6 winners and 3 losers from the NBA’s opening playoff Game 1s

The NBA playoffs have arrived with eight Game 1s played this weekend. It was dominated by the higher seeds, as expected, who went 7-1, but there was brilliant basketball played across both days. These are the winners and losers that stand out from the opening days of the NBA postseason.

WINNER: Playoff hoops

Say what you want about the NBA’s regular season product: it has too many games; it doesn’t have high enough stakes; the stars don’t play often enough; the media is too focused on everything except what’s on the court. I’ve said all that, too. I’ll also say this: The NBA playoffs are as good as sports get. The entertainment product, the stakes, the on-court play all accelerate to nitrous-fueled levels. We’ve all been waiting for the calendar to turn to this moment. After the first weekend, we have all remembered why we crave this time of year.

There’s less space. I watched nearly every second, and I remember no more than one or two straight-line drive layups where the player found himself alone at the rim. The superstars are asked complicated questions as their opponents’ strategies pick away at their strengths and preferred spots, ones that are enormously fun to watch them figure out in real time. The rotations are shorter. The physicality allowed never approached rock fight-levels, but it was ever so slightly more than what we saw in the regular season, I felt.

We spend all season nitpicking various aspects of basketball, but this is what we live for. Welcome back, postseason basketball.

WINNER: Thinking Nuggets-Wolves would rock

The series most anticipated to be the first round’s best sure looks like it will be. The Denver Nuggets opened the first round with a 116-105 win against the Minnesota Timberwolves, which affirmed the belief that the Nuggets are comfortable favorites. They can’t be too comfortable, of course. Minnesota shot disastrously, generating just five corner 3s and really bogging down against a Denver defensive effort that was miles past what we saw for much of this calendar year. I would anticipate Chris Finch, the head coach who has proven his ability to make in-game adjustments, has more in store for Game 2 and beyond.

I’ll leave those thoughts to Dane Moore, an excellent Timberwolves reporter, who joined Adam Mares to break down Game 1 for our ALL NBA Podcast.

LOSER: Detroit’s playoff concerns

WINNER: Jamahl Mosley’s perfect matchup

The Charlotte Hornets had been the league’s darling, and at times my own, in the second half of this season. The Orlando Magic had been much nearer to a punching bag. The juiced narrative for the former facing the Detroit Pistons in the first round had been fueled by the midseason brawl between them. In reality, the Magic were probably better suited to amplify what concerns we’ve had all season about Detroit, ones we’d defaulted to obsessing over in lieu of needing more regular season proof.

We were right to have some concerns. In the series’ opening game on Sunday, Orlando convincingly won it 112-101.

It wasn’t an aberrational game: Both teams knocked down 10 3s; Detroit shot twice as many free throws (38) as Orlando (19). The shot quality metrics suggest Detroit shot beneath its standards while Orlando overachieved theirs; it hurt Detroit to only snare six offensive rebounds, an unlikely thing for the team that was third best in the regular season at rebounding its own shots. Finally at full health, however, Orlando is one of the few teams that never concedes size to Detroit. Its smallest rotation player on Sunday was the 6’5 Jalen Suggs.

Detroit’s concerns have, at times, been simplified to 3-point shooting. (The Pistons attempted the second fewest in the regular season.) It’s more correct to refer to it as a half-court offense execution problem. No team spent fewer possessions playing half-court offense (75.4 percent) than Detroit this season. In the regular season, that was the team’s strength: Ausar Thompson created live ball turnovers that turned into lethal fast breaks; Jalen Duren ate up offensive rebounds that balanced inefficient shots from his teammates.

That said, we all know the cliche: There are times in the postseason where the game slows down and you need more execution. On that front, the Pistons and the Magic are rather balanced. (All stats and ranks referred to are from the regular season.)

	DETROIT	ORLANDO
HALFCOURT	97.6	97.0
RANK	16th	17th
OREB%	34.2	29.7
RANK	4th	9th

Cunningham leads Detroit’s attack, specifically in the half-court, of course. His Sunday performance — 39 points on 13-of-27 shooting — can’t be expected from Detroit every game this series. Jalen Duren and Tobias Harris split second option duties in the regular season, and Daniss Jenkins emerged in the season’s second half as the team’s most reliable secondary creator. All three had poor games. Harris has a long postseason track record of underperformance; Jenkins has none, and Game 3 will be the 82nd game of his career.

Duren is where Detroit needs more bully-ball offense, like this driving layup through Wendall Carter Jr.’s body.

But Carter and Paolo Banchero, who had one of his best outings this entire season in Game 1, are the exact type of stout, broad-shouldered players that Duren doesn’t inherently have any physical advantages against. Detroit still forced its way to the rim, taking 40 percent of its shots there, but the turnovers and the second chances weren’t there in Game 1. If that’s inherent to this matchup, rather than a one-game aberration that J.B. Bickerstaff can fix, then Detroit’s in trouble. It feels more like the first than the second.

Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley could win this series and still lose his job this summer. That’s how hot his seat is perceived to be. But his team was the better coached one on Sunday. Orlando’s ball movement was crisp and Mosley’s players reacted well to Detroit’s defensive rotations. Orlando has been at its best this season whenever fully healthy: Its starting five, which only played 182 minutes together this season, was plus-11.6 per 100 possessions in the regular season. That was mostly due to Franz Wagner’s repeated injuries; Jalen Suggs also missed 25 games and averaged under 28 minutes.

