Lest you forget how great playoff basketball is, we received a stark reminder over the weekend with all eight series tipping off.
In their respective openers, the Denver Nuggets and L.A. Clippers produced an overtime thriller, the New York Knicks mounted an unfathomable comeback, and the Oklahoma City Thunder put the league on notice (they should have been already) with a record-breaking blowout.
The great thing about the NBA playoffs is that everything is under a microscope. If you’re a subpar defensive player, they’re going at you every time. If your jump shot is shaky, guess what? They’re leaving you open in the corner all game long. It leads to some phenomenal performances, but it also exposes those who aren’t ready for the spotlight.
With that in mind, here are some winners and losers from this weekend’s Game 1s.
Winner: Old Man Curry
The Warriors-Rockets first-round matchup is, ostensibly, a battle of youth versus experience. Now, of course the Warriors have some youth and the Rockets have some experience, but ultimately it will come down to whether Houston’s blossoming young core of Alperen Sengun, Jalen Green and Amen Thompson can outplay Golden State’s sage trio of Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green.
Well, after Game 1, advantage goes to the experienced side.
The Warriors stole home-court in Game 1 with a 95-85 win thanks largely to Curry — who poured in 31 gigantic points, including several backbreakers in an arena where he’s already crushed Houston’s postseason dreams multiple times.
The 37-year-old Curry, who in this series is particularly reminded of his age because he coached both Jalen Green and Thompson at his camp several summers ago, also did all of this with a wrap on his thumb roughly the size of a catcher’s mitt.
Curry and the Warriors looked great on Sunday — but that was after four days of rest following Tuesday’s play-in win over the Grizzlies. Now we’ll have to see how those old experienced legs bounce back for Wednesday’s Game 2, and for however long the series lasts.
Winner: Knicks’ resilience
The Knicks were outplayed for the first three quarters of their opening game against the upstart Detroit Pistons on Saturday, and it appeared that an upset was imminent as Detroit entered the fourth quarter with an eight-point lead and all the momentum.
How did New York respond? Oh, just with a good old-fashioned 21-0 run to completely seize control of the game and send the Pistons back to the hotel in shambles.
Surely the Knicks don’t want to be in position to have to pull a run like this out of their rear ends every time out, but they can’t possibly consider themselves out of any game from here on out knowing that this kind of dominance is possible.
It’s just one reason that, as our Brad Botkin wrote, the Knicks are built for the playoffs.
Loser: Lakers exceptionalism
Despite what many Laker fans may have believed heading into the playoffs, it turns out you can’t just acquire one of the league’s most ball-dominant players, put him on a roster with virtually no rim protection and expect to steamroll your way to a championship.
The downfalls were never more evident during Saturday’s 117-95 stomping at the hands of the Minnesota Timberwolves, which silenced a Crypto.com Arena crowd which entered the game ready to make arrangements for the victory parade.
Even the most biased of Lakers supporters, Magic Johnson himself, was disappointed with the effort and fired a few strays in coach JJ Redick’s direction.
It’s just one game, but that bad of a loss on their home floor certainly tells the Lakers that they have their work cut out for them moving forward.
For the latter portion of his career, Russell Westbrook has been dared by defenses to burn them with his shooting — and with good reason. His six seasons shooting below 30% on at least 200 3-point attempts are the most in NBA history (shout out Corey Brewer and Jerry Stackhouse with four each!).
But if there’s one thing we know about Westbrook, it’s that his confidence is never going to waver. So when he got the ball in the corner with his Nuggets trailing the Clippers by one with just under 30 seconds left during Saturday’s Game 1, he let it fly without hesitation.
It dropped right through the net, of course, leading to exaltation from his teammates and the Ball Arena crowd.
This is what you get with Westbrook. He went 2 for 6 from 3-point range on Saturday, but one of them easily could have been a game-winner. Thanks to James Harden, however, it wasn’t. Which leads us to …
Loser: Russell Westbrook
As our Sam Quinn wrote, the full Russell Westbrook experience was on display in Game 1, and that includes not just the good, but also the bad and the ugly.
After Harden tied the game on an impressive floater, the ball once again ended up in Westbrook’s hands on Denver’s final possession of regulation. This time, things … didn’t go so well.
He was also a wrecking ball in the overtime period, going 0 for 4 from the field and nearly costing his team the game by electing to shoot with the Nuggets up by one with 13 seconds left, despite there being just a two-second difference between the shot clock and the game clock.
Luckily, Aaron Gordon was there to bail him out with the offensive rebound, or else things could have gotten quite interesting.
It’s rare for a player to be both a winner and loser in a single playoff game, but leave it to Russ to blaze his own path.
Winner: OKC defense
You know a defense is elite when you’re physically uncomfortable watching it, and that was the case for the Oklahoma City Thunder during Sunday’s historic 51-point Game 1 win over the Memphis Grizzlies.
OKC generated 22 turnovers, scoring 24 points off of them, while holding Memphis to 80 points on 34% from the field, including 17% from 3-point range. There’s just no room to breathe with the length, strength and quickness of every single defender on the floor.
And when they do force a mistake, which they did at the highest rate in the NBA during the regular season, they capitalize with knockout-blow highlights like this Jalen Williams dunk.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the league’s leading scorer, put up a relatively meager 15 points on 4-for-13 shooting in Game 1, and the Thunder won by 51 points. Good luck to any team that gets in their way.
All credit goes to the OKC supporting cast, not just for picking up the offensive slack, but also for dominating on the defensive end like they have all season.
Basketball isn’t all about statistics. But it’s, you know, a little bit about statistics. If you go an entire game without recording a single counting stat, chances are you didn’t have a tremendous impact.
This brings us to Bucks forward Kyle Kuzma, who tallied a goose egg in every major statistical category during Milwaukee’s 117-98 Game 1 loss to the Indiana Pacers on Saturday. His 22 minutes without recording a point, rebound, assist, steal or block tied for the most of any NBA player in a playoff game since steals and blocks became official stats in 1973-74.
He missed all five of his field-goal attempts, both of his free throws and both of 3-pointers while committing two fouls and finishing as a team-worst minus-24 in his minutes. Kuzma has seen better days.
CBS Sports research department
If you told Kuzma, who was traded from the lowly Washington Wizards prior to February’s deadline, that he’d make history in his first playoff game as a Buck, he probably wouldn’t have thought this is what you meant.
For what it’s worth, Bucks coach Doc Rivers blamed Kuzma’s teammates for not putting him in better position to score. Excuses were scant, however, regarding the zeroes in every other major statistical category.
Hey, at least there’s another game on Tuesday and he won’t have to spend all summer wallowing in the misery of this performance.
