Add Category
With Donovan Mitchell's 39-point effort leading the Cleveland Cavaliers past the Orlando Magic in a pulsating Game 7, the first round of the 2024 NBA playoffs is officially in the books.
There are just eight teams remaining in the running for the title, and some of the game's biggest stars were sent packing at the first time of asking.
Household names such as LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard and Giannis Antetokounmpo are just a few of the many star players who will now be forced to watch the rest of the games from the sidelines like the rest of us.
As the second round gets underway, here's five things we learned from the opening round of the NBA playoffs.
1. The next generation is here, and Anthony Edwards is the face of it
We've been bracing for the changing of the guard in the NBA for years, and this post-season looks like the time where generation next is finally taking over.
LeBron James' team won one game these playoffs, Kevin Durant's team got swept, and Stephen Curry's team didn't even make it.
The one playoff win combined by this trio — the top three players of their generation — is the lowest since the 2008 playoffs, when James's Cleveland Cavaliers won seven games. Durant was a rookie that year and his Thunder team didn't make the playoffs, while Curry was not yet in the NBA.
It is the first time none of the trio have reached the second round of the playoffs since 2005, the year before James made the first playoff trip of his career.
James, Durant and Curry have provided countless iconic moments in the post-season for the best part of two decades, but the next generation is well and truly ready to take centre stage.
Durant's Phoenix Suns were ousted by the Minnesota Timberwolves, and there was a real sense of a torch being passed between the two-time Finals MVP and Wolves superstar Anthony Edwards during the four-game sweep.
Edwards, the number one pick in the 2020 draft, has all the tools to be the next face of the NBA after the James-Durant-Curry era comes to an end.
He is charismatic off the court in a way that makes every one of his press conferences must-watch TV. At just 22, he is already the undisputed leader of his team, and he is as explosive an athlete the league has seen perhaps since a young Michael Jordan in the 1980s.
It's almost sacrilegious to compare anyone to Jordan, who is still considered by many to be the greatest player of all time, but with Edwards the comparisons are undeniable.
Every time he steps on the court, regardless of who the opponent is, Edwards believes he is the best player. He has the Jordan-like ability to drag the best out of his teammates, and has the jaw-dropping plays that make him jump off the TV screen.
Edwards is marketable in the same way that made Jordan instantly one of the most recognisable athletes on the planet as the NBA really took off into a different stratosphere throughout the 90s.
James's accolades led to him being compared to Jordan the most, but the truth is their playing styles are completely different. In terms of simply looking like Jordan did on the court, the only player in the last 30 years who has been more Jordanesque than Edwards is the late Kobe Bryant.
It's hard to believe that the Wolves came into this series as underdogs, but if there were any nerves early, Edwards's play helped them dissipate immediately as he went toe to toe with Durant, a player he idolised when growing up.
Edwards finished the series averaging 31 points, eight rebounds and 6.3 assists per game and closed out Game 4 and Durant's season by dunking on his head with the game on the line.
Jordan famously told future Hall-of-Famers Magic Johnson and Larry Bird that there was a "new sheriff in town" during the 1992 Olympics when the trio suited up on the US Dream Team.
Edwards will be flanked by Durant, James and Curry in Paris this year. Don't be surprised if he tells the old heads something similar.
2. Josh Giddey's Thunder can win the title
The Oklahoma City Thunder had a right to feel a little slighted coming into the NBA playoffs.
Despite securing the number one seed in the Western Conference after winning 57 games — second only to the 64-win Boston Celtics in the east — the Thunder were talked about like they would be a speed bump for most teams in the first round.
When the Lakers finished the season in seventh spot, there was a train of thought that they should tank one of the play-in games before winning the second in order to face the Thunder instead of the reigning champion Denver Nuggets.
There was a similar confidence among those who believed in the 10th-seeded Golden State Warriors, who thought they could easily account for the inexperienced Thunder.
The result? The Warriors didn't even make the playoffs, while the Lakers were bundled out in five games by the Nuggets, and the Thunder swept their first-round series against the New Orleans Pelicans.
As expected, there were some playoff jitters for the Thunder, who came into the season as the second-youngest team in the entire NBA ahead of the San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs won 22 games this season for comparison's sake.
OKC looked like it would lose the series opener at home to the Pelicans before their nerveless superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander carried them home with 28 points, six rebounds and four assists.
