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The late great Kobe Bryant once posed the question: Are you different animal and the same beast?

I believe that perfectly describes the dichotomy between regular-season basketball and postseason basketball. For six months all 30 NBA teams travel around the country to play one another.

There’s back-to-backs, three games in four nights, seven games in 10 nights, limited practices and time to prepare. It’s a marathon designed as an appetizer for the final sprint — postseason basketball.

The NBA playoffs feature the best of the best; competition is tougher, refs swallow their whistles as the game becomes more physical, rotations shorten and the pace becomes slower with players recognizing that every possession matters more.

Gone are the dog days of the regular season where travel spots, injury news and motivation drastically impact performance. The playoffs are about matchups and adjustments.

Who can find an edge? Who can perform under the bright lights and who can’t? If a team or player has a weakness in the playoffs, opposing teams will attack it until they adjust.

Handicapping playoff basketball means we’re handicapping a fundamentally different sport. In light of that, let’s take a look at some of the different approaches to betting the NBA playoffs.

How many times have you liked a team to win a playoff series but found that the price was too high for your liking? One of my favorite strategies is to wait until a team loses Game 1 or wait until mid-series to bet so I can get a better price.

Of course, you have to tread lightly here as a price can get away from you if you elect to wait on betting a team and it actually wins Game 1. Interestingly enough, out of the 818 total playoff series, teams who won Game 1 have won the series 78.6 percent of the time and are 643-175 all time.

In the first round of the playoffs, teams that win Game 1 are 263-65, winning 80.2 percent of the time. Overall, winning Game 1 is a solid predictive indicator for whether a team will win the series as teams that win Game 1 have taken a 2-0 lead more than 63 percent of the time the last 20 seasons.

Given the history, if you’re looking to back a team who is down in the series, it should be because the team played under expectation despite being the better team or there’s some adjustment that could shift the series.

Recognizing shifts and adjustments in series is one of the biggest keys to successfully betting the playoffs. Take the 2015 Western Conference Finals between the Golden State Warriors and Memphis Grizzlies.

The Grizzlies were up 2-1 when Steve Kerr and defensive assistant Ron Adams elected to not guard Tony Allen unless he came into the lane. With Warriors center Andrew Bogut clogging the paint, providing double-team help on the Grizzlies big men in Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph, Allen was essentially played off the floor given his inability to space the floor as a jump shooter.

From that moment on, the Warriors took control over the series with the Grizzlies all but drawing dead. Moves like this can make or break a series and if you can recognize them, you can profit.

The biggest difference between the NBA regular season and the postseason is the difference in pace with games containing fewer possessions as the game slows down. In the last five seasons, teams are averaging 2.46 fewer possessions per game in the playoffs.

Although Unders were just 43-46-2 (48.3 percent) in last year’s postseason, playoff Unders were profitable in five out of the last seven seasons. If you exclude 2016-17, the year Unders went 30-48-1 (38.4 percent) for a -24.7 percent ROI, Unders went 269-228-9, hitting at 54.1 percent which gives you a small edge considering that you need to hit 52.38 percent of your wagers to break even on -110 bets.

The Zig-Zag theory is archaic but it’s been one of the more popular angles to bet in the NBA’s best-of-seven playoff series format.

You’re betting the opposite of what happened in the last game with the assumption that teams are likely to bounce back from a poor performance given the prospect of facing elimination.

The biggest question is if it’s profitable?

According to data from Killer Sports since the 2000 season, it’s pretty clear this isn’t a profitable angle if you’re betting this blindly. However, there are some spots where you can profit if you’re willing to dig deeper into the numbers. One of the best angles is backing top-three seeds that have been upset in Game 1. Since 2005, top-three seeds at home that lost the opening game of a best-of-seven playoff series are 28-16 ATS in the following game.