Would a bunch of upsets be good for the NBA playoffs?

Grizzlies-Thunder has been an emotional, confusing watch for me this postseason. It's been an incredible series, and normally, I'd be overjoyed to see this Memphis team--who I've been bandwagoning for since the early Rudy Gay/OJ Mayo days, and who I love now more than ever--take a 3-2 lead in Oklahoma City, with the chance to put this thing away at home in Game Six and move on to the second round. But there are times when Memphis has been winning and despite my reflexive elation, I have to sort of wonder: Is this really for the best?

The Thunder losing in the first round would be a pretty big upset. I picked them to go all the way to The Finals and win once there, and I wasn't the only one. What's more, Oklahoma City has the likely MVP in Kevin Durant, the player whose dominance over the regular season was the most pronounced of anyone, and the guy most have tabbed as the primary challenger to LeBron's throne as the league's best player. Memphis might end up being the better team in the series, but it's unclear if they're actually a Finals contender, and they don't have any player that rivals Durant as a lightning rod. It's hard to argue the playoffs wouldn't be more interesting with the Thunder moving on than the Grizzlies. 

Of course, if the playoff series always went to the team that deserved to win, or that made for the more interesting story, there wouldn't be much point in watching the postseason at all. But Memphis over OKC is far from the only upset that's currently looming over this first round. Both eighth-seeded teams--the Mavs in the West and the Hawks in the East--have put their respective top-seeded opponents on notice, the Mavs winning two of four so far and the Hawks now just one win away from making the second round. The Nets (#6) have also played the Raptors (#3) even through four, and both fifth seeds (the Blazers and Wizards) look to be advancing past the fourth seeds (the Rockets and Bulls) who were widely expected to beat them, Washington even sealing the deal last night. 

In other words, this is about as close as we've ever come--or are likely to ever come--to total parity in the NBA postseason. The prohibitive favorites don't look so prohibitive anymore--even the Heat, who swept the Bobcats in four games, showed genuine vulnerabilities in that series, and looked entirely liable to drop a game or two if they had to deal with a healthy and full-powered Al Jefferson for the whole series--and all of a sudden, the playoffs seem like just about anybody's game. 

There are benefits to a postseason like this, of course. The biggest one is obviously that it makes for some incredibly exciting early basketball: Many have already labelled this the best first round in league history, and though it's hard to imagine anyone actually remembers every old first round well enough to make such a statement, it's also hard to imagine what a postseason more suspenseful, dramatic or eventful as this would even look like. There's been everything--buzzer-beaters, transcendent individual performances, amazing comebacks, and of course, enough overtime periods to make up a whole bonus playoff series. It's been awesome, for sure, and certainly preferable while watching to a bunch of chalky sweeps and near-sweeps. 

Another perk of an upset-heavy first round is that it introduces the country to a whole spate of new faces, guys who might eventually be the faces of the league. Your average NBA viewer might not be intimately familiar with John Wall, Damian Lillard or Jeff Teague, but if they do their parts in leading their respective squads to the next round, it could establish them as the kind of up-and-coming stars where eventually, it might not be so surprising to see them making it to the second round or beyond. It's necessary to occasionally balance the LeBrons, Durants and Duncans of the world with players we might not already be so comfortable with, and maybe this year, it's just time for one of those new rounds.

And in general, a sprinkling of upsets keeps things from getting too stale with the NBA postseason. Nobody wants to watch a playoffs where every result feels predetermined by the end of the first game, and when a number of unexpected teams make it to the second round, it sets a tone from there where it feels like anything could happen, which is one of the qualities that makes other sports postseasons--like the NHL playoffs, or especially like NCAA March Madness--so breathless and so much fun.

