Imagine for a second that you’re an NBA head coach. Your team is facing off against Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors. As you sit in a pre-practice coaches meeting, your assistants suggest to you all the different ways your team can guard Curry in pick-and-rolls. Everything from trapping him to going under on the game’s best shooter are kicked around, each having their pro's and con’s because let’s face it, with Curry there is no clear-cut solution.

You eventually settle on one of the options, head down the practice court and put in the necessary legwork to get your team ready to execute your scheme. The next night, the game starts and you watch helplessly as Curry drops 40, making or creating shots out of pick-and-rolls like there is no defense at all. You trudge back to the locker room, huddle your assistants together and ask the fundamental question behind every adjustment in basketball: do we need to do things better or different?

The tactical chess match that goes on between NBA coaches is one of the most fascinating elements of playoff basketball. As coaches traverse round after round, sometimes the most subtle strategic tweaks -- or absence of them -- can make or break a series. At the root of all of them is that innocent sounding query that causes coaches to lose both their sleep and their sanity. After all, when you’re facing the best teams and players in the world, how do you tell for certain if your team is doing the wrong thing or just not doing the right thing good enough?

So far in these playoffs we’ve seen both good and bad come from adjustments and non-adjustments alike. During the epic first round series between the Clippers and Spurs, San Antonio struggled mightily trying to contain the Clippers double high ballscreen. Gregg Popovich, who has been known to make wonky adjustments before, defended it virtually the same way the entire series -- dropping his bigs back and living with Chris Paul firing mid-range jumpers or generating switches after some crafting maneuvering. By the end of that series, one thing was clear: the Spurs' best chance of stopping that play was the Clippers simply not running it.

Yet in that same series, Pop’s commitment to his current personnel simply playing better paid off in a big way in Game 7. Throughout most of the series, starting guard Danny Green struggled mightily to do much of anything well. In the piece linked above, I even advocated for more time given to Cory Joseph due to Green’s struggle. Yet Pop refused to make changes to his rotations and Green responded with a monster final game in which he scored 16 points on 50 percent from the field while tallying eight rebounds and five blocks. Had Pop already severely limited Green’s role in previous games, perhaps that performance, along with the Spurs chance to win a close contest late, never happens.

The truly difficult part for coaches comes when “better or different” turns into “screwed either way”, which is what Rick Carlisle experienced against Houston. In no way shape or form was Carlisle going to find a solution to Houston focusing their James Harden-led pick-and-roll attack against Dirk Nowitzki. While Carlisle primarily kept Nowitzki’s role the same, he changed up everything from the rotations behind the play to who defended Harden in order to find type of defensive competency. Carlisle tried a combination of both better and different to no avail.

Where it this decision gets even tougher for a coach is when things like Game 1 of the Rockets-Clippers series happen. In that game, Houston came out noticeably flat, with a few of their key contributors noticeable lacking in effort and focus (how that happens in the second round of the playoffs is another topic entirely). For a coach like Kevin McHale, figuring out adjustments after a game with shoddy effort and execution is a nightmare. How can you tell what needs to be done differently when most schemes weren’t executed well?

And speaking of things not being executed well, the Cavs have stubbornly stuck with running pick-and-rolls where LeBron James acts as a screener for Kyrie Irving. With a few notable exceptions, this concept has largely failed to consistently generate good shots for the Cleveland offense. Up 3-2 in a hotly contested series, head coach David Blatt (Or maybe Ty Lue? Even James?) must figure out if they need to scrap this from the Cavs' playbook or hope that better results will come as his players continue to figure out Chicago’s defense.

What really haunts a coach isn’t these decisions, but the ‘what if’s’ that end to follow them into the offseason. With the case of Pop and the Clippers pick-and-roll, maybe there were better options that could have slowed Paul down just enough for them to get by in that series. Or maybe, by avoiding a change he stopped worse results from happening. This is the gray area that coaches operate in and why their jobs are really hard.

So next time you see a player like Curry destroying a defense -- or even sidetracked by one -- just remember that coaches on both sides will trying to sort out that complicated mess by asking themselves one simple question.