The real driver to me is the lack of the super-team. Technically this happened in the last regular season to, which was until the COVID shutdown was shaping up to be a great regular season as well. But then we had the shutdown and bubble and all the rest. This year, we (luckily) haven't had that, and while there are two teams that probably fit the criteria of the Superteams, with the Nets and Lakers, they've both had their team curtailed by injury. And therein lies one of the "good reasons that are due to bad reasons". Injuries have played a big role in teh season, and in a weird way flattened things.
The injuries are inescapable, both Covid related and otherwise. The best example of this is probably the fact that we've seen what could've been an incredible MVP race end up with Nikola Jokic a clear winner because everyone that came close to him got hurt at some point. Be it LeBron, Joel Embiid (granted, just 10 games or so), Durant, Harden, and more. Luckily most of these guys are back, but it hurt the quality of teams at some point - of course it ends with just bananas close races across all conferences.
There are enough great stories that last though. You have the Nuggest and Jokic, stamping his name as the best passing big man ever and the first true center to win an MVP in 21 years. You have the Jazz playing beautiful basketball, shooting and making threes at a record rate. You have the lunacy of the Suns being a potential #1 seed. You have the Bucks still being a great team, same with the Clippers, though for those two we'll await to the playoffs to see if anyone will give a shit. And hell, shouldn't bury the lead here, you have the damn Knicks being a honest to God good team. This is just a great season.
Of course, there's one big issue hiding behind all this beautiful basketball and close races: threes are ruining the game. Not in the "the game was better in 90's, no one plays defense" way, but in another more factual way. I should say, threes are clearly a valuable, efficient and important shot. It's a winning shot, as first truly shown by 2011 Mavs who went on a 3-pt shooting bonanza (for the time, at least) in their way to a win. Reinforced by the 2014 Spurs and of course the Warriors. Now everyone basically tries to play like those teams. Therein lies the issue: threes are still a high-variance shot, which leads to a bunch of blowouts.
Not every team is good at hitting threes, which is fairly obvious. What is less openly obvious is teams aren't good even night to night. The Jazz, a truly great shooting team, could hit 50% of their threes one night, then 32% of them the next night. You may then end up with games where one team hits 47% and one team hits 31% even if they're both more or less as good normally, which leads to a blowout. There's been a lot of blowouts. NBA stat-master Seth Partnow mentioned recently about 10% of the entire season (in terms of game minutes) have been played with one team leading the other by 20 or more. Of course, every now and then the team down is able to make a run, make it interesting, if not outright retake the lead, but equally often the game goes to 25 then 30, even recently a spate of 40+ pt blowouts.
Yes, teams that make the playoffs are better than that and we probably won't get any 40+ pt blowouts, but we may still get a whole lot of 20 pt ones. There were a bunch in the last postseason too. It's been on an upward trend for years. Even series we allre member to be great have had this issue - take the 2016 Finals which of course had the memorable game 7, but that was preceded by six pretty bad blowouts, largely driven by which team was hot from three. I hope we don't have repeats of those types of series, especially since we got openly lucky with teh close Game 7.
This season has still been great, especially a great one to follow day-to-day, week-to-week, with the ups and downs of various teams, the storylines, the rise of the Joker, etc. But in the end I truly hope the three point shooting variance, the woes of night to night deep shooting, don't ruin what could be a special season.