But there are drawbacks to this, and they are considerable. First and foremost, as previously alluded to with Durant, too many upsets rids the playoffs of too much of its signature talent. It's tough to even watch a player like the Bulls' Joakim Noah, a top-five MVP candidate whose imprint on this season was virtually unparalleled in the league, go home so early, and if other big names like Paul George, Tim Duncan, James Harden, Kevin Durant and more fail to make it to the second-round, that will also be a loss. As Score editor Joseph Casciaro rhetorically posed to me, how many people would really be excited by a Heat/Wizards, Blazers/Grizzlies Conference Finals?

Some basketball junkies might be fond of those matchups, but most casual fans certainly don't want to see that, and you can bet that the league itself doesn't either. Matchups of unfamiliar teams with unfamiliar players playing in low-exposure markets would certainly hurt TV ratings for the later rounds, and sap a lot of the momentum the league has picked up the last few years, and especially in this season of the Heat going for the threepeat, where the Spurs, Pacers and Thunder have been groomed as the primary challenges they will face on their way. LeBron vs. Durant or Heat vs. Spurs are matchups everyone watching at home can understand, if it's LeBron vs. Aldridge--or worse, Wall vs. Aldridge--that'd be a much tougher sell.

What's more, such wacky playoff shenanigans also serve to devalue the meaning of the league's regular season. For Indiana to kill themselves all season to get the No. 1 seed, and for the Spurs to endure such injury woes in such a tough conference to get the best record, and then for both to still struggle like this to get past their first-round opponents, with home court barely even helping...I mean, why bother? The 82-game regular season is such an interminable slog at times, but it usually still feels important, because historically, seeding in the playoffs really matters, and home court can really make the difference. An anything-goes first round like this one flies in the face of that a little, and makes you wonder if teams should just be concerned about getting in, and phone the rest of their regular seasons in from there.

But most importantly, getting that many first-round upsets just kills the excitement of the rarity of a first-round upset. If the Hawks hang on to topple the Pacers, or if Dallas squeaks by San Antonio, that'll mark the third 1/8 first-round series upset in the last four postseasons--after just three total in the first 27 years of the league's current playoff system. When the 'We Believe' Warriors beat the 67-win Mavericks team in '07, it was an iconic, unforgettable moment in basketball history, partly because the Golden State team was so fascinating, but largely because it was so unexpected that they could be able to defeat the mighty Mavs. Would it still feel like that if the Hawks finish off the Pacers tonight, or if the Mavs can make the Spurs the first franchise to lose twice in the first round as a No. 1 seed? Doubt it.

And that's true for the NBA postseason beyond the 1/8 matchups. Oddly, the predictability of the NBA playoffs (and of the four major sports, it'd be hard to argue that the Association doesn't operate the closest to the general script) makes the playoffs more exciting on the whole, since when something mostly unforeseeable does happen--say, Stephen Curry going supernova last postseason, or the Celtics getting past LeBron in 2010--it feels truly momentous, and you never know when such a moment will occur. But that momentousness is contingent on such moments not actually happening all that often: Once they become commonplace, as they're getting dangerously close to becoming with a first round like this, they'll pack all the shock and awe of a Wild Card team winning in the first round of the MLB playoffs, and that ain't much.

So is it worth it? I'd say it is if only one or two end up actually coming to fruition. If only one of the Dallas/Atlanta/Memphis triumvirate of mega-dogs ultimately come through in their respective series while the other two bow out gracefully, and we just have one of those along with the two fifth-seed teams advancing from the upset ranks, that'd be doable. That'd give us the payoff to make it feel like all this early-round intrigue wasn't just blowing smoke, without removing too many of the major players from these playoffs to make the future rounds bereft of the highest-stakes drama.

But if we get two or all three of those low-seeded teams nailing the coffins of their respective series, that's maybe when we've gone too far with this. Parity is an admirable long-term goal for the NBA, but the playoffs work because we mostly know who the good teams are, and we feel like the best team usually wins. Once it becomes the postseason crapshoot of the NHL or MLB, that's when we need to start reconsidering the seeding system, or the length of the regular season, or something else to tip the balances slightly back in the favor of the favorites. March is more than enough pure basketball Madness for me, I don't much want it extending into May and June as well.