2024 NBA Playoffs Takeaways: Team building the Minnesota, Oklahoma City way, or the Phoenix way

Things move fast in the NBA playoffs, so to help you stay on top of everything, from now through at least the end of the second round, we will have nightly takeaways from the postseason action.

Team building the Minnesota, Oklahoma City way, or the Phoenix way

Have a clear plan and style of play.

Trust the plan.

Don’t get impatient.

It’s never quite that simple or easy — and it needs a sprinkling of luck — but those three basic steps are the ones both Oklahoma City and Minnesota used to build teams that may be on a collision course for the Western Conference Finals. Those steps work.

Owner Mat Ishbia's Phoenix fired its second coach in as many years on Thursday. Frank Vogel was sent away because he didn’t connect with the team's thrown-together collection of free-agent superstars. Vogel didn’t get enough out of a top-heavy roster short on depth and defenders to keep his job.

Take a step back and look at the big picture; it is an instructive lesson on how to build a contender—and something that will last—in the NBA.

No two paths are identical —Minnesota and Oklahoma City play very different styles of games — but the process they used to get to this point is similar:

Find your superstar. Decide on a style of play that fits said star and draft/sign athletic players who fit that style. Hire a coach who can coach that style. Then, be patient — with the players, coaches, and everyone. It takes time to build chemistry and an identity. Patience requires buy-in from ownership, from the front office at all levels, and down through the coaching staff and players.

Building a contender also takes luck. Minnesota won the lottery to draft Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns. Oklahoma City traded for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander hoping he would be part of the future, but nobody predicted he’d become an MVP candidate. OKC also had some lottery luck, moving up to No. 2 to select Chet Holmgren. These teams both drafted and developed well.

Then they were patient. When calls came from the outside to break up Towns and Rudy Gobert because it would never work, Minnesota was patient and Chris Finch found a way to a make it all mesh, with KAT serving as the perfect bridge between Ant and Gobert.

It’s not just those two, look at the patience of other teams still playing. How many calls were there for the Celtics to break up Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown? Countless. They ignored that noise, and this season, they had the best record in the NBA. Denver faced calls to speed up the process, but they assembled the roster they knew could contend then patiently waited out Jamal Murray’s recovery from a torn ACL, and when he was right Denver got to the mountaintop and hosted a parade.

All that contrasts with what Ishbia has pushed for since taking over in Phoenix — an aggressive trade for Durant (which was a good move) and then another for Beal that sapped the team of their depth. He’s cycled through coaches. The Suns are a throwback 3-star team — one where the players have a lot of power — but it's incredibly hard to win in today’s NBA that way.

The NBA isn’t a league where a title can be bought. Money helps, but it still requires a plan, patience and luck. NBA owners eventually figure that out, some just have a bumpier path to that realization than others.

Doncic looks better, that proves too much for OKC

The challenge in defending Dallas is not simply that, when healthy, Luka Doncic can score against whatever defense a team throws at him — the hard part is his passing. Commit defenders to stopping the MVP candidate and he finds other shooters, others who can get to the rim, and very quickly a team feels it doesn’t have enough defenders to stop everyone.

In Game 1 Doncic wasn’t right, Oklahoma City’s defense was, and nothing clicked for Dallas.

In Game 2, Doncic looked better — not all the way back, the lift on his step-back is still not the same — and he scored 29, including hitting 5-of-8 from 3. What mattered more is his play opened everything else up. P.J. Washington had a monster game with 29 points and 11 rebounds. Tim Hardaway Jr. started to find his groove in his second game back from injury and scored 17 on 6-of-10 shooting. Daniel Gafford was getting buckets in the paint again on his way to 13 points. Josh Green was 3-of-5 from 3.

That’s more like the Dallas team that looked like a threat to win the West after the All-Star break, and it got them a 119-110 win.

Doncic’s play was… orgasmic if you watched his press conference.

Oklahoma City will adjust, its defense with Lu Dort and Jalen Williams — backstopped by Chet Holmgren — will remain physical and intense. SGA will continue to look like an MVP (33/12/8 in the loss).

But how things swing game-to-game will start with Doncic in this series. He remains the lynchpin to making everything work for the Mavericks, and when everything does work they can win.