10 Ways the NBA Playoffs Are Like <i>Mad Men</i>

With the seventh and final season of AMC's Mad Men now underway, fans of the show will finally begin to receive the closure that they've all been waiting for since the series began in 2007. A mess of questions and loose ends await Don Draper and his team at Sterling Cooper & Partners, as well as the entire cast of characters involved in Draper's personal life and troubled past. The public will be glued to their TVs every Sunday in anticipation of a fitting end to Draper's saga, and it doesn't seem likely that Matthew Weiner and his crew will disappoint. After all, why start now?

However, Mad Men isn't the only thing that is beginning to wrap up in the world of entertainment, as we're also approaching the conclusion of the 2013-14 NBA season. With just a couple days left in the regular season, questions abound for the playoffs, mainly centered on what team will come out on top at the end of it all. Will the Miami Heat be able to pull off the three-peat, or will Kevin Durant and his Oklahoma City Thunder finally be able to get the ring they've been fighting for? Can the San Antonio Spurs maintain their dominance despite their age? What upsets, if any, await the top-tier teams?

But more than anything, what has come to define the NBA this year is the turbulence of the league. LeBron James suddenly no longer looks invincible next to Durant's torrid scoring pace. The Heat will finish the regular season with their worst winning percentage since the Big Three was first formed. Nine different teams in the Western Conference have a serious claim to a playoff spot, while three playoff teams in the East struggle to break .500. Needless to say, it's going to be interesting to see how all of this shakes out in the postseason.

Of course, Mad Men is no stranger to this sort of uncertainty either, but what other similarities can be drawn between AMC's critical darling and the NBA? They're more alike than you might think. Touching on fashion, advertising, fighting, and more, here are the 10 Ways the NBA Playoffs Are Like Mad Men.

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Biggest Examples: GQ's Lookbook from the first season

It's never said explicitly if there’s a dress code at Sterling Cooper/SDCP/SC&P. If there is, it definitely extends out of work because the characters are rarely slacking when it comes to threads. This goes for the veterans or the younger, more casual facial hair-sporting characters like Stan Rizzo and Michael Ginsberg. Former commissioner David Stern enacted the dress code to force players to dress a part. Fashionistas like Dwyane Wade and Russell Westbrook oblige, and they aren't doing so begrudgingly either.

Biggest Examples: The opening sequence; Jai-Alai ("Public Relations")

The NBA Playoffs are where human drama and stunning feats of human athleticism meet for a yearly spectacle. It's also where sponsors hustle to get your attention. Maybe not as much as the Super Bowl, but it's still pretty serious. The connection between that and Mad Men is pretty obvious if you even read a basic synopsis of the show.

But think about how the NBA and Mad Men made certain companies relevant. Did you care that much about Jai-alai and Kodak without Don Draper? Did you even know what Jai-alai was? How many times would Sprite cross your mind if it wasn't sponsoring the Slam Dunk Contest? Also, name one movie/television show Jesse Williams was in (don't answer that if you watched Grey's Anatomy or looked him up after last year's playoffs.)

Biggest Examples: Various examples of Don Draper & Co. stunting

Could you imagine the amount of media scrutiny, vitriol, and slander LeBron James will receive if the Heat get kicked out of the playoffs by the Hawks, especially if he averages under 20 points? Also, could you imagine the percentage of those critics and Internet thugs who make even a good fraction of what that loser James makes? There's a reason the opening sequence never actually shows where that silhouette lands. He's actually landing on a pile of money. It would totally deflate the drama if the viewers knew that.

Biggest Examples: SC&P expands ("In Care Of")

The east coast generally looks less intersting in nearly every medium. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib's Pinata is being looked at as a Madvillainy sequel and YG's My Krazy Life is considered classic. That's by YG himself, however, but he's not wildly far off. The Western Conference is unquestionably the greater conference with powerhouses like the Clippers, Thunder, and Spurs smacking teams left and right. Five out of the East's eight leaders wouldn't make the playoffs by the West's standards. Even the definitively New York "Mad Men" is going to be putting some focus on the west with some of the characters boarding that lifeboat to hit the reset button. Maybe things will get better for New York if True Detective's second season is set there.

Biggest Examples: Pete Campbell tries to snitch on Don Draper ("Nixon vs. Kennedy"); The Hershey incident ("In Care Of")

Last season's penultimate moment came during Draper's failed Hershey pitch. The wall between Draper and Dick Whitman ("Whitman" just fucks everything up on AMC, huh?) crumbled, and the ad exec's true self painfully showed itself to the concerned/creeped out folks in that room. Normally there wouldn't be that much wrong with this. Self-realization is good. The problem here is that Dick Whitman can't sell pitches and he's just screwed up the Hershey pitch, possibly costing Draper his job in the process. The playoffs are kind of like that scene in that the frauds make themselves painfully apparent to the realer teams and a fan base waiting to eviscerate the failures.

