Weekend takeaways: LeVert's patience, Mitchell's vision, Westbrook's problem

Another weekend of first-round basketball has left us with a far clearer picture of the playoff field. One series has already been salted away in a sweep, two more appear well on their way to the same fate, and four others have seen the lower-seeded team pushed to the brink. Despite plenty of game-to-game intrigue across the board, only the Spurs-Nuggets series is knotted at two games apiece and assured of at least a Game 6.

Here are five takeaways from the long-weekend slate, with a focus on players whose postseasons could soon be at an end:

The Nets' future has a face ...

... and it looks like Caris LeVert.

The overmatched Brooklyn Nets couldn't back up an inspired Game 1 win over the Philadelphia 76ers, and they likely aren't coming home for another contest at Barclays Center, but this young squad's first playoff foray has borne out some meaningful revelations. Perhaps the most important one is that LeVert is big time.

The Nets finally bumped LeVert into the starting lineup for Game 4 - something they arguably should've done from the get-go - and he displayed complete command of the contest's pace and flow. In a must-win game for Brooklyn, the third-year guard looked shockingly composed running the offense, picking Philly apart in myriad ways with methodical precision.

What stood out most is the patience LeVert exhibits in the pick-and-roll, a rarity for such an inexperienced player. He just never rushes anything. He maintains a live dribble. He prods, jukes, and feints until the defense gives something away. In the two plays below, LeVert manages to extract some concessions even when Allen's screens don't really stick.

And when the Sixers play a drop coverage against the pick-and-roll, LeVert's probing often prompts them to concede a big-on-small switch, at which point LeVert gets to work right away. He might look to attack off the dribble, or he might scamper back behind the 3-point line and get a shot off before the lumbering big can contest:

The Nets are planning to go big-game hunting this summer. The may even look to lure one of the impending star free agents currently playing for the 76ers. Brooklyn will likely have to pony up if it wants to keep D'Angelo Russell, too. But in a series that features Russell, Jimmy Butler, Ben Simmons, and Tobias Harris, LeVert has been the best off-the-bounce creator and the best pick-and-roll operator.

He has size, he has handles, he can pass, he can shoot (kinda), and he's proven he has the moxie and conviction to play his most calmly assured basketball on the biggest stage. He looks like a guy worth building around.

Westbrook's push-and-pull leaves OKC stuck

With about 80 seconds left in Sunday's Game 4 against the Blazers, the Oklahoma City Thunder were making a last-ditch push to avoid going back to Portland trailing 3-1. They'd sliced the lead to seven points and the home crowd was doing its damnedest to will them to a miracle.

At that point, the Thunder trapped the Blazers 30 feet from the hoop. As Al-Farouq Aminu cut down the middle, Russell Westbrook abandoned his man, Moe Harkless, to divert a potential slip pass to Aminu. It worked, except that Westbrook didn't recover to Harkless (or even look for him), and as he drifted into no man's land, hoping to pick off a pass, Damian Lillard tossed the ball over the top to Harkless, all alone under the basket, for a layup.

Going back the other way, Westbrook tried and failed to puncture Portland's defense, and ultimately wound up eating 16 seconds of clock before hoisting a step-back three from the corner that rimmed out. Paul George never touched the ball.

It was a perfect illustration of what the Washington Post's Ben Golliver would describe as "playing with purpose, but not a purpose." No one has ever accused Westbrook of sparing any effort, or of not working hard enough, or of not "wanting it." If anything, it's the opposite. He wants it too badly. And sometimes, that overwhelming desire clouds his judgment. He wants so desperately to win, and believes so strongly in his own ability to produce that desired outcome, that he misses the forest for the trees.

That has always been part of the Westbrook experience, but these days there are fewer redemptive moments to offset the frustrating ones. He was outstanding in Game 3, and easily the biggest reason the Thunder won, but he was bad in Game 4, scoring 14 points on 26 used possessions. It's not dissimilar to the way he rescued the team in Game 5 against the Utah Jazz last year before going out in a mushroom cloud of pull-up jumpers in Game 6.

Westbrook necessarily becomes the center of his team's solar system. That happens by force of will, to some extent, but also by virtue of his strengths and limitations. With Paul George's ascension this season, the balance tilted back toward the binary-star system the Thunder enjoyed when Westbrook and Kevin Durant played together. But even still, Westbrook's inability to play off the ball, his inattentive defense, and his instinct to trust only himself when everything is on the line has proven inherently limiting.

He's still a brilliant, explosive ball of flame. He just finished averaging a triple-double - a feat we'd seen only one other player achieve, 57 years ago - for a third straight season. He shouldn't have to bear the brunt of the blame for the failings of a faultily constructed Thunder team. Still, he's produced a subpar 47.2 true-shooting percentage in the playoffs while using 30 percent of OKC's possessions. He could come out with his hair on fire in Game 5 and save the Thunder's playoff lives. That would be a very Russ thing to do. But it feels like these days, the piper always demands payment for those transcendent performances, which are fewer and farther between than they once were.

Westbrook is on the Thunder's books through the 2022-23 season, when he'll earn $47 million. He kept the franchise afloat in the wake of Durant's departure, he was the reason it made sense to trade for George, and he was singularly instrumental in keeping George in the fold long term. But getting this capped-out, asset-poor team to the next level will require a serious reimagining of both Westbrook's game and the team around him.

