround

— Pat McAfee is stoking the flames of the Woj vs. Shams beef. Here’s Zeglinski with more

— Dan Hurley denies that he used the Lakers as a leverage play. We all know what it is, though. Bryan Kalbrosky has more.

— Speaking of Bryan, our latest NBA Mock Draft is out. Take a peek and see who your favorite team is picking.

— Brian Windhorst had a brutally honest take about Luka that should stick with him for a long time. Charles Curtis has more.

That’s a wrap, folks! Thanks so much for reading Layup Lines today. We’ll be back at it again next week. Until then! Peace.

-Sykes