In this Basketball Digest story from 2001, Net guard Bill Melchionni recounts the last game ever played in the ABA (May 13, 1976) in which the Nets won the final ABA title with a thrilling come-from-behind win over the talented Denver Nuggets.

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Three stars from Wednesday's NBA playoff games
Andrew Wright, Yardbarker

The intensity system: "This league has become this" and the 64-win Cavaliers couldn't keep up
Henry Abbott, True Hoop

It can be confusing, trying to understand how the Pacers, a middling team in the regular season standings, keep making the conference finals. Last year, there was an urge to describe it as a fluke.
This year, though, the NBA’s coach of the year sees it as a model. The Pacers play with off-the-charts intensity. Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson held his hand way up high early in his post-game press conference. “They're up here, guys,” he explained. “I know what I know from the data and I know from watching film. They're up here, and they can sustain it. … I give them so much credit for being able to stay in that, to sustain that type of intensity for so long.”
This idea of mounting intensity that wears teams down doesn’t fit most of the broadcast narrative about how teams win–that tends to focus on star who score a lot like Donovan Mitchell. But the Pacers have a system of playing starters short minutes, while role players like Obi Toppin, Bennedict Mathurin, T.J. McConnell, Ben Sheppard, and Thomas Bryant fly all over the court, badgering the other team’s stars into fatigue.
Then the starters come back, fresh and ferocious, and seal the deal. It changes the math of basketball in ways that are somewhat new to the NBA. It’s a bet that a player like Donovan Mitchell is battling not just his defender, but the limits of his own body. It’s a bet that the league’s best players are close to cracking, if only you can tip them into exhaustion.

Boston forces a Game 6, Minnesota bounces Golden State to return to the Western Conference Finals, and more
Dustin Brewer, Hoops Daily

Will this season’s NBA champion be the healthiest (and last) team standing?
Zach Harper, The Athletic

Unfortunately, health becomes a major talking point of any NBA postseason. We’re not even through the second round of these playoffs, and we’ve lost Damian Lillard and Jayson Tatum to Achilles tears, seen the Cavaliers miss key starters for games before their elimination and lamented Steph Curry’s hamstring making us watch too many Brandin Podziemski jump shots. That’s the playoffs, though. Sometimes, it’s just about which team can maintain the most health to get to the finish line.

BI: Sometimes? Been that way, almost always, for as long as we can remember

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Is Jayson Tatum’s Achilles injury the cost of the modern game and increasing physicality?
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