With a wild regular season behind us, the NBA playoffs are finally here. This season has already felt like a major turning point in what the league will look like in the future. The rookie class, led by Dallas’ Cooper Flagg and Charlotte’s Kon Knueppel, already looks like one for the ages. Two new teams will be coming to Las Vegas and Seattle in the coming years. Victor Wembanyama has officially entered the conversation for the Most Valuable Player award in his third season at age 22, having won his first Defensive Player of the Year award in a unanimous vote this season. However, the playoffs are where history truly gets decided, and NBA fans are going to be spoiled with some exciting matchups this year. The Justice’s Luca D. Jordan, Elijah Roth and I went through the bracket and picked the teams we thought would make it out of each matchup.

We wrote out the bracket on a whiteboard and broke the playoff down matchup-by-matchup. Luca, a Dallas Mavericks fan, and I, a Memphis Grizzlies fan, have no dogs in the fight this year, so there are no teams we are forcing into deep runs just because we want them to. We focused mostly on roster composition, playoff experience and thought about the matchups in terms of how each team could win. If a team needed too many things to go right to win a series, they would be eliminated. 

First Round

With the play-in games behind us, we now know the whole bracket. The Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns, Philadelphia 76ers and Portland Trailblazers earned their positions in the playoffs with wins in the play-in, but none of them drew a good matchup against their top-seeded opponents. Dillon Brooks and the Suns are matched up with the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder, led by reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. While the Suns making the playoffs exceeded their pre-season expectations, considering they dealt Kevin Durant in the offseason, the Suns simply aren’t in a position that can win them this series. Oklahoma City simply has an answer for everything. On the other side of the bracket, the Trail Blazers drew the two-seed San Antonio Spurs as their matchup. Portland can answer Victor Wembanyama slightly better than most teams with 7’2” Donovan Clingan, but the Spurs are deeper than that. Despite it being most of the team’s first playoff experience, Wemby and the Spurs are still solidly the favorites in this series, and we think they will advance.

The other first-round matchups in the Western Conference are very polarizing. Despite the Los Angeles Lakers missing Austin Reaves and Luka Doncic, the team was able to win the opening game of their series against the Houston Rockets off of a 27-point shooting clinic from Luke Kennard. The Lakers’ bench has been suffering all season, and having performances like this happen four times in a seven-game series isn’t worth expecting. The Rockets lost Kevin Durant to a calf injury for the first game, but it seems like he will return before the series is over. For these reasons, we faded the LakeShow and picked the Rockets to continue on. The other series is the Minnesota Timberwolves against the Denver Nuggets, a matchup that always brings a lot of buzz. The Nuggets took the first game with Nikola Jokic notching a very pedestrian triple-double with Jamal Murray scoring 30. Still, the T-Wolves have the fight necessary to make this series scary for Denver. Anthony Edwards had an unusually bad shooting night in game one, and Minnesota has one of the best answers to Nikola Jokic in the form of Rudy Gobert, but it’s hard to know if this will bring them across the finish line. There are more factors at play in this series, but it’s hard to bet against the duo of Jokic and Murray in the playoffs. It’ll be a long, hard-fought series, but we have the Nuggets moving on to face the Spurs in round two.

For the East, the Detroit Pistons will be facing the Orlando Magic. The Magic seem to be the odd ones out this playoffs, having an embarrassing performance against Philly in the play-in and could very well fire head coach Jamahl Mosley at the end of the season. Former first overall pick Paolo Banchero locked in for their do-or-die game against the Charlotte Hornets and scored 25 in the big win, but now they’re right in the path of the best Detroit Pistons team of the last 20 years. Banchero had a very solid performance in the first game, but it’s hard to trust him to replicate that performance, let alone a whole series against a healthy Cade Cunningham. The Pistons move on, and will face the winner of the Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Toronto Raptors series. The Raptors are justifiably a fan-favorite team with Scottie Barnes and Brandon Ingram bringing a lot of fun basketball to the North, but the Cavs are simply more prepared. While we don’t entirely trust Cleveland to play a consistently good series, their bench is too good to expect them to falter four times. The Cavs move on to face Detroit.

