10 First-Round Lessons: Bench Depth and Star Roles
Teams leveraging bench strength and optimizing star roles navigated first round better. Here's what depth tiers revealed.
NBA first round sorted teams into depth tiers. Zach Kram examined 10 key lessons from early playoff action, exposing which clubs had sustainable bench strength and how they deployed stars. These advantages carry straight into remaining rounds.
Bench depth separated contenders from pretenders. Teams leveraging reliable rotation players rather than riding stars into exhaustion navigated closer series with fresher legs down stretch. First-round performance revealed which rosters possessed genuine secondary creators and which operated thin outside top three names.
