It took six months for the Oklahoma City Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers to put together the dominant regular seasons that helped them gain home-court advantage throughout their respective conference playoffs.
And it took 48 minutes for each of them to lose it.
The 68-win Thunder were stunned Monday night when the Denver Nuggets rallied late for a 121-119 win in Game 1 of their conference semifinal series. Same goes for the 64-win Cavaliers against the Indiana Pacers on Sunday. Let’s throw in 61-win Boston, the only other dominant regular-season team in either conference, which lost Game 1 to the visiting New York Knicks on Monday night.
Those should all serve as a warning to the higher-seeded and favored Wolves as they begin their series Tuesday night at Target Center against Golden State, which I talked about on the Daily Delivery podcast.
The three lower seeds who toppled more dominant foes in Game 1 were deemed to have “stolen” the home-court edge in each series, which is an apt description for something that hardly seems fair.
As we consider what happened these last couple days in the NBA playoffs and contemplate those results in tandem with a growing concern about teams coasting through an increasingly less meaningful regular season by resting players at strategic moments, a minor but essential tweak to the league’s rules seems obvious:
The higher seed in all three rounds of the conference playoffs should get to play five home games in a seven-game series. They should play Games 1 and 2 at home, Games 3 and 4 on the road, then Games 5-7 (if necessary) at home.
The benefits:
