I sense your sarcasm, but you’ve got to have some pretty rose colored glasses on to think that a below 500 team over the last half of the season (with good health luck! see below) would have any shot against one of the greatest teams of all time. Healthy Bucks would have had a bear of a time getting by the Pacers, Pacers WORKED them when the Bucks were healthy, their speed was too much.
I’m optimistic for the Bucks next year, though! Obviously Giannis and Dame can increase their chemistry with more time together.
I think, overall, they had pretty good health luck last year, though. Lillard and Giannis both played 2500 minutes. So did 35 year old Brook Lopez. Middleton played 1500+ minutes, that might be all he can handle now. 9000 combined minutes for those 4 is pretty good.
Mavs were the best team in the west since the trade deadline. I don’t think there’s much between them and DEN/OKC/MIN. Boston would have been a big favorite against all 4.
Minnesota outplayed Dallas taking out crunch time. Luka just had them in the final 2 minutes of each half. Minnesota won the first 4 games in non crunch time minutes. If KAT shoots even 30% from 3 that series goes the other way.
I remember, after the 2001 season, the Red Sox GM said in a radio interview that the Red Sox had spent more days in first place than the Yankees. It just doesn’t matter.
OKC-DAL 3 point variance really wasn’t that big - a 6% swing happens all the time in playoff series. To put it in comparison, the difference in the Miami-Boston series last year was 13%.
Additionally, DAL had a higher percentage of Corner threes than OKC (almost half of Dallas’ 3s were from the corner, OKC was at 37%), so you’d expect Dallas to shoot a higher percentage. Contrast that with Miami-Boston last year, Miami actually had a lower corner percentage than Boston did. OKC-DAL really isn’t a significant outlier, that sort of variance is completely normal.
