When he has played, Steph Curry has been his usual magnificent self. Entering Sunday's Game 3 in the conference finals, he was averaging 25.5 points on 42.9 percent shooting from behind the 3-point arc. These numbers - staggering though they are for a primary ball-handler and off-the-dribble shot creator - are astonishingly below his regular season averages.
Steph will be Steph, but the product on display in the 2016 NBA Playoffs has suffered despite his best efforts.
The first round of this year's postseason tournament fell flat. Only two series went to seven games, and the lower seed advanced in only one first-round series; neither Cleveland nor Golden State, the teams from last year's Finals, has been even casually threatened thus far.
The Grizzlies, who played no fewer than 28 different players due to constant injury, were eliminated in four games - by an average margin of 22 points. This is not the stuff of legend.
Fans hoping the second round would bring relief were disappointed. The Steph-deprived Warriors had no trouble dispatching Portland, even without their increasingly iconic point guard; the typically stalwart San Antonio Spurs fell to Oklahoma City not in a classic series, but in an uncharacteristic meltdown.
The list goes on. In fact, only Miami and Toronto played a series that could rightly be called even "interesting" in the first two rounds.
So what is it that the playoffs have been missing? As it happens, a few things have combined to drag the 2016 postseason into the slow bleed of tedium to which it has succumbed.
For some, good health has been rare. Curry has missed half the postseason; the usually competitive Grizzlies played basically the entire second half of the season and into the playoffs without their two best players. Miami may never have Chris Bosh back again.
More generally, however, the quality of competition has been woeful. This has been the key to the worst playoffs in years; magnificent as the Warriors were last season, the light show was aided by the best Western Conference ever. The season prior was similarly deep, setting a round one record for seven-game series.
This season has lacked all of that. Unlike the last few seasons, the West has been top-heavy; the Warriors and Spurs spent the regular season chasing and achieving historic greatness, only for San Antonio to fizzle disappointingly.
The Eastern Conference has usually benefited from the opposite phenomenon, in which the best teams in the conference soar high above the rest before inexplicably stalling out in the playoffs; this year's top-seeded Cavs have shown no signs of folding in the fashion of, for example, 2013-14 Indiana.
Short of abandoning conferences altogether and seeding the best teams in a round-robin tournament, these issues seem systemic. In any given playoff, a series or two will be one for the ages, but most series are simply flat - not competitive, not interesting, just a better team going through the motions of dispatching a worse team.
Appreciate the interludes when they come, and appreciate Steph while you have him, but NBA basketball has fundamental problems. Not even Steph Curry can fix that.
