I recently finished reading Merchants of Doubt and one of the chapters focused on the attacks on Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring, which warned of the dangers of pesticides such as DDT back in 1962. The attacks claim that her role in the ban of DDT prevented malaria control which could have saved millions of lives. This claim is not warranted, in part, because at the time DDT was banned it was already becoming less effective at killing mosquitoes because they developed a resistance to DDT. “The most efficient way to use pesticides against disease is through application to the insides of buildings… it doesn’t produce resistance very quickly, because most insects don’t wind up in buildings and therefore aren’t subject to poison…. However, when pesticides are sprayed over large agricultural areas, they kill a large fraction of the total insect population, ensuring that the hardy survivors breed only with the other hardy survivors; the very next generation may display resistance.” I read this chapter right around when the Bucks and Rockets got eliminated from the playoffs. This got me thinking about how teams and players who play one way in the NBA fare better in the regular season than the playoffs.
In the NBA regular season teams play the other 29 teams 2-4 times each. This means you are constantly seeing different players and play styles. With travel and limited time between games there is very little time to prepare for each individual game. As a result teams play a style that maximizes the skills of their players and tend to not adjust on a game-to-game basis based on opponent tendencies. Strategies tend to be more based around how the typical opponent plays rather than how tonight’s opponent plays. If you have played poker, you can think of the regular season as playing a GTO (Game Theory Optimal) strategy. As a result teams and players with unique styles or skills can tend to have great success in the regular season in part because their opponents haven’t had the time to plan and adapt to their unique style - opponents have not developed a resistance. Much like how spraying large agricultural areas with pesticides will kill a large fraction of the insect population, having a strategy that beats up on the average NBA team will result in a large number of wins in the regular season. The problem is the teams that the strategy does not kill are the strongest teams and those are the teams still alive deep in the playoffs.
In the NBA playoffs you are playing the same team for up 7 straight games. The coaching staff is spending all their time preparing how to beat only one opponent. The players are playing against the same players each game and getting used to their individual tendencies and learning how to counter them. A team should be finding their opponent’s weaknesses and exploiting them as much as possible, and knowing what their opponent will try to exploit and trying to limit that. If you have played poker, you can think of the playoffs as playing exploitably. The strategy that may have worked well against 20+ teams in the regular season does not matter much now that your opponent has built a resistance. Building a resistance could be anything from exploiting a team’s pick-and-roll coverage to knowing not to fall for a player’s pump fake.
As you get deeper in the playoffs you will face teams more capable of building a resistance. If you play a style that is different than everyone else, then your opponents will tend to be unaccustomed to playing against that style in the regular season. When they play you multiple times in a row, like in the playoffs, the more comfortable they will become playing against you. Once your opponent has built a resistance you need to be willing and capable of changing things up or else you risk being a team that consistently under-performs in the playoffs compared to your regular season results.