NBA: play‑in starts Tuesday
The NBA Play‑In Tournament — which hands out the final two playoff spots in each conference to teams finishing 7th–10th — begins Tuesday, turning the regular season’s final days into high‑stakes seeding battles (Yahoo Sports/NorthJersey). (The actual first round of the full playoffs is scheduled to begin Saturday, April 18, with the NBA Finals set to start June 3 and possibly finish between June 10–17 depending on how the conference finals go.) ( ).
The National Basketball Association turned the last week of the regular season into a traffic jam on purpose: teams that finish seventh through tenth do not get a playoff berth, they get a second exam four days later in the play-in tournament that runs April 14 through April 17. The actual playoffs do not start until Saturday, April 18, so the standings on Friday, April 10, still decide who gets dragged into that extra round. (nba.com, nba.com) The format is simple once you picture two ladders. The seventh-place team plays the eighth-place team for the No. 7 seed, the ninth-place team plays the tenth-place team in an elimination game, and then the loser of 7-versus-8 plays the winner of 9-versus-10 for the No. 8 seed. (nba.com, sports.yahoo.com) That setup gives seventh place a real cushion. A team that finishes seventh can lose once and still make the playoffs, while a team that finishes tenth has to win twice in a row just to grab the last seat. (nba.com, desmoinesregister.com) The league adopted this system after the 2019–20 season restart and kept it because it makes April matter for more teams. Instead of six or eight clubs quietly coasting to the finish line, four teams in each conference now spend the final days fighting over whether they get a safety net, a sudden-death game, or no postseason at all. (nba.com, sports.yahoo.com) As of Friday, the official National Basketball Association playoff page showed a crowded middle in both conferences. In the East, the Orlando Magic were seventh, the Philadelphia 76ers eighth, the Charlotte Hornets ninth, and the Miami Heat tenth; in the West, the Phoenix Suns were seventh, the Los Angeles Clippers eighth, the Portland Trail Blazers ninth, and the Golden State Warriors tenth. (nba.com, nba.com) Those spots were not locked when the day began. The league schedule still had 15 games on Friday, April 10, and another full slate on Sunday, April 12, which is the last day of the regular season, so a team could still climb from ninth to eighth or slide from sixth into the play-in with one bad weekend. (nba.com, nba.com) That is why the line between sixth and seventh is the sharpest line on the board. Sixth place goes straight into a seven-game first-round series, while seventh place has to survive a mini-tournament first and can be knocked out before the bracket even starts. (nba.com, northjersey.com) The schedule after that is already set. The first round opens April 18, and the National Basketball Association lists Game 1 of the Finals for June 3, with later Finals games scheduled for June 8, June 10, June 13, June 16 if necessary, and June 19 if necessary. (nba.com, nba.com) So the next three days are really two races at once. Teams at the top are chasing home court, and teams in the middle are chasing something even more basic: avoiding a one-week detour where one cold shooting night can erase an 82-game season before the playoffs officially begin. (nba.com, sports.yahoo.com)