Mitchell's passing could make him special

As a rookie, even in his rawest, most mistake-prone moments, Donovan Mitchell popped off the screen. His athleticism, his fearlessness, his shot-making ability, his acrobatic finishes at the rim, the way he'd sky for one-handed rebounds, his flashes of clamp-down defense ... he looked the part of a future superstar. To use an antiquated term, he had the "It Factor."

A tiny bit of that shine came off in Mitchell's second regular season. As a scorer, he came back as basically the same guy. His points per possession ticked up a hair, but that was mainly the result of a higher usage rate. He shot more free throws and upped his 3-point percentage, but didn't score as efficiently at the rim and ultimately saw his true shooting dip from 54.1 to 53.7 percent.

However, one area of unquestioned growth for Mitchell in Year 2 has been his passing. And while Game 3 against the Rockets was an abject disaster for both him and the Jazz - who lost at home and fell into an 0-3 hole despite James Harden missing 85 percent of his field goals - Mitchell put those refined distributing chops on full display.

The passes came in many different forms. There were blind backhand wraparounds delivered to the perimeter, right on target, with surprising zip:

There were overhead skip passes to the corner - notable not just for their pace and accuracy, but for the hesitations and head-fakes that preceded them, which would routinely fool the Rockets' help-side defender into lurching toward the roll man as the ball whizzed past him into the pocket of a waiting shooter:

And there was miscellaneous, freewheeling stuff like this nifty midair adjustment after Clint Capela denied the lob option to Rudy Gobert:

Yes, Mitchell had a rough shooting night, which included missing a wide-open three that would've tied the game with 10 seconds to play. But he did a wonderful job of facilitating, and the Jazz would've won if they'd just been able to convert a respectable number of the wide-open looks he created for them.

Mitchell should eventually evolve as a scorer, but it's the way he's seeing the floor right now - while lasering the ball to every corner of it - that hints at how good he can be.

He's Kevin Durant

"I'm Kevin Durant," the Golden State Warriors star told a gaggle of reporters one day after turning the ball over nine times in his team's stunning collapse against the Los Angeles Clippers in Game 2. Durant was in the process of explaining why he didn't feel the need to prove himself by trying to beat Patrick Beverley in a one-on-one matchup. "Y'all know who I am."

Well, that's kind of the thing. Do we know? Since joining the Warriors three years ago, it seems like Durant's grown increasingly inscrutable, culminating in the season-long weirdness and uncertainty that's hovered over him and the Warriors this year.

This wasn't about Durant's free-agency plans, or his mood, or what makes him tick. It was about how he approaches the game of basketball. And while that question is ostensibly distinct from the off-court noise that's defined his season, the two have seemingly blended together at times this season. There have been stretches when Durant's drifted in and out of games, when it's been hard to discern if he's being deferential, passive aggressive, or just plain passive, when he and Steve Kerr publicly disagree over some element of basketball philosophy, and when you can almost see Durant trying to balance how he wants to play and how he thinks he should play.

He said during that same media scrum that he didn't want to take the Warriors out of what they do by getting baited into isolation plays. Kerr later indicated that he wanted Durant to be more assertive. Then Games 3 and 4 happened.

In those contests, the Warriors made a point of getting Durant going early and often, and he responded by hunting shots in the flow of the offense, repeatedly shooting over Beverley - the thing he said he wasn't much interested in doing - and generally getting whatever he wanted. He hit his first eight field-goal attempts of Game 3 en route to a brutally efficient 38 points. He followed that up with 33 on 24 shooting possessions in Game 4.

Beyond the scoring, Durant's passing was sharp and his defense was locked in. Nothing about his game felt forced. There was no hint of an on-court identity crisis. And if that wasn't indicative of who Durant is, it was at least a sign of what he can be: the best player in basketball.

Oladipo's injury was everyone's loss

Except Boston's, of course.

It may seem like a stretch to suggest Oladipo's presence alone could've flipped the outcome of the Celtics' sweep over the Indiana Pacers, but the margins of the series were a lot slimmer than the win ledger suggests. Indiana was outscored by a modest 30 points across four games and led at halftime in all of them.

Even if you attribute that to the Celtics' penchant for futzing around and playing with their food, the Pacers were clearly up for the task of defending Boston. They just couldn't score enough to make it matter. Between Kyrie Irving, Jayson Tatum, and Gordon Hayward, the Celtics probably had the three most capable creators in the series. With Oladipo there to actually initiate some semblance of offense off the bounce - and to guard Irving in crunch time - this could have been an intense, fun matchup, instead of the predictable, perfunctory slog it became. The Pacers' season deserved a better ending.

It's not like we didn't know the Oladipo injury was a death knell for this team when it happened, but the extent to which the Pacers' offense folded in this series was still a bit jarring. They had quarters of eight, 12, 12, and 17 points. They scored a miserable 0.52 points per isolation possession and 0.71 points per possession finished by the pick-and-roll ball-handler, to name but two varieties of half-court offense in which they ranked at or near the bottom of the playoff field. Outside of transition, they managed just 80.2 points per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass. All of their supporting pieces made perfect sense around Oladipo, but without him, they were all overextended.

Give credit to the Celtics for taking care of business, defending their tails off, and pulling out a couple tight games by locking in down the stretch. Still, it's unclear how much we can really take away from these four games. Realistically, we won't know if Boston's turned the corner until we see what the team looks like in Game 1 against the Milwaukee Bucks.