Every year, sixteen NBA teams enter the playoffs and eight teams get bounced in the first round. The loser machine that is the tournament bracket produces eight disappointments. But not all disappointments are created equal; some are definitely worse than others.
Losing in the play-in or the first round of the playoffs puts a team in the dreaded NBA no man's land. Too good to get a good draft pick, too bad to win a championship. In the toxic ring culture of the league, "we'll get to round 2 next year" doesn't cut it. Teams making their first round exits must ask themselves: do we have a path to improvement or is it time to give up and start a rebuild? In many cases, they're also looking for someone to blame, a scapegoat that can be ritually sacrificed to guarantee a better harvest next year.
In this post, I analyze all eight first-round exits and rank them according to a very scientific scale I've developed. I call this the quadruple D system. It rates each team on three scales: disappointment, despair, disillusionment, and disgrace. Averaged out, these factors form the Suffering Index.
Disappointment is a simple measure of expectations against reality. It is, of course, worse to lose in the first round if you expected to be a contender. It considers individual performance (did your players wither in the playoffs?) as well as team performance.
Despair considers how a loss fits in the history (both recent and all-time) of a given club. NBA franchises operate in cycles. You draft high, build the best team possible, compete for a few years, then break up the band and try again; only a few blessed franchises can actually transition smoothly from era to era, without an intervening period of tanking or wandering the wilderness. This means that some franchises just inherently have a higher despair index, which is appropriate. Basically: Lakers fans just can't complain too much no matter what happens to them.
It's one thing for one team to not live up to championship aspirations; it's quite another to root for a franchise where multiple generations of disappointment have come and gone.
Disillusionment is the ghost of playoffs future to Despair's ghost of playoffs past. The worse your team's future prospects, the higher the Disillusionment Factor. Many a team has traded away all their own picks for a big championship push only to find themselves with no rings, no stars, and no future.
Last but not least: Disgrace, aka the 'not like this' factor. Did you get swept? Did you lose in particularly painful fashion? Did your star wither under the bright lights and prove to be a fraud? Did you lose to a hated regional rival? Did the ball bounce seven times on the rim before going in?
Here they are, 2024's eight first-round losers, in order of lowest to highest Suffering Index.
8: The Cleveland Cavaliers or the Orlando Magic (2.25)
"But Bruno," you ask me, "the first round of the playoffs isn't over yet. There's still game seven of the Cavs/Magic series to play!"
That's really no issue for this article because as it happens, I have biased my analysis to give either team an identical score to the other, whoever loses. So I can confidently predict the Suffering Index here, and the Suffering Index... is low. Let's do a little case study, shall we.
Disappointment: 1. Nobody really expected either team to do that much. A matchup between the fourth and fifth seeds, naturally, is one that can go either way. The Cavs have obvious problems, the Magic have obvious problems. On paper, this is more disapointing for the Cavaliers... but the season has kind of provided ample evidence that this team needs more stuff going on before they can be taken seriously.
Despair: The Cavaliers have won a championship not that long ago, which instantly disqualifies them from having a high Despair Factor. Still, it's been longer than other recent champions on this list, and they do have a very dark history before that. So they score a 2. The Magic, on the other hand, has a Despair Factor of 4.
Disillusionment: The Cavaliers find themselves relatively inflexible with their cap and pick situation, on the other side of a Donovan Mitchell trade that didn't really put them as far head as they thought, with Evan Mobley's plateauing development appearing alongside that to limit their ceiling. They have a Disillusionment Factor of 4. The Magic, on the other hand, are a very young and very effective team with a great deal of upside, if they can find offense in the coming seasons. They have a Disillusionment Factor of 2. See how it all balances out?
Disgrace: I'm giving this a 2 on grounds of how unwatchable this series was, but it's true that it's hard to fault a fifth seed from losing to the fourth seed... or vice-versa. Both teams can point to the fact that they took the other to seven games as something that makes up for being blown out in multiple losses.
7: The Miami Heat (2.5)
Disappointment: 3, generously. Like, rationally, the Heat are a marginall playoff team that squeaked by into the eight seed on grit. But irrationally, they did the same thing last year and made the Finals. There's just this assumption that the Heat have a deep reserve of, idk, moxie or whatever that they can dip into to win playoff games.
Despair: 1. The Heat are one of the winningest franchises in the 21st century; the good times weren't that long ago.
Disillusionment: 3. The Heat are old and creaky, but they're one of the few franchises that do seem to know how to transition to their next era without going into a significant tank. And they own most of their picks. And they have a knack for just finding random rotation players outside the draft. They'll be fine, they know they'll be fine, and if there's any source of disillusionment it's the hanging question of... okay, where do you find a real MVP-type player if you're the Heat?
Disgrace: 3. That was pretty bad, not gonna lie, but ultimately it's an eighth seed getting taken care of by a first seed.
6: The New Orleans Pelicans (3.25)
Disappointment: 2. No reasonable observer expected them to win this, Zion on the floor or no.
Despair: 4. The Pelicans have not been around long enough to truly develop a curse. But neither have them been a fun team to root for over their existence. And as far as this current era of the team, well... this loss represents another data point in an alarming pattern: Zion cannot reliably stay on the floor and his supporting cast cannot reliably win without him.
Disillusionment: 3. The Pelicans are still relatively young, still building, kind of. But they've hitched their wagon to Zion and Zion is not looking so hot.
Disgrace: 4. Getting swept sucks, but getting swept as the eighth seed sucks a little less.
4 (Tied): The Los Angeles Lakers (3.5)
Disappointment: 4. Now, you need to be a totally biased Lakers fan to think the Lakers had any chance in this series. Alas, there are a lot of Lakers fans.