From there, the Thunder went from strength to strength, and the results have to be terrifying for the rest of the league.
The biggest reason inexperienced teams often flounder in the post-season is a lack of belief, but this Thunder team has that in spades, led by Gilgeous-Alexander himself.
While the Canadian guard set the tone, as the series wore on, he saw his younger counterparts all come to the fore at different points in the series.
Jalen Williams, who is likely to be an All-Star forward for years to come, finished the series averaging 21.3 points, 7.3 rebounds and five assists per contest. His all-round reliable game takes the load off Gilgeous-Alexander and doesn't allow defences to key in on the Canadian guard.
Young big man Chet Holmgren certainly looked frazzled in the series opener, but still finished with five blocks before responding to that win with a 26-point, seven rebound effort in Game 2.
That brings us to Giddey. The Aussie was unsighted in Game 1, making just one basket in OKC's 94-92 win, but his finish to the series showed just how important he is to making the Thunder truly unguardable.
OKC's starting line-up of Giddey, Holmgren, Gilgeous-Alexander, Williams and Lu Dort outscored the Pelicans by 29.5 points per 100 possessions, and the Aussie's ability to constantly knock down outside shots unlocked that five-man unit.
After a slow start to the series, Giddey exploded in Games 3 and 4, knocking down eight triples on just 13 attempts from deep, including three in the final quarter of Game 4 to close out the Pelicans.
A common train of thought has been that the Thunder are a piece away or a year away. But if they keep up this play in the next round against Dallas, they'll soon wonder, 'Why not this year?'.
3. The three-star model of NBA team building might be dead
Is the 'Big Three' era of the NBA over? It certainly seems like it.
The basketball landscape shifted in 2010 when the Miami Heat managed to lure both LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join Dwyane Wade in South Beach.
James's titanic free agency call ushered in an arms race across the league as teams attempted to follow the model set out by the Heat — three All-NBA level players flanked by ring-hunting veterans and cheap young players on minimum contracts.
It's a model that has yielded championships for James — in both Miami and Cleveland — and several other franchises over the last decade, but recently there's been a shift.
Depth has become a key factor in this post-season and the teams with the best chance of winning the title have all been able to call on their benches in key moments to help lift them through games.
James won his fourth title on a Lakers team that was built around he and All-Star big man Anthony Davis, with the pair flanked by solid role players such as Alex Caruso, Kyle Kuzma, Danny Green and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.
Just 12 months later, the Lakers punted on their depth in search of a third star with an ill-fated move to acquire Russell Westbrook in a deal that effectively cost them Caldwell-Pope and Kuzma as well as Caruso, who signed with the Chicago Bulls as a free agent that summer.
The Lakers have been playing catch-up ever since that trade in order to find pieces that fit as well around their star duo, and Caldwell-Pope has become a vital part of the Denver Nuggets team that is threatening to go back-to-back.
When Phoenix went to the finals in 2021, it was on the back of a deep team that was stacked with elite role players who supplemented All-Stars Chris Paul and Devin Booker.
Since then, the Suns traded their depth for starpower, first adding Kevin Durant, before trading for Bradley Beal last summer.
The Suns found out first-hand just how important depth can be after their bench was outscored by Minnesota's in a first-round sweep.
This is not to say every team with three or more All-Star calibre players is doomed from the tip-off. The Timberwolves, who have flanked Anthony Edwards and Karl Anthony-Towns with Rudy Gobert to great effect, are one example. The league-leading Boston Celtics were an outside chance of having four All-Stars this season.
However, both teams have multiple homegrown All-Stars in Edwards and Towns, and Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, which makes a GM's task of team-building that much easier. The Nuggets have a similar model after drafting Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr.
The lesson here is simple — stacking talent is still a viable route to winning a championship, as long as you're not gutting your roster to do so.
4. The best ability is availability
The saddest theme to come out of the first round was the number of stars either not playing at all or playing hobbled.
Milwaukee was thought of as the most likely team to give Boston a run for its money in the East, yet was bounced out in the first round by Indiana, with Giannis Antetokounmpo not seeing the floor for a single minute due to a calf injury, while star off-season recruit Damian Lillard was hobbled with an Achilles issue.
