HOUSTON -- There is a creeping sense spreading through the sports world, a sort of odd combination of malaise and disdain. A "disdaise," if you will, and it's about the fact that we all know how this NBA season winds up. The Cavaliers will win the East, the Warriors will win the West, and the two will meet for the third time in three years.
On its surface, that's what we want. We want the best teams in basketball, going head to head, with the legacy of one of the greatest players of all time on the line on one side, and the legacy of JaVale McGee on the other. No one denies that Cavs-Warriors is the best possible matchup for the Finals, and executives have to be drooling over the potential TV ratings in a rubber match. However, we also don't want it to look so ... easy. The Warriors and Cavs have dominated to such an absurd degree that the entire playoffs feel like a big dog and pony show, like we're all pretending to be really into that opening band even though we just came here for the headliner.
Rockets-Spurs should be a compelling series pitting old rivalries and new blood, with the MVP reputations of Kawhi Leonard and James Harden hanging in the balance -- a battle between old school grind-it-out and new-age chuck-'em-up. Instead, it feels like we're making two goats fight over the chance to get dropped into the T-Rex exhibit in "Jurassic Park." And the same is true in the East with the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards. A close, tough, competitive series seems like a waste of time because, in the end, they're all just going to get eaten.
But that's not all. The way these playoffs have worked out, how the tiered system of the NBA has shaken out, it's not just that the Cavs and Warriors are, on paper, phenomenally better teams. It's that they're going to be rested, healthy, and ready to go, while the other team is going to look like it showed up for work after an all-nighter that ended in a barfight.
That is to say, the winners of Celtics-Wizards and Spurs-Rockets aren't just facing super-teams. They're facing full-strength super-teams when they've got nothing left.
Playoff series become more physical as they go on for a few reasons. Familiarity breeds dislike, which brings harder fouls, stiffer screens, and loose elbows. But even in a series low on hate like Rockets-Spurs, the two teams have played one another enough that they know what the other one is going to run, which means there are a lot of guys just slamming into one another trying to make a play.
In Tuesday's Game 5 victory for San Antonio, the Spurs, already without Tony Parker, lost Kawhi Leonard to an ankle injury. The severity of the injury isn't known -- he's questionable for Game 6 but expected to play. The Rockets are without Nene for the rest of the playoffs after the big man tore his adductor earlier in the series. Both teams are low on bodies and in Game 5, you could tell both teams were exhausted, particularly the Rockets on a seven-man rotation.
If the Rockets do win Game 6 on Thursday to force a Game 7, the winner of that game will have to turn around and fly to Oakland the next day, with roughly a 45-hour turnaround before Game 1 vs. the 67-win Golden State Warriors. An every-other-day schedule is normal for the regular season, but it's always punctuated by a few days off. If the Spurs wrap the series in six, they get a whole whopping one extra day to rest up before Game 1 Sunday.
We've seen this before. Before Game 1 of the 2008 Western Conference Finals, the Spurs survived a grueling seven-game series with the New Orleans Hornets, had plane trouble and got into Los Angeles far later than expected. They had nothing left for that series. No one thinks the Rockets or Spurs have much of a chance to steal three games off the Warriors, much less win the series, but the way the NBA has stratified makes even what already seems like an insurmountable challenge that much harder.
The Rockets and Spurs are closer to the Warriors than any team outside of Cleveland, but they're also not as good as the Warriors, so of course they have to play one another. This isn't about any of this being unfair. It's totally fair. But the Warriors are working on a full week's rest -- so are the Cavaliers -- while the NBA's upper-middle-class beats on one another repeatedly, dragging out injuries and exhausting each other while the Warriors spend their time feuding with the media.
So who would be in a better spot to actually push the Warriors, given these factors? Houston's healthier, the Spurs have more energy. The Rockets match up better with the Warriors on account of being the only team outside of Cleveland capable of walking into Oracle Arena and saying "let's have a shootout." And with the Parker injury being more impactful than the Nene injury, and the Kawhi injury being bigger than both, it's easy to say Rockets.
But the Rockets looked completely spent Tuesday. Harden's usage has been high all season, he's been battling a cold, and ankle, and hip injuries through this series. The phrase goes "No one's healthy in the playoffs." That should probably change to "No one's healthy in the playoffs except the Warriors because they sweep everyone and their stars don't have to play that many minutes." For comparison, Steph Curry has played 275 minutes in these playoffs. James Harden has played 370, with one or two more games to go.
Still, the injuries put the Spurs in too big of a hole. Even if Leonard plays, he's clearly not 100 percent. That's just one more way these playoffs have been such a disappointment. No one expected anyone but the Warriors and Cavs to win, but we expected some decent fights along the way.
The problem is, there may be no one left standing to face either of them before the Finals.
