What The Playoffs Mean: The Playoffs Kinda Suck When Your Team Plays

The playoffs are the sacred text, broad and malleable enough to explain any point of view. They are the way players reach immortality, the way GMs keep their jobs for another year. They are the reason Courtney Lee, Trevor Ariza, JJ Barea and Derek Fisher are kind of close to household names. They are why they play the games and why we watch. But they also mean a lot more than this, which is why we are here. From now until the end of the finals, we'll be here, toiling away, trying to unpack exactly what makes these games so great, exactly What The Playoffs Mean.
 
Here's how I imagine a day in the life of a near-homeless heroin addict:

Wake up feeling terrible on a crappy mattress (no box spring) on the floor of a flophouse, cough up something brown. Think up a way to make, like, eight bucks so you can go buy heroin from a guy who hates you. Ask strangers for money, nobody gives you any because you smell awful. Start finding ways to steal scrap metal and sell it at the local metal yard. Get junkyard dogs sic'ed on you. Try to sell your plasma, they won't buy it from you because you've obviously stuck needles in your arms hundreds of times. Decide that if you pretend you're a firefighter and hold a boot at an intersection, people might give you change. Get your ass kicked by a firefighter while doing this. Throughout the day, you get a dozen dirty looks and probably some police attention.

You finally somehow have your eight bucks. Go to the drug dealer who hates you's corner. He tells you you're disgusting, but he sells you the heroin. Go find a needle you used yesterday in the flophouse, which may have been used by any of the seven other people who pass out there on any given night. Shoot up, pass out. Repeat tomorrow. It will be just like today. If everything went right, you didn't die.

Why have you put yourself through all this? Because you want to re-live that first high. You just want to get that feeling again, from the first time you tried it. Man, that was awesome.

Being a fan of an Eastern Conference playoff team during April and hopefully May and June is basically this. You wake up every morning, read TrueHoop and whatever other blogs dissecting everything that went right or wrong for every team. Maybe Russell Westbrook scored 46 last night and the Thunder won, but he gave Kevin Durant a dirty look and they yelled at each other in the huddle for half a second. Today you will hear some talking head telling you why Westbrook needs to be more unselfish and give Durant his shots. Then somebody else will say Westbrook was hot, let him have the ball. Then you'll hear whatever Westbrook said after the game 50 times and somebody will twist it to sound like he was dissing Durant or Scott Brooks. Then you click some link to what you think will be an original take on the situation and a video from First Take starts auto-playing and Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless start screaming at you about Westbrook's attitude. You close it as fast as you can and turn on ESPN Radio. There's Colin Cowherd saying something sort of racist about whatever absurd retirement home bingo outfit Westbrook wore last night. Then you go to Deadspin and they're talking about the racist thing Cowherd implied. You throw on a podcast thinking that'll be safe and there's JE Skeets reminding you yet again that Russell Westbrook is a cat and most certainly NOT a dog. Sometime in the early afternoon things start to shift to the games that are on tonight. The Heat are playing the Bucks. That sounds godawful. The Celtics are playing the Knicks, that sounds better. Bill Simmons makes a "Don't get fired" Honey Nut Cheerios reference you've heard 600 times. Amar'e isn't playing tonight because of course he isn't. JR Smith said something stupid on Twitter and there's Deadspin again, all over it. There's KG saying something evil to someone. Let's talk about how Joakim Noah used to like him and now he doesn't. That's what you wanted to hear about today, the two most antagonistic pricks in the NBA who aren't even playing each other tonight. At least you get to watch Rondo Derrick Rose Kobe Dirk Joe Johnson later.

The game is finally on. The Knicks and Celtics combine for 32 points in the first quarter. JR Smith missed his first four shots and got pulled. Paul Pierce is yelling at the refs. There's Amar'e in a suit. Jason Kidd looks like a melted candle. Rasheed Wallace didn't even come to the game. This would be so much more fun with Rondo. At halftime, there's a promo for the late game, it's Clippers-Grizzlies. Can we just skip this and get that late game started? It starts at 10:30 and you have to work tomorrow. You'll stay up because that game is so much better than this one that you actually care about.

The Celtics lose, or the Knicks do. It doesn't matter, the series is only 1-1. The Heat are going to win the East anyway.

Why are we even watching this? Because basketball is going to end soon and you'll miss it when it's gone. Because your team made it really deep into the playoffs or even got a ring at some point in your life and maybe, just maybe they'll get another one this year. Maybe somebody on a rival team gets hurt. Maybe an opposing player leaves the bench and gets suspended for game six of the series against him. Maybe someone, maybe even your team, will knock out the Heat.

None of that will happen.

Each night you'll go to bed and the best case scenario is your team's season not being over yet. If everything went right, you didn't die. Then there's two days—full of Pacers-Hawks highlights and whatever Westbrook's body language implied today and whatever opinion Skip Bayless is disagreeing with and whatever dickish thing Joey Crawford did to the Spurs—until your team plays another ugly, low-scoring game where you're just waiting for things to go horribly wrong. Eventually they will.

Your team being knocked out of the playoffs sucks for a day and then it's kind of a relief. You can watch whatever game is on and just root for good basketball. Kenneth Faried and Ty Lawson are running amok? Sweet. Blake Griffin just dunked Tiago Splitter to death? Awesome. A series with any combination of Thunder-Clippers-Nuggets? GIVE ME MORE.

The playoffs are miserable. Then your team gets knocked out. Then playoffs are awesome.

This doesn't apply if you're a Heat fan, in which case you should feel free to go hold a boot in an intersection near a fire house.