It goes without saying that every game in any sport becomes magnified in the playoffs. There is less margin for error, and a couple of bad performances can end a team’s championship dreams and send it into the offseason.
Game 1 is a tone-setter. In a seven-game series, it allows the most forgiveness in general because the losing team still has time to make up ground. But historically the Game 1 winner in an NBA best-of-seven series is a good indicator of who will win the series.
Per the site Who Wins (an excellent resource for a lot of major sports playoff history), NBA teams that win Game 1 go on to win the series 75.3% of the time.
With that context as a backdrop, there’s this: Game 1 feels especially important for the Timberwolves as they open play Saturday in their series against Phoenix — something Chris Hine and I talked about on Friday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
The reasons range from the practical to the emotional.
First, it’s important to maintain home-court advantage. The Wolves worked hard all season, often eschewing load management and other maneuvers that veteran teams use as they cruise through 82 games, to give themselves a chance at the best playoff seed possible.
Minnesota was in the mix for the No. 1 seed in the West until the season’s final day — when they lost convincingly to the Suns for the third time this season. Still, they earned the No. 3 seed, and a Game 1 loss would undo the advantage they spent an entire season to obtain.
Second, those aforementioned struggles against the Suns. In terms of matchups, the Wolves couldn’t have found a tougher first-round opponent than Phoenix. After they went 0-3 against the Suns this season, a Game 1 win would give the Wolves earned confidence. On the flip side, a Game 1 loss would only reinforce the challenge of trying to defeat a team led by Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal.