We are still in the nascent stages of the NBA's win-or-go-home-to-get-some-Tylenol-and-come-back-in-two-days tournament, and what we know is the Eastern Conference should never again be allowed to participate. Then again, that is true of anything after the five-seed in the East in any year, so Tuesday's games in Indiana and Boston were exactly the abominations they should have been.
But as to the one game people have been frantically pretending to anticipate, Golden State at Los Angeles, we can say with justification that it actually means more to the Lakers than to the Warriors for one simple reason: It will answer one way or another the nagging question of whether the Lakers are healthy enough to go deep again.
The Warriors are punching uphill on this, and most folks comprehend that. They need to leave as few things to chance as possible to win Wednesday's game, from Stephen Curry through to Juan Toscano-Anderson (if they need Nico Mannion or Alen Smailagic, then the game is already irretrievable). The Lakers have depth, height, defense and historical throw-weight to hurl at this game, and though the last one doesn't matter all that much, illusions from the past have value too.
The Warriors' job is to win one game, and not necessarily this one. The Lakers need to show that they are healthy enough now to meet the expectation they have placed upon themselves to reach July, because one does not get healthier as the playoffs progress. It is a multigear grind that leaves almost everyone exhausted and disappointed, except for the team that ends up exhausted and fulfilled. And the best the team ends up exhausted and fulfilled can say about its physical conditions is that they don't hurt enough to make life unwieldy.
We can say this about the preamble to the playoffs, though, and that is this. There is a reason God has told us not to care about the fates of nine-seeds and below — it is because the purity of the bracket demands no nine-seeds unless accompanied by 10- through 16-seeds and in a field of candidates numbering 64 or greater. And more to the point, the Eastern Conference of the NBA should be treated as it has been for the last two decades — as the place where bad Western Conference teams go to be relegated. True, this doesn't help explain Warriors-Lakers, because that's been done to the point of exhaustion itself. There's a price to be paid for being marketed as the only game worth bothering with, and it is that everyone has an opinion on it that is long, tedious and mostly unasked for. We shall see if the same level of analysis prevails if Friday's games are Lakers-Grizzles, or Warriors-Spurs. It probably won't, but just be grateful that none of it is Pacers-Celtics. That would be too much to bear.