I’m not so worried about your graphic. That wins by 4 to 10 points is pretty sizable. That says to me that there must be several games that were close that they were able to put out of reach, ie get past a one possession game. What does the data look like if you go 1 to 4 points? Tho I realize 1 to 3 makes more sense as a 1 possession game type tight situation.
To your question, it’s gotta be health. The games will get more physical.
In the east we should beat anyone in our bracket. I don’t care how that shakes out. This team is well focused and on a mission. I believe!
I thought about breaking it up to begin with but as you say I decided to use 3 pts as a cutoff to make it a one possession game. But here's the data if you split the 4-10 point margins into 4-6 and 7-10, both for wins and losses:
So that's 13 wins and 11 losses in games decided by 2 possessions or less. Obviously we can keep on slicing and dicing the data until it gets favorable but the general trend is that we win one of every two games that are tightly contested, at least within 2 possessions or less. Not the greatest record - I'm less worried about the mediocre record, and more about the fact that we've only had 24 games that were considered to be close. We've been all-conquering so often that I worry they're not tempered enough to make the right reads and judgments in those situations.
It's why I feel that Joe kept on letting them play during those situations in the regular season, even though everyone in the game threads was screaming for him to call timeout - because we haven't had many of those situations this year and he wanted them to experience it.
Of course it's not like these guys are novices...they've been to the ECF multiple times, they've been to the Finals once, it's not like this season is the be-all end-all indicator of how they will handle pressure. but on the evidence of this year, with this set of players at least, I think they need to show me more before I can be confident they can grind out a win in a tight game if they had to.