There’s a term the media often uses to describe the final weeks of the NBA season, usually starting right after the All-Star Game: silly season. This is when tanking teams start shutting down the veterans they haven’t waived or traded to better teams and start giving more minutes to their younger, more raw guys for “development”. Putting guys who are terrible on the court doesn’t actually make them less terrible, as anyone who has followed the career of former New York Knicks superstar Kevin Knox knows, but it is a convenient excuse to use for intentionally losing games without the powers that be getting angry at you for intentionally losing games. Got a top ten draft pick who isn’t panning out? That’s alright, just up his minutes from 20mpg to 30mpg and you’ll be bad enough to get another top ten draft pick who won’t pan out! (See Also: The last five years of the Detroit Pistons, led today by former New York Knicks superstar Kevin Knox)
This time of year, when the NBA season is all but over and it’s fairly obvious who the playoff/play-in teams and lottery teams are, is when silly season kicks into high gear. You’ll see headlines featuring complete nobodies going off for teams that would otherwise have no reason to appear in headlines in April. Take this for instance:
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/39871368/pistons-reserve-malachi-flynn-puts-50-loss-hawks
Malachi Flynn. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time. Usually he was the first guy I grabbed off the waiver wire when Fred VanVleet got injured, but he was apparently a footnote in the OG trade, and with the Knicks not being bad enough for him to be a silly season star with them, they shipped him to the Pistons, which led to yesterday’s 50 point masterclass. Flynn is owned in just 2% of Yahoo leagues, and I’m sure it was closer to 1% before he dropped fiddy in Atlanta. It’s late-season heroes like him that make April fun even for fans of NBA teams that are eliminated (or owners of fantasy teams that got eliminated like mine, RIP).
April is also when fans of teams that are contending but not so good they’ve already clinched a playoff spot see the most incredible basketball of the season. I just watched some of it myself during Philly’s razor-thin win over Oklahoma City on Tuesday night, and we’ll see many more classics like that over the next week-and-a-half. There’s only one contender that won’t have to care about the regular season after today: the Boston Celtics. For the rest of us, it’s basically our version of March Madness: every game matters. Everybody who can play will play, and fans will be reminded of why they fell in love with the NBA in the first place. Make sure you’ve got the popcorn ready.
