As a Boston Celtics fan, Bill Simmons obviously loved the 2024 NBA Playoffs.
But as a pure basketball enthusiast, the Sports Guy was less than satisfied with the quality of competition he witnessed over the last two months.
“I think that was a bad playoffs, but it didn’t seem like a bad playoffs because we had something to talk about every day,” Simmons told The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Rob Mahoney on the latest episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. “When we look back at the playoffs, the Philly-New York series was super fun. It just was good theater. The Denver-Minnesota Game 7 was awesome. I thought the OKC-Dallas entire series was really good. The two Boston-Indiana games at Indiana were good. Game 3, Dallas-Boston, was good. But for the most part, we were really scarce on…”
“But we’ve created an apparatus where we have to talk about it all the time,” Ryan interrupted.
“There was always something to talk about, but it wasn’t a good playoffs,” Simmons said.
To Simmons and Ryan’s points, this seemed to be a playoffs where the narratives — who’s the Celtics’ best player? Is Luka Dončić the best player on the planet? Can Anthony Edwards be the next Michael Jordan? — were more memorable than most of the games played. Of the series and games played, very few actually stand out, with the exceptions being most of the ones that The Ringer founder referenced.
A part of the reason for that may have been the injuries that affected this year’s postseason — and aided Boston’s title run — with Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jimmy Butler, Donovan Mitchell, Tyrese Haliburton and Kawhi Leonard among the list of star players to have missed playoff games this year. The good news for basketball fans is that there’s more competitive basketball around the corner, with Simmons expressing high hopes for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
“I wonder if the Olympics will be better than the playoffs just were,” Simmons said. “I think that’s in play.”