Which is to say: Mosley didn’t elevate his rotations when they were incomplete, but 45-win Orlando showed it was a better team than its record suggested when fully healthy. Suggs, still just 24 years old, is the closest Derrick White clone we have in the league. Orlando’s best two-man units were him playing with essentially any of his teammates; if Suggs can handle his elevated minutes (he played 36 on Sunday), then the Magic are a better team. If Mosley wins this series, he might have an offseason case to make for his job: Get me better bench players.

We’re one game into this series. Banchero could turn back into a looser cannon; he needs to maintain three turnovers or fewer, the number he had in Sunday’s opener. Detroit’s missed shots could spray out more predictably, creating those second chance points the team feasted on in the regular season. But Detroit should fear a team that can match its size and physicality; this was the first round’s worst case scenario. Charlotte might’ve outgunned them, but Orlando is a squad that can eat away at the very strengths Detroit has flexed this season.

This might turn out to be the first round’s most interesting series.

WINNER: Victor Wembanyama’s playoff debut

Wembanyama’s postseason debut was brilliant, of course. It’s something that’ll soon become normalized, an event as likely as Anthony Bourdain in a kitchen or Timothee Chalamet in a blockbuster movie, but it’s still human instinct to celebrate things when they happen for the first time. Wembanyama was everything we could have expected him to be.

I can’t choose one single play to highlight.

There was a moment in the fourth quarter, before the Portland Trail Blazers clawed back into punching distance, where Wembanyama bit off even more than he could chew after several isolation successes. (Victor, that spin move is now predictable enough that someone like Jrue Holiday will sit on it; be aware.) But it was an earnest desire from Wembanyama to dominate his debut, which was historic.

The best playoff scoring debuts in NBA history. pic.twitter.com/0SNeWfOnZs

— Automatic (@automaticnba) April 20, 2026

WINNER: San Antonio’s fiesta T-shirts

I’m typically ambivalent towards T-shirt gimmicks: Each section wearing the same or color-blocked shirts under fear of Jumbotron embarrassment. (The game operation cameras seek out non-shirt-wearing fans before and early during games to enforce compliance.) A color out feels more apt for college basketball, and I’ve even poked fun at professional teams that have done it before.

there are thousands of Taco Bell hot sauce packets cheering for the Jazz tonight pic.twitter.com/2t2ScBWpxy

— Tim Cato (@tim_cato) April 22, 2022

I will not say that about San Antonio’s fiesta-colored T-shirts. Oh my gosh. This was one of the coolest playoff atmospheres I’ve ever seen.

From what we could hear and what those on the ground said, there were many fantastic postseason atmospheres created this weekend, ones that roared and drowned out, at times, even the referees’ whistles. The fans were alive and vibrant with noise. But no arena was more vibrant with color than San Antonio’s. The team shouldn’t overdo this, in my opinion, but it’s perfect to begin each series’ first home game.

LOSER: The Play-In Tournament

WINNER: Best-of-five believers

As we know, the ninth and 10th seeds did not win their matchups. If there was no Play-In Tournament, the only difference would be the Phoenix Suns facing the Spurs and Portland squaring off against the Oklahoma City Thunder. As discussed, it does seem like Portland can make San Antonio work for its first-round win, but Orlando still would’ve faced Detroit if the Play-In Tournament didn’t exist.

It was brilliant to watch one more game where the Warriors reminded us of those special days of the past. Where Stephen Curry had one of his special playoff Play-In-and-the-stats-don’t-count-and-you’ll-never-find-those-numbers-anywhere performances. But the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Boston Celtics dominated both their opening games so damningly that it made me wonder if the best-of-five advocates, ones who believe the league should return to its old first-round format, which was changed in the 2002-03 season.

It won’t change. The NBA and even the owners of a team destined to be first-round fodder enjoy having one more guaranteed home game worth of revenue. (Portland’s new owner sure does; I cannot believe his cost-saving measures included not sending two-way players on the road.)

But in a perfect world where every correct suggestion I make is immediately implemented by Adam Silver, I would suggest this: First-round series should remain best-of-seven but, if a team goes up 3-0, it ends there. It’s a permutation taken from pickup basketball, where a 7-0 or 13-0 lead in a game to 11 or 21 often ends it, and I’d add that to the first round. After that, teams always have to reach four games to win series.

Likewise, the Play-In Tournament won’t change because of that Stephen Curry magic we witnessed. I’m glad to have watched that, at least, but nothing about the series we’re watching now would be all that different without it. As a tanking measure, it’s proven rather meaningless. It also stacks every 1-vs.-8, 2-vs.-7 series on the second day, which meant Sunday’s first five hours of basketball were barely worth tuning into for a casual fan.

These are, at the day’s end, minor quibbles. They did not take away from my enjoyment.

LOSER: The depleted Rockets and Lakers

Kevin Durant was a late scratch from Saturday’s matchup between Los Angeles and Houston, which allowed Los Angeles to rather comfortably outshoot the Rockets in a Game 1 victory that exposed every half-court offensive flaw Houston has had all season. Los Angeles probably can’t replicate this shooting performances — they took 25 fewer shots than the Rockets — more than one or two more times. If J.J. Redick has any adjustments beyond Luka Dončić please get healthy, they’ll be needed.

But winning Game 1 increases the chances Los Angeles can hold out for its injured stars, ideally Dončić halfway through this round and Austin Reaves returning in the next one should they win. And Durant’s absence from this game is a buzzkill, too, even if Houston’s offense should be better than this without him.

Tim Cato is ALLCITY’s national NBA writer currently based in Dallas. He can be reached at tcato@alldlls.com or on X at @tim_cato.