Playoff Talking Points: The Playoff Uncertainty Principle

No one with a wife and kids, or the need to eat leafy greens, has time to watch all this basketball. But we do. So, as a service to the public, here are the Playoff Talking Points you need to fake it at the water cooler:

• Act Your Age: There are no limits to how horrible I am being about this Hawks-Bucks series. It was bad enough that I refused to give Milwaukee any credit -- they weren't winning, the Hawks were losing on the road as usual. And losing in such an alarming manner that the Bucks might as well have been playing a lottery team. But I'm pretty sure that I denied the Bucks the best years of their lives.

It's hard to figure out what it means that Atlanta loses on the road. Young teams lose on the road ... but Atlanta's not so young anymore. Older teams, like the Lakers or the 2008 Celtics, are vulnerable on the road if they're hit with raw energy. But Atlanta's not really a veteran team yet. This practically forces us to examine that great unexamined team, the Milwaukee Bucks. We know the basic facts about them, and yet there's a key point that's often left out: This team is pretty young, too.

Brandon Jennings is a twenty year-old rookie. Luc Mbah a Moute and Ersan Ilyasova are in their second seasons. John Salmons only came to the team at the trade deadline -- which, as Trey Kerby joked, always makes him start playing like a mid-twenties All-Star. Carlos Delfino is only on year four, as is sidelined center Andrew Bogut. Scott Skiles is only on his second season as head coach. And Executive of the Year John Hammond has only been around since April 2008. That was around the same time that the Hawks were needling Boston and making us all wonder if, just maybe, they had finally arrived.



ShareI'm sure that the average age of the Bucks is higher than that of the Hawks, if nothing else because of Kurt "Methuselah" Thomas. But if you stretch your mind a bit, my point stands: Milwaukee's a more recent concoction, and has more than a few players who make the Hawks look like veterans. So what do we make of these wins? Does the Hawks' failure to show up on Monday mean they lack maturity, or they're mature enough to be caught off guard? Or, are we actually looking at an evenly matched series -- something that, when Bogut went down, seemed a very unlikely spot for the Bucks to find themselves in.

At one point last night, Kenny Smith said (paraphrasing here) that the playoffs sometimes aren't about who wins, but who makes the best adjustments going forward. There's no question that the Hawks will be better tonight than they were on Monday. The question is, will they pick up where they left off before going to Milwaukee, or find themselves dealing with a team that's looking to bring some of its own home court mojo to Phillips Arena? The Lakers nearly got beaten in Game Two, dropped two in OKC, and then, back in LA, picked up where they had left off at home. That's the luxury of home court advantage, the patience that veteran teams can afford to employ, and why Smith is right. On the other hand, if the Bucks keep this one close, then they're the one's making progress.

The Hawks are one of the better teams in the East. The Bucks are a rag-tag, resourceful bunch either ready to compete or at least irritate their higher-ups. Both are in that no man's land between team-on-the-rise and playoff perennials. Tonight, we'll figure out just how much baby fat each squad still has left on it.

• We Were Warned: A friend once told me a story about Ron Artest. As you may know, the folks who set the lines on games kind of know what they're doing. Otherwise, organized gambling wouldn't exist as we know it. Anyway, each player has some sort of number assigned to them that reflects how much they impact games -- in a positive way. Artest's is off the charts, meaning that the people whose livelihoods depend on the outcomes of games thinks Ron Ron remains a real impact player. If you aren't going to trust them, who are you going to trust?

I thought of this when watching yet another Boston-Miami game. Early start, buried on NBA-TV, and in this case, put up against LeBron James on a national telecast. It was almost set up to fail. Oh, and with a local Boston call, there was a good chance that anyone who tried to watch would be deterred by Tommy Heinsohn. So, despite so many hopes that this series would be interesting, we should've known all along that it was a lost cause -- and with the exception of that one game where Wade went off, totally boring to watch.

• Silent Prayer: Four games last night, with the two must-watch occurring pretty much at the same time. Good thing both were blow-outs and neither worth watching. I guess that's one solution to the problem of too much of a good thing.