The playoffs are finally, mercifully, here. No more complaints about tanking. No more bad-faith arguments about awards. No more questions of effort, load management, or injuries. Everyone healthy will play, and play hard.
This is the boss level. The regular season is for fun; the playoffs are for legacies. A couple of hot weeks, a few cold nights, can change perceptions of players and teams forever.
Typically, people like to frame pre-playoff discussions around who has the most pressure on them to deliver. But there’s a flip side to that train of thought, something that isn’t quite a mirror image. Whose legacy gets the biggest boost with a strong playoff performance? Which teams, players, and coaches would most benefit from overperforming expectations?
Let’s start with a team that still needs to prove itself despite running away with the one seed.
The Pistons
The Pistons don’t need to win a championship to validate their team. However, winning the conference would go a long way toward affirming their coach, their star, their front office, and everyone in between.
JB Bickerstaff is widely beloved by players and is an excellent defensive tactician. He’s also constructed a top-10 offense from a team without much shooting or ballhandling. Fairly or unfairly, questions about his playoff game management and ability to construct a resilient half-court attack (which led to his ousting from Cleveland) will remain until he can guide the Pistons to a deep playoff run.
Newly eligible Cade Cunningham has a legitimate down-ballot MVP case (in your face, 65-game rule!), but if you want to be mentioned as a potential top-five player in the league, you need to bring some results. The Pistons fought hard against the overdog Knicks last season, but Cunningham’s shot disappeared. This season will be a far better opportunity to prove his playoff bonafides.
Even the role players have a lot to prove. Tobias Harris needs to shake off the perceived playoff demons he brought over from Philly. Ausar Thompson’s limited offensive game has led to fourth-quarter benchings. Duncan Robinson’s shooting is essential, but he’s been mercilessly attacked his entire playoff career.
As for the front office, it’s been a long while since we’ve seen a team with this many defense-first players make a deep playoff run, and Trajan Langdon controversially decided not to add much firepower to the roster at the trade deadline (sorry, Kevin Huerter, you don’t count). Can Detroit buck modern team-building convention (perfectly encapsulated by a Boston squad they might have to play in a month) to earn a Finals trip?
The narratives around this team change drastically if the answer is “yes.”
Nikola Jokic
Nikola Jokic might be the best offensive player in the history of basketball. Plenty of smart observers (and dumb ones, like me!) believe that his peak on that end surpasses anyone’s.
But historical analysis reduces accomplishments to resumes. Yes, Jokic’s stat lines are preposterous. Box scores need a safe word before he starts with them. Averaging a triple-double again while leading the league in rebounds and assists on outrageous efficiency? There’s a Wilt Chamberlain problem where the numbers are so absurd that they cease to hold meaning.
You know what doesn’t lack meaning? Championship rings. Basketball is the top-heaviest sport, and if you want to be considered the best, you need some jewelry. Salary cap changes, aprons, changing norms and regulations around free agency, a rising talent pool, the increased emphasis on the three-pointer, and more factors have conspired to make it nearly impossible to have a quote-unquote “dynasty.” This generation of superstars will have far more players with rings than in the past, and, increasingly, the year’s champion is simply the healthiest team.
In other words, there will always be people who can consider any one championship a fluke. The dreaded, incredibly dumb asterisk conversations. Two wins in June, however, erase that argument. Nobody actually driving the bus flukes into two rings.
Jokic might be the most self-possessed superstar of our generation. He doesn’t need another trophy to validate anything to himself. But for those of us who have defended him year in and year out, another championship would do wonders toward convincing the general public that this man is the defining force of the 2020s.
Non-shooters
Blame Ron Adams.
Steve Kerr’s assistant suggested siccing Golden State’s center, Andrew Bogut, on the Grizzlies’ non-shooting defensive ace, Tony Allen, halfway through a 2015 second-round series. Bogut proceeded to completely ignore Allen, mucking up the middle and rendering Allen unplayable. Golden State went on to win the series and the championship.
It changed basketball strategy forever.
Ever since then, teams have gotten more and more aggressive roaming off of non-shooters. Helpful regular-season players have found themselves taken off the playoff floor for crunch time (or entire games). All the metrics agree that non-shooting role players have never been less valuable.
But a new crop of players will strive to prove that axiom untrue. This will be a pivotal year for the three-point-challenged. Coaches around the league have developed strategies to make the most of their players’ other talents. Some, like Draymond Green, become playmaking hubs. Some, like Steph Castle, become dynamite north-south drivers, forcing their way to the hoop both in transition and in the half-court. Some, like the Thompson twins, make hay in the dunker spot, feasting on lay-ups and offensive rebounds. And almost all become useful off-ball screeners, leveraging their anti-gravity to spring a teammate open with flare or surprise pin-in screens.
It feels like this year’s top playoff teams are relying upon non-shooters more heavily than in the recent past. In addition to the names above, players like Dylan Harper, Evan Mobley, Dyson Daniels, and many more will try to survive the playoff crucible despite outside jumpers ranging from unproven to non-existent.
Legacy isn’t quite the right word for these guys. This is an existential crisis for an entire breed of ballers. If this group of important, talented players can’t figure it out, perhaps no one can.
James Harden
Cleveland is the most expensive team in the league. With great money comes great expectations; they can’t keep settling for second-round exits. Koby Altman took a desperate swing by trading a promising but uncertain future for a clearly defined present when he swapped Darius Garland’s ruined toes for James Harden’s beard oil.