In a poetic twist of fate, the New York Knicks are facing the now Trae Young-less Atlanta Hawks. Without facing New York’s most hated man, they’ll need to get their strength from elsewhere. The Hawks can make this a really interesting game; they have the perfect answer to Jalen Brunson in Dyson Daniels and some solid big man depth to handle lineups containing both Mitchell Robinson and Karl-Anthony Towns. Still, the Hawks have too many exploitable weaknesses to keep the games close. Daniels is a terrible shooter and, aside from Jalen Johnson, they don’t have a consistent source of volume scoring. The Knicks take this one, much to Elijah’s chagrin as a Hawks fan. They’ll go on to face the winner of the Boston Celtics vs. Philadelphia 76ers series, which the Celtics took a one game lead in on Sunday. The Sixers are missing former MVP Joel Embiid at center thanks to a poorly timed case of appendicitis, losing them their best win condition in the process. The Celtics’ frontcourt is likely their Achilles heel, although Neemias Queta is still no slouch. Without Embiid, it’s hard to think that Philly can find a way to win this one. The Celtics move on.

Conference Semifinals

In the West, we think the two matchups will be Thunder-Rockets and Nuggets-Spurs. The Thunder have a particularly advantageous matchup against the Rockets since Houston’s backcourt can be exploited very easily; Reed Sheppard is one of the shortest rotational players in the NBA and Amen Thompson can’t shoot from anywhere besides right underneath the hoop. Oklahoma City’s smothering defense can just as easily clog up their other good scoring options too, and relying entirely on Kevin Durant midrange jumpers to win a series against the Thunder seems unlikely to work. The Thunder make easy work of the Rockets and advance to the conference finals. The other matchup, Nuggets-Spurs, is the more interesting series in our opinion. The Nuggets don’t have an answer for Victor Wembanyama at all, but they match up pretty well with the rest of the Spurs team. The Nuggets will need some better production from outside of their starting five to keep this series from getting out of hand, but San Antonio’s bench mob has been incredibly consistent so far this season. Out of all the matchups, this is the one we spent the most time debating over. In the end, the Spurs are able to exploit the non-Jokic minutes, bringing them to the Western Conference Finals.

The matchups we predicted for the East are Cavs vs. Pistons and Celtics vs. Knicks. Both series are set up to be bare-knuckle brawls between teams who cannot stand each other, which we think will make for some unexpected outcomes. First, the Celtics against the Knicks. Despite Neemias Queta’s big improvement this year, the Knicks still hold a massive advantage in the frontcourt for the second series in a row. However, Joe Mazzulla is totally capable of finding an unorthodox solution that can keep Towns and Robinson in check. This combined with a long history of the Knicks never making anything happen in the playoffs makes us more confident in the Celtics to move on to the Eastern Conference Finals. The other series, Cleveland vs. Detroit has a lot more variability. The Pistons have one of the best all-around defenders left in the playoffs in Ausar Thompson, but he can’t guard both James Harden and Donovan Mitchell at the same time. The Pistons have also been pretty underwhelming offensively — outside of Cade Cunningham — in their ongoing series against the Magic. For these reasons, we think the Cavaliers will move on to face Boston.

Conference Finals

In the West, we picked the Spurs and the Thunder to move on and bring the fans the most hate-fueled series of the playoffs so far. As much as he denies it, Victor Wembanyama cannot stand Chet Holmgren, and facing him in the conference finals might bring us a version of “The Alien” that we have never seen before. One very underrated part of the Spurs’ core is the amount of capable ball handlers they have, even outside of their backcourt. They have plenty of reliable bench players who are capable of getting an offense moving in the non-Wemby minutes. Even more than that, the Spurs have seemingly had Oklahoma City’s number all season long. San Antonio went 4-1 against the Thunder this season, better than any other team in the league. At this point, there is no better candidate to end the Thunder’s bid for back-to-back championships than the Spurs. San Antonio will return to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014.

In the East, we selected the Celtics and the Cavaliers to make their way to the conference finals. The matchup isn’t nearly as fiery as the other side of the bracket, but it’s still the Eastern Conference Finals, and both teams will treat it as such. The Celtics have already outperformed what was expected of them this season, given Jayson Tatum’s major injury in the playoffs last year, but there’s nothing the Cavaliers can reliably do to stop them. The Cavaliers have been knocking on the door of a great playoff run for years now, but the Celtics will spoil their deepest playoff run in a decade.

Finals

Our finals matchup is the San Antonio Spurs vs. the Boston Celtics. These teams are two of the most balanced in the NBA; neither of them have a weak link to take advantage of. At this point in the playoffs, injuries and fatigue are much more of a factor than in earlier rounds. There’s no good way to predict which players will have caught the injury bug, but there’s no reason to expect that one team will be more affected than the other. However, there is one thing that the Spurs have that the Celtics — and for that matter, no team in the history of basketball — could match in gravity. Victor Wembanyama is smart enough to recognize that getting to the Finals is never a given, good enough to throw the entire series by himself and has more drive than arguably any star in the NBA. He would give everything to win a championship right here and right now. An alien has taken over the NBA, and there are no escape pods left. The San Antonio Spurs win the NBA Championship.