Philadelphia was also bounced out in the first round and was once again forced to deal with Joel Embiid being nowhere near 100 per cent healthy.
The Pelicans cruelly saw peak Zion Williamson in the first play-in game against the Lakers, only for the 2019 number one pick to be forced out of the game (and eventually the rest of the post-season) with three minutes left.
This brings us to the curious case of Kawhi Leonard and the LA Clippers.
Leonard joined the Clippers in the summer of 2019 on the back of winning the second title and second Finals MVP of his career in a stellar season with the Toronto Raptors.
He was magical in that playoff run, which ended with the Raptors beating the Warriors in six games and appeared to be well past the injuries that ruined his final season in San Antonio.
Leonard was heavily courted before settling on the Clippers. There was a school of thought at the time suggesting he had become the best player in the entire league.
The Clippers traded a host of picks as well as Gilgeous-Alexander to the Thunder for Paul George in the hopes of pairing him with Leonard to bring the team its first NBA title. In a cruel twist of fate, just five years on from that deal, Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder appear far closer to a title than the Clippers are.
Since joining the Clippers, Leonard has ended the post-season healthy on exactly one occasion — in 2020 when he saw his team blow a 3-1 lead to a young Nuggets team in the second round.
Leonard was playing the best basketball of his career in the 2021 playoffs before suffering a partial ACL tear that not only ended his post-season, but ruled him out of the following season.
Last year, Leonard was again on fire in the first round against the Suns, only to suffer a torn meniscus in his right knee.
Leonard's chequered injury history has resulted in him gaining a reputation of being unreliable, which has clouded the fact that he is still one of the 10 best players in the world … when healthy.
This season was Leonard's last five years in a nutshell. He was excellent in the regular season and was named to the All-Star team for the sixth time in his career. He is likely to be named on one of the All-NBA teams as well. He then missed half of the Clippers' first-round series against the Mavericks.
The Clippers signed Leonard to a three-year extension in January, but have to be wondering just what his age 33-36 years will look like and whether he'll even be able to see out the end of that contract.
5. Bet against Jalen Brunson at your own peril
The New York Knicks were the laughing stock of the NBA two summers' ago when their plans of adding Donovan Mitchell went up in smoke, leaving them with Jalen Brunson as a consolation prize.
Up until that point, Brunson had been a solid but unspectacular sidekick to Luka Dončić in Dallas. His signing with the Knicks was the league's worst-kept secret, given his father Rick was hired as an assistant coach with the Knicks a month before Brunson signed a four-year, $104 million deal as a free agent.
Even in their wildest dreams, Knicks fans would not have predicted what Brunson has turned into since landing in the Big Apple.
The pint-sized point guard has become the most beloved Knick since Patrick Ewing, and after an upset first-round win over Mitchell's Cavs in last year's playoffs, Brunson's Knicks are at it again.
On paper, the Knicks have no right to be winning these series. They are severely undermanned without All-Star forward Julius Randle, and the ball is always in Brunson's hands down the stretch of games, given there's no other solid ball-handlers capable of running an offence consistently.
Teams know what's coming yet they can't stop it, a testament to Brunson's offensive wizardry.
The Knicks took care of the Sixers in the first round, the same Sixers other teams in the East willingly ducked from facing in the first round.
Not many people would consider Brunson to be a better player than Sixers star Joel Embiid, but time and time again, it was Brunson closing out games down the stretch with the composure of a league MVP, not the reigning MVP himself.
Brunson averaged 35.5 points and nine assists per game against Philly. Here's how he finished the last four games of that series: 39 points and 13 assists in Game 3, 47 points and 10 assists in Game 4, 40 points and six assists in Game 5, and 41 points and 12 assists in Game 6.
His Game 4 and Game 6 statlines have never been achieved by any other player in Knicks history. He joined LeBron James and Michael Jordan as just the third player to put up over 35 points and five assists in four straight playoff games.
Every time Embiid and the Sixers looked ready to overpower the Knicks, there was Brunson, hitting a contested triple or stumbling in between three defenders to drain an off-balance floater in the lane to keep New York alive.
After they were the butt of jokes for years before his arrival, Brunson has made the Knicks relevant and respected again by being the star they've yearned to have since Carmelo Anthony's heyday a decade ago.
Sports content to make you think... or allow you not to. A newsletter delivered each Saturday.