n Wednesday, the day after the Golden State Warriors defeated the Minnesota Timberwolves in Game One of their second-round playoff series, Chris Finch, the Timberwolves coach, shared some thoughts with reporters about the Warriors’ style of play during the post-season.

The Warriors, he said, “do a lot of fouling, holding, shoving, pushing and tackling Rudy”—as in Gobert, Minnesota’s center.

The Timberwolves were forced to take matters into their own hands, he added. By way of example, he cited a moment when Brandin Podziemski had grabbed and grappled with Gobert, who is seven feet one, under the basket. Gobert had untangled himself from Podziemski, who fell to the floor. Gobert had been called for the foul.

After Finch made his comments, a reporter relayed them to Podziemski, and asked for his take. Podziemski listened to the reporter’s account with a cocked head and pursed mouth, his distinctive ringlets flopping over his sweatband, his left eye shadowed by a faint bruise.

“I mean, it’s the playoffs,” Podziemski said. The Warriors’ first-round series—a seven-game win over the very physical Houston Rockets—had been a brawl, he went on. The Rockets’ aggression “rubbed off on us,” he said. Also, Gobert is a foot taller than he is, he noted. He shrugged. “What do you want me to do?” The gaggle of reporters laughed.

“Playoff basketball” rarely needs an explanation.

Everyone knows what it means: the stakes of the games are higher, and so is the intensity of the action. Referees become less inclined to blow their whistles, and teams take advantage. The games become more physical than they are during the regular season. All of that is familiar by now. Even so, the aggressive play in this post-season has stood out.

A number of coaches have commented on it—not only Finch, who also decried the amount of contact that the referees allowed during the Timberwolves’ first-round series, against the Los Angeles Lakers, but also Kenny Atkinson, the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers; David Adelman, of the Denver Nuggets; and Steve Kerr, who coaches the Warriors.

“To me, it’s crazy out there, what’s happening,” Kerr said on Wednesday. “Everybody’s fouling each other.” It seems that way to a lot of people. Last season, the refs seemed to pay renewed attention to the degree that players on offense were veering into contact, attempting to draw fouls; the refs started calling fewer of those fouls, leading to an increase in contact and a drop in scoring. But, this season, the officiating appeared to return to its previous form, and scoring ticked up again—until the post-season, when the refs have, once again, let more contact pass.

Or at least that’s the story. It can be hard to interpret the numbers; shooting fouls are down, offensive efficiency has dropped, and some games look more like the bully-ball style of the nineteen-nineties than the free-flowing game that many teams—including, famously, the Golden State Warriors—usually deploy now.

Referees are still calling a lot of fouls, but many of them are off the ball. Also, some teams have been intentionally fouling weaker free-throw shooters, or baiting less adept defenders into contact, in an attempt to get them into foul trouble and force them off the court.

Not all coaches place the responsibility with the officiating. “I actually think they’re calling more fouls right now than they did in the regular season,” the Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said.

“They’re calling more off-ball fouls, they’re calling less shooting fouls, they’re calling less illegal screens. We’re tracking it closely. I think the games are a little more physical, but there’s probably more actual fouling going on.”

The Thunder, as it happens, were among the most physical and defensive-minded teams during the regular season.

They were also the best team in the Western Conference. In the playoffs, though, many of the teams that have embraced a flagrantly physical style have been the underdogs.

In the first round of the Eastern Conference, the seventh-seeded Orlando Magic seemed to have determined that if they could not defeat the second-seeded Boston Celtics with crisp ball movement or accurate jump shots, maybe they could just bruise them and wear them down—and it appeared to give them a chance, for a while.

The Lakers—underdogs by seed, but with the higher profile and starrier pedigree—have a lack of good centers, and so, against Minnesota, they played smaller lineups; short guys tend to get away with more contact against big ones.

(As Podziemski said, what else do you expect?) The series between the Warriors and the Rockets was slow, low scoring, and ugly—which is exactly how the younger, less experienced Rockets wanted it. “When people start complaining about foul calls or crying about physicality, you’ve done your job,” the Rockets coach Ime Udoka said.

“That’s the first step in winning the battle. So I told my team, ‘When this team starts crying about it, up the intensity, up the aggressiveness, and make the refs adjust to you.’ ”

Udoka was betting on a psychological reality: the referees weren’t going to foul everybody out.

The conventional wisdom is that players with a couple of fouls need to lower their aggression, and perhaps even come out of the game, so that they’re available for important moments at the end. But there’s another way to approach it: referees don’t actually want to keep slowing down the game with their whistles, and nobody wants to see the stars get ejected. So, instead, you can remain aggressive, and trust that the refs will adjust to you.

That can be a team-wide strategy, as with the Rockets. But some individual players have always seemed to understand it intuitively. Chief among them is the Warriors’ defensive star Draymond Green.

As the N.B.A writer Seth Partnow has noted, Green seems to regard the first technical foul he receives in a game as a “cloak of invisibility,” something that causes refs to begin ignoring his excessive roughness, because they don’t want to give him a second technical, which would entail an automatic ejection. If anything, Green might become even more physical, knowing that the refs don’t want to throw him out.

Players who can’t adjust to this post-season style of play have suffered for it. James Harden, a former M.V.P. who plays for the Los Angeles Clippers, has got a reputation for choking during Game Sevens—and he put up another pathetic Game Seven performance this year, in a loss to the Nuggets.

But, as the basketball writer Tom Haberstroh has pointed out, Harden’s stat line in the playoffs is largely consistent with his usual play. The difference is that, in the post-season, he still tries to draw contact on his three-point shots, in the hope of a foul being called, leading to three free throws.

But while this is a winning strategy when those fouls are called, it’s a bad one when they’re not. In Game Sevens, they’re typically not.

Another aspect of this year’s playoffs that has received a lot of attention: the underdogs won the first six games played in the second round, something that had never happened before in N.B.A. history.

Parity seems to be a wider trend: the N.B.A. used to be a league of dynasties—the Celtics and the Lakers in the nineteen-eighties, the Chicago Bulls in the nineties, the Spurs and the Warriors more recently.

But no team has won a repeat title since 2018, and no defending champion has made it past the second round since the Warriors did it in 2019. A number of factors may help explain this: tweaks to the draft rules and stronger player-development systems; injuries to key stars that have made it harder to consolidate any advantage; the increasing reliance on three-point shooting, which makes it so that almost no lead is insurmountable—and which makes even great teams vulnerable to simply going cold.

(The Celtics, one of the league’s best teams, lost not one but two games in which they led by twenty points, while shooting a hundred three-point shots, and missing seventy-five of them.)

But it’s also possible that the greater physicality of play has made the court a little more level. Finch is right, insofar as the uptick in physicality is risky, even dangerous, for the players. But for fans it’s hard to fully side with Finch and his complaints.

After all, these playoffs have been remarkably exciting to watch, full of upsets and dramatic finishes. And the level of effort players have shown has been astonishing. Granted, motivation isn’t measured by fouls. But pushing and shoving does look like harder work than stepping back and taking a three.

And it takes a toll that you can see, and which can draw you in, to make the risk and sacrifice seem clear. Basketball players are not calculators or statistical machines. They get emotional. They get tired. They push back. ♦

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/why-basketball-is-different-in-the-playoffs