The NBA Play-In Tournament has wrapped and all 16 seeds are set for the 2024-25 playoffs, which begin on Saturday with the Bucks vs. the Pacers at 1 p.m. ET. Playoff time is pressure time. Everyone feels it. But some have more riding on this than others.
Take LeBron James and Stephen Curry, for instance. Sure, they feel personal pressure to win a fifth ring, but if they don’t, their legacies are already sealed. Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo have the rare combination of an MVP trophy and a championship ring. Kawhi Leonard has been there and done that. The Rockets are full of young guys who aren’t yet saddled with any real expectation. The Pistons are playing with house money. Indiana is mostly doing the same.
But then there are these 10 players below, all of whom are under genuine pressure, if for different reasons and in different contexts, to come up big in these playoffs. Next to each name you will see a number. That is what we’ll call their playoff pressure meter, with 10 being the highest degree of heat. Let’s get to it.
There is one way, and one way only, that Stephen Curry can make a run at a fifth championship, which would tie him with Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan and potentially, in the eyes of some, elevate him above LeBron James on the all-time alter: Playoff Jimmy has to show up. Not a couple of times. The whole time. If he does, the Warriors can beat anyone. If he doesn’t, they can, and likely will, lose in the first round, and certainly beyond that.
Butler — who will probably never have a better shot, from this point forward, at winning the NBA championship that has thus far eluded him — has been masterful in his short time with the Warriors, who felt like scattered puzzle pieces that magically connected upon his arrival. But he shifted into an intentionally destructive gear against the Clippers in the season finale and the Grizzlies in Golden State’s play-in win by scoring 68 points, buoying a Warriors offense that had previously been way too susceptible to these stale stints.
Butler has to remain in attack mode to make Curry’s production exponential enough to matter. If he slips back into connector mode or starts smoking his layups, or worse, goes back to hesitating to even take them, forget about it. The Warriors are done.
Towns had his moments in last year’s playoffs, but his 3-for-22 showing from 3 through the first three games of the conference finals, when Towns’ Timberwolves went down 3-0 to Dallas, only furthered his mostly deserved reputation for laying big-game eggs. And that was in Minnesota. A couple of dud performances in New York, or even one at the wrong time, will have this man on trial for his basketball life.
Even though the Knicks actually gave up more for Mikal Bridges, it was Towns, from the moment that trade went down, who felt like the all-in move. Towns critics, despite his All-NBA regular-season, remain proudly committed to their cause, and they are just waiting to pounce on him as a bright-light bust if he slips up in the slightest. The Knicks need Towns to be damn near perfect to have any chance to competing with, let alone beating, Boston in the second round, and that’s if they get through Detroit in the first, which won’t be easy.
The trust factor on playoff Harden is ever teetering. In a macro sense, his shortcomings have been exaggerated, and even if you comb the ledger, you’ll find more great playoff performances than true stinkers. But it’s the latter ones that disproportionately frame Harden’s postseason context. You won’t find many people talking about the 45 and 42 points Harden put up in Games 1 and 4 against the Celtics in 2023; they’re too busy laughing at the nine points he scored in the elimination game, his last in a Philly uniform.
Last season, the Clippers had the Mavericks 2-2 in the first round, and what did Harden do in the pivotal Game 5? He scored seven points, and he went 1 for 13 from 3 over the final two games as L.A. was eliminated. This is perhaps Harden’s last legitimate chance to contend for a title. Every second that Kawhi Leonard is healthy and playing at an MVP level, which he is doing right now, must be maximized, and if Harden doesn’t show up at the wrong time for a Clippers team that quietly has honest two-way championship traits, he’s never going to live it down.
Mitchell is a certified playoff performer. He scored 89 points in the last two games against Orlando last year, with 39 in Game 7 (you can do the math on the 50 in Game 6). He averaged over 31 points, six boards and five assists on 53% 3-point shooting in three games vs. Boston before he got hurt. He had a lot of huge games in Utah.
But he’s never had this honest of a shot at a ring. Cleveland is a sum-of-its-parts team, but it’s Mitchell who will ultimately carry the burden of proof that they truly belong with Boston in the East. Mitchell has always been a bit of an underdog in postseason settings; the guy going head to head with Jamal Murray in a first-round fireworks show that we all knew was going to burn out long before the Finals. These Cavs can actually win the whole thing. That’s a different kind of pressure.
Luka Dončić: 8
Luka’s greatness is not in question for anyone not named Nico Harrison, He has been, literally, one of the best playoff performers in history to date. But this is the Lakers we’re talking about. This is different than anything he experienced in Dallas.
Personally, you can bet he wants to stick it to the Mavericks and validate all the people who have clowned them for trading him by lighting up this particular postseason on fire. There’s a potential for pressing here, especially with the added dynamic, again, of his first playoff run with the Lakers and alongside LeBron James.