It is funny that a team in 2026 would add James Harden to raise its playoff ceiling. The jokes flew fast and furious after the trade, and nothing short of a championship would erase the sins of Harden’s past.
But imagine if the Cavs do conquer their demons thanks to a Harden surge? How late is too late to rewrite a reputation? It’s not like Harden hasn’t had enough shots at playoff glory. You’d think the law of large numbers would dictate that Harden has to have one resounding playoff run, right?
Oklahoma City Thunder
The likeliest NBA champion is still one of the teams with the most to gain. Much of what I said about Jokic up top still applies. Only 13 teams in NBA history have won back-to-back titles, and it’s a list of the sport’s most iconic squads: The Russell Celtics, the Durant/Curry Warriors, the Jordan Bulls, the Heatles, etc.
Sustaining a multi-year contender has never been harder than it is today, and it’s not like the Thunder’s road has been sanded smooth: They’ve battled a significant number of injuries to important players both last season and this one.
To come out on top again would be a confirmation of what most of us already believe: This Thunder team is one of the greatest of all time.
Shai starts to ascend into “Top X Greatest Player” conversations. Chet Holmgren becomes a mainstay on All-NBA lists, instead of scrapping for the last Third-Team spot. Jalen Williams picks up the narrative thread where he left off last season, before injuries hurt his case as the league's best second banana. Role players and coaches get paid.
Most terrifyingly, another Thunder championship would force us to ask the question: What would it take for this team to lose?
Jaylen Brown
How many times does one guy have to prove himself?
Few players are as divisive as Brown, whose prodigious counting stats on a consistently excellent team belie relatively pedestrian advanced metrics. This is someone with both a Finals MVP and an Eastern Conference Finals MVP trophy, someone who has starred on a championship contender for half a decade while racking up All-Star and All-NBA nods. And yet, he still hasn’t convinced a huge chunk of both fans and media that he’s a true-blue superstar.
Boston, right now, is the betting favorite to win the East. The easiest way to shut haters’ mouths is to stuff some hardware down their throats. Were Brown to make another Finals appearance, particularly in a season in which many expected the Celtics to tank… what could people say?
And imagine if Boston were to win over the menacing Thunder, as staunch an opponent as one could ask for. It’d be fairy-tale, knight-against-dragon stuff.
Defense
Failure in his first postseason won’t define Victor Wembanyama’s legacy… but success jumpstarts it.
Wembanyama is only in his third year, but imagine what a championship would do. How many modern-era superstars have gotten so good, so fast? The Spurs weren’t supposed to be competing for a ring yet, but they’re ahead of schedule, and a sterling record against the Thunder proves they aren’t a fluke.
Unfortunately, any path to victory has to go through Denver and Oklahoma City, plus the East champion, making for a very difficult course to chart.
But the harder the toil, the greater the rewards. It isn’t merely about Wembanyama’s long-term legacy. It’s about wresting back the idea that defense is as important as offense, something that talking heads have pushed back on in recent years. As great as Wembanyama is offensively, he isn’t Shai or Nikola Jokic on that end. But they aren’t him on defense, either, and a win over both players proves that defensive all-timers are just as valuable as offensive juggernauts.
Karl-Anthony Towns
There are some similarities between Towns and Brown. Both players are comfortable as the first or second option. Both have a large contingent of, let’s say, non-believers. And both have won a huge amount in recent seasons.
Towns, of course, doesn’t have the Finals on his resume. And he’s habitually had some struggles in the playoffs.
But the Knicks were a popular preseason pick to win the East, and Towns has made two straight Conference Finals (the first with the Wolves, the second with New York last season). The shine is somewhat off of New York, and they’ve fallen to fourth in the East in the oddsmakers’ opinions. Towns is a popular punching bag.
Can he punch back? Can he string together enough strong playoff performances to help New York back to the Conference Finals (or further), defeating Boston along the way?
The much-derided big man still has a ceiling that sips tea with clouds. Making the Finals would endear Towns to the massive New York fanbase. Anything else might lead to a summer house-hunting session.
The fading stars of yesteryear
Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant are finally slowing down — barely, but noticeably. Their reputations are secure, their jewelry cabinets overfloweth, etc., etc.
But there are only a few handfuls of players — at most — better than the worst of Curry, James, and Durant. The old legends aren’t trying to secure their legacies; they’re trying to fortify them.
Steph Curry has no chance of winning a first-round playoff series against the Thunder. It’d be a minor miracle to simply see him in the playoffs at all, given Golden State’s 10-seed status. But it would be a sparkly feather in Curry’s cap to put up a 40-burger in a surprise Game 2 win, a reminder that even wintering lions still have teeth. Just ask the Clippers if Curry’s still got it.
Injuries to Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves arrowed the Lakers’ balloon, but James still has a chance to steal a series against a Rockets team that has more than its share of vulnerabilities. A 41-year-old outlasting a physical Houston team would be yet another late-career line item for future generations to marvel at. When you’re trying to be remembered as the best of all time, every accomplishment matters.
Durant’s situation is the most complicated. He’ll make another All-NBA team this year, but problems both self-inflicted (those messages!) and not (injuries to point guard Fred VanVleet and big man Steven Adams) have demolished Houston’s ceiling. Still, the Rockets found their footing a bit toward the end of the season, and they are one of the few teams with the horsepower to meet OKC as athletic equals.
An upset over the Thunder isn’t the same thing as a championship, but it would be a hell of an accomplishment for Durant. And if they can beat Oklahoma City… they can beat anyone.
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