Despair: 1. It's the fucking Lakers, the most blessed franchise in the history of the NBA. Their fans have no right to complain about anything for eternity.
Disillusionment: 5. This era of the team is over, and we all know the institutional depletion that LeBron leaves in his wake. So many bad trades. Firing Darvin Ham won't fix a franchise whose central problem is Rob Pelinka.
Disgrace: High. Here's where we get to the crux of the issue: The Lakers were supposed to lose. They did lose. But Denver played poorly. This was not firing-on-all-cylinders, dynastic Denver. This was "jokic is just really good but these other guys, idk" Denver. Every game was winnable for the Lakers. In fact, the Lakers led for most of the minutes in this series. They just let the Nuggets sleepwalk into a series win, one lackadaisical possession at a time – especially in that fateful game two. "They wanted it more" is a sports cliché, but... this series, it feels like Denver really did win because they wanted it more. And the hellish thing is that Denver seems to only have wanted it more a little bit. This was a workaday, blue-collar, unfancy beating that the Lakers took.
4 (Tied): The Milwaukee Bucks (3.5)
Disappointment: 4. The Bucks are supposed to be contenders, but I think even their own fans had made peace with the fact that the vibes were not on any more. It's been a messy season. Damian Lillard has been off and on and off again. Giannis injured. I think the writing was on the wall pretty clearly, but still: they have a lot of firepower to end up like this.
Despair: 2. They won a championship just a couple years ago.
Disillusionment: 4. Giannis is not actually that old, but the team just has no ammunition left. Where are they going to find help, exactly? There's a definite sense that, while they had a good run, it's time to start packing it up.
Disgrace: 4. Giannis was out, Dame was out for a couple games. This series definitely should have been winnable. There's no singular "oh no" moment here, just a sense of a thoroughly missed opportunity.
3: The Philadelphia 76ers (3.75)
Disappointment: 5. How do you even characterize the expectations of Philly fans at this point? Should we have expected more from the Sixers? Seven consecutive playoff appearances adding up to five second-round exits and two first-round exits. Is that enough? Is that a disappointment, overall? Is losing in the first round a massive disappointment next to the overwhelming expectation of getting bounced in the second round? Is losing James Harden enough to temper expectations? At this point, there's just a sense of impatience around Philadelphia. C'mon, do something. Make an ECF, for chrissakes. Why can't you do it?
Despair: 5. The Sixers are an odd case here, because unlike some other franchises in this list, they've had good times. They can point to eras of the team where they were good and memorable. They've won championships, though that was a long time ago. Under the right light, this current era of the team is quite good. Seven straight playoff appearances! That's not bad, is it?
But the reality is that despair clings to this organization like tar. The memory of the pact that was made to obtain their power is not so easily dismissed. Nothing feels so much like a curse like trying the same thing over and over and getting the same disappointing result over and over. Seven straight playoff appearances. Five second-round exits. Two first-round exits.
Disillusionment: 3. Honestly? This should probably be higher. But Tyrese Maxey is very young and very good, and he gives the Sixers something resembling a pivot. And Tobias Harris just came off the books, something that Sixers fans are celebrating as hard as anything in the last few years.
Of course, Tobias Harris might just be the latest in the long list of scapegoats left in Embiid's wake... Jimmy, then Ben, then Glenn, then James... How long until it's Nick? How long until it's Tyrese?
Disgrace: 3. This could have been much higher. There were definitely moments of utter disgrace here. That disastrous ending to game 2, complete with the friendly bounce on a Jalen Brunson three that echoed a past disaster. Losing against the Knicks specifically, with their fans chanting 'MVP' in your arena.
But in the end, the Sixers got to say they went down fighting. Joel battled through injury, Maxey put on a star-making performance in game 5, and they managed to drag it out to six games in a brutal rock fight with the Knicks. This isn't quite a moral victory, but it's something.
2: The Los Angeles Clippers (4.25)
Disappointment: 4. This is supposed to be a superteam. This is supposed to be better than this. But every year, Kawhi is injured. Every year, they underperform. The cycle of hope and disappointment is familiar, at this point; and that's enough to temper expectations.
Despair: 5. Few franchises are as sad as the Clippers, who have long existed in the shadow of the biggest franchise in the league. Bad ownership, long periods of famine, and playoff heartbreak are all in this club's DNA. And then just as things looked like they were turning around under a new owner – whoops! This newest era of the Clippers is a failure, too.
Disillusionment: 5. The Clippers took a big swing and they completely missed. Their mix of old and injury-prone stars just isn't getting them anywhere. The parallels to the post-Garnett trade Nets are very clear here.
Disgrace: 3. This was a normal playoff series against a serious but flawed opponent, and that's the one thing that keeps this loss from being as intense in its suffering as the one endured by...
1: The Phoenix Suns
Disappointment: 5. I think if you're making 'superteam' claims and you get bounced like this you instantly get a 5 in this factor.
Despair: 4. Phoenix is one of the NBA's remaining championship-less franchises. They've had truly great players on their roster – Charles Barkley, Steve Nash – and it's always ended in heartbreak. They don't quite qualify for the club of perpetual misery that, say, the Kings live in, though.
Disillusionment: 5. The Suns bet the farm on a roster that makes absolutely no sense outside of NBA2K. They literally stacked up on isolation scorers that don't scale together. Oh, did I mention Bradley Beal has a no-trade clause?
Disgrace: High. Getting swept in the first round is the ultimate stamp that you don't belong. The fact that you got a playoff berth was surely a mistake. A clerical error that deprived some other, more deserving team of a spot.
