Playoff basketball is a different sport mainly because the rotation shrinks

Cutting ten players to eight changes matchups, fouls and fatigue more than any tactical adjustment a coach makes.

People talk about the postseason slowing down, or getting more physical, or officials swallowing the whistle. All of that is secondary. The primary change is that a coach stops playing ten men and starts playing eight, and everything else follows from the arithmetic.

Start with matchups. A ten-man rotation contains specialists, and a specialist survives the regular season because he faces a different opponent every second night and roughly a third of them cannot exploit his weakness. In a seven-game series there is one opponent, and they have a week to find the weakness and a game plan built to attack it. So the specialist gets removed from the rotation by the third game, not because he got worse, but because his hiding places are gone.

Then fouls. Eight men means the fifth foul on a starter in the third quarter is a genuine crisis rather than an inconvenience, which changes how aggressively defences can play, which is why the physicality people notice is at least partly a consequence of the shortened bench rather than a cause of anything.

Then fatigue, which compounds through a series and then across rounds. Thirty-eight minutes a night for two weeks is survivable. Doing it for four rounds is where the late-series collapses come from, and it is why the fourth quarter of game six so often looks like a different standard of basketball from game one.

My argument is that this makes depth valuable in a way the regular season never reveals, but only a specific kind of depth. Not more players. More players who have no exploitable hole, which is a much rarer commodity and one that free agency prices badly, because the market pays for what a player does well rather than for the absence of a weakness.

The teams that lose in the second round every year almost always have a deep roster of good players with one clear flaw each. The teams that go further have fewer, duller options who cannot be attacked.

Watch which bench player disappears between game two and game four. The series usually turned there, and nobody wrote about it.