Dončić is the future for L.A., so this isn’t a do-or-die run for him by any means. Before the LeBron era closes out, there is a real chance to do something special right now. LeBron has handed the QB1 reins to Dončić, who will probably have the largest say in how far the Lakers go, or don’t go, over these next few weeks or months.
Like Luka, SGA enjoys near universal superstar acceptance and will presumably get a lot more runs at a title. But he is also almost certainly going to win MVP, and when that happens (the announcement usually comes during the second round) — particularly over a player as otherworldly as Nikola Jokić — a new level of expectation is going to be levied upon his shoulders. That’s perhaps not how it should be, but it’s how it will be nonetheless. Heavy lies the crown and all that.
This feels similar to Stephen Curry winning his first MVP in 2014-15, when the protectors of NBA superstar virtue weren’t quite ready to anoint him or the 67-win Warriors until they saw it in the postseason — and even then they fought the circumstantial-fortune fight as long as they could.
SGA has graduated. He’s no longer in that can’t-lose candy land where even losses are regarded as positives through the prism of experience gained. Now the losses count, not just toward the title that OKC is the betting favorite to win, but toward SGA’s standing in the highest stratosphere of stardom.
Morant, despite a turned ankle in the third quarter against the Warriors, was sublime in Memphis’ two play-in games — the last of which being a win over the Mavericks that sealed a first-round date with Oklahoma City. Absolutely no one will be picking Memphis to win that series, but quietly, there’s some pressure on Morant to justify his franchise-player post moving forward.
We know about the off-court stuff, which is still sticking to Morant as he was recently fined $75K for making a gun gesture after hitting a 3-pointer. We know he has struggled to stay healthy. And we know that Memphis is anxious enough to start making good on the promise they showed as an up-and-coming contender in 2022 to can their coach three weeks before the playoffs.
There have been whispers of Morant hitting the trade block this summer if things go poorly. Nothing reported in concrete, but it’s not hard to imagine in a post-Luka-to-the-Lakers world. The Grizzlies are an electric offense in a position to upset a historic defense. They’re unlikely to do it, but Morant needs to play well nonetheless.
Jamal Murray: 7
Speaking of Murray, he’s got a lot on his shoulders in this first-round matchup with the Clippers and potentially beyond. Denver needs its starting lineup to crush to make up for the bench minutes it tends to spend swimming upstream, and since we know exactly what we’re going to get from Nikola Jokić, Murray becomes the fulcrum on which Denver’s hopes swing.
Murray mostly reprised his Robin role this season, but that won’t matter if he shoots the way he did in last year’s playoffs (his two game-winners against the Lakers notwithstanding) before his disappearing Olympic act. Murray has to play huge, as we know he can do in the playoffs, to give the best player in the world the shot he deserves at honestly competing for a second title.
Much like Murray in Denver, Randle is the necessary wingman if Minnesota is going to make a run. The defense is there, but Anthony Edwards can’t do it all offensively. Not against a Lakers team that has three killers (yes, I’m calling Austin Reaves a killer).
Randle really turned it up over the last legs of the regular season. The Wolves went 22-4 with him in the lineup from the final week of January on. He closed the campaign on 51/45 shooting splits over seven basically must-win games for the Wolves in April.
If Randle can continue this form, Minnesota can beat the Lakers. Hell, they can beat anyone. But the truth is, nobody actually thinks he will. Can he prove everyone wrong?
Mikal Bridges: 6
As mentioned above, Towns is going to be under a hotter spotlight in these playoffs than Bridges just by virtue of being a better player, but that doesn’t mean anyone has forgotten just how much the Knicks gave up to bring in Bridges as the final piece of a beat-Boston-at-its-own-game blueprint.
Bridges had a pretty good year, but the defense for which he was so heralded early in his career hasn’t lived up to the billing and the 3-point shooting was just OK. That will have to change if the Knicks are going to make any noise. This isn’t about Bridges being a focal point scorer, but rather a consistent shooter and put-it-on-the-deck punisher of defenses put into rotation by Towns and Jalen Brunson. If he can do that, in this particular wing-by-committee context, he will prove plenty worth what New York gave up to get him.
This feels strange to say Lillard is under any basketball pressure when he has been dealing with actual life pressure in the form of blood clots that ended his regular season in mid-March. That’s scary stuff, and the fact that he’s reportedly on the mend and expected to return at some point during the series may actually mean all the pressure is off on account of some good old-fashioned perspective. It is, after all, just a game.
But if we keep it to just basketball, yeah, Lillard has some heat on him. The Bucks moved mountains to get him and not much that they envisioned has actually come to fruition. There’s still time, but this might be it. A meek playoff exit — which, to be fair, most people expect, which is why there can only be so much pressure — could foreshadow significant summer changes in Milwaukee.