The playoffs aren't a time for struggle. Hershey's pitches aren't the time to give eloquently delivered admissions and shit.

Biggest Examples: With Don Draper on a mandatory leave of absence, we see Peggy Olson step into his office as the new creative head of Sterling Cooper & Partners. ("In Care Of," Episode 13, Season 6)

In the Western Conference, we've seen a number of younger teams emerge in the past few seasons to usurp the stranglehold that the Spurs, Lakers and Mavs have held on the conference for past decade and a half. While San Antonio has managed to stay consistently strong, Los Angeles and Dallas have fallen far in the standings due to aging talents like Dirk Nowitzki and Kobe Bryant.

Similarly, in Mad Men we've seen the influence of Roger Sterling and Don Draper wane in recent seasons, with last season culminating in Draper's dismissal from the firm. Will we see a similar outcome in the Western Conference this year? Will the Thunder or the Clippers manage to overtake San Antonio for good, or will the Spurs piece together another playoff run to stay on top?

Biggest Examples: Feeling threatened by Bob Benson's rising profile in the office, Pete Campbell is able to dig up some dirt on Benson in order to keep him under his thumb. ("The Quality of Mercy," Episode 12, Season 6)

In a seven game playoff series, it's not about what happened during the regular season, or what your seed is, or who is on your team: it's about showing up in the moment for 4 solid games. Like Mad Men, the "what have you done for me lately" mentality rules the day. We see it with characters like Pete Campbell or Don Draper, stars of the series who are constantly looking over their shoulder in order to maintain their position. It doesn't matter that they're both leaders of the firm, much like it doesn't matter if your team had the MVP winner or won 60-plus games during the regular season.

Just ask the 2006-07 Dallas Mavericks. Led by league MVP Dirk Nowitzki, the Mavs finished the regular seasons with 67 wins and appeared poised to take the NBA title after falling just short in the Finals the previous year. However, the team fell in the first round after Baron Davis and the upstart Warriors completely ambushed them. Remember: no one can ever be too comfortable.

Biggest Examples: Lane Pryce and Pete Campbell duke it out in the office after Pete questions Lane's manhood. ("Signal 30," Episode 5, Season 5)

The fight that took place between Lane Pryce and Pete Campbell in Season 5 was only spectacular because of Pete Campbell getting a much-deserved ass-kicking, but the actual scrap itself was pretty subpar. Both men had the fighting stances of the Notre Dame leprechuan (which is definitely not a compliment), and barely knew what to do with their fists when it came time to throw a punch. However, when you're comparing Pryce vs. Campbell to your average fight in the NBA, it's hard to figure out which is worse.

In the NBA, a "fight" usually ends with a couple dudes yelling at each other while their teammates hold them back, or is used as a cheap way to get a tech called on the other team. In the latter case, it's not really a fight so much as it is a test of willpower. As soon as a punch is thrown, the guy getting hit is immediately going to flop to the ground, so the only question is whether you're going to be the first one to snap. Boring. We'd rather watch the NHL.

Biggest Examples: Don Draper is ordered to take a mandatory leave of absence from Sterling Cooper & Partners after personal issues begin to bleed into his professional life. ("In Care Of, Episode 13, Season 6)

At the end of last season, we saw Don Draper hit rock bottom, having been shooed out of Sterling Cooper & Partners for an involuntary leave of absence. After his pitch to Hershey's ended in disaster, it became clear to the rest of the partners that Don's private life was spilling into his day job. The moment was indicative of the struggle that takes place in Mad Men between the personal and the professional, and concluded by leaving Don directionless.

In the playoffs, the Miami Heat are at a similar crossroads, as we'll soon discover whether LeBron James and his teammates can overcome the difficulties of the regular season and pull it together in the postseason to come out on top for the third season in a row. Miami will finish this season with at least 10 less wins than the previous season. Can they prove to everyone that they still have a championship gear come playoff time? And if they can't, how will it affect LeBron's impending free agency?

Biggest Examples: In the face of losing Chevy to a larger ad agency, CGC merges with SCDP to form Sterling Cooper & Partners. ("For Immediate Release," Episode 6, Season 6)

When Jim Cutler and Ted Chaough teamed up with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce last season, it showed everyone the power of joining forces, as the firms combined outperformed their previously unjoined entities. Of course, this is nothing new for the NBA as we've seen talent mergers become increasingly common in recent seasons. Dwight Howard and James Harden have come together to take the Houston Rockets to new heights, while the Miami Heat have ruled the roost for the past two seasons with their trio of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

Oh, and don't forget the Brooklyn Nets or the Los Angeles Clippers, who both acquired the missing pieces for their superstar nuclei with the help of some creative trading. With each of these powers, it's not a matter of whether they'll win, it's just a question of who exactly will come out on top.