BY JACK TIEN-DANA / MARCH 31, 2020 9:20 AM
Without the Finals happening for the foreseeable future, this NBA season will lack, uh, finality. While this is stupidly obvious, the playoffs are also the truest barometer for the state of basketball. The regular season provides a massive summary of the league’s overarching philosophy, but the most informative developments occur when the very best teams are crammed together for two months without any social distance.
In 2015, the Warriors discovered their Death Lineup, ushering in a new wave of utter small-ball domination; in 2018, the Celtics fully exposed how Joel Embiid’s and Ben Simmons’s peccadillos can be weaponized against the 76ers; last year, the Raptors unveiled an array of unconventional zone defensive schemes that took down Giannis Antetokoumpo and Steph Curry, marking a fundamental reimagining of defense. This year, the month of March has revealed that it is now actually several dozen years long and your outerwear collection doesn’t hit as hard over Zoom. But in this boring new world where there’s nothing but time yet nothing to fill it, it’s worth considering what we still don’t know. I mean, it’s either this or the Iditarod. So let’s talk about the NBA’s biggest unanswered questions and some possible answers