Playoff picture tightening

Boston went into New York on Thursday with a chance to lock up the Eastern Conference’s No. 2 seed, lost, and left the race alive for at least one more night. The Celtics are still in control, but one more Boston win or one more New York loss ends that chase. (masslive.com) (bostonglobe.com) That is what the final weekend looks like across the league now: not teams fighting to get in from scratch, but teams fighting over where they land. The National Basketball Association says the regular season ends on April 12, the Play-In Tournament runs April 14 through April 17, and the playoffs start April 18. (nba.com 1) (nba.com 2) The Play-In Tournament is the league’s pressure cooker for teams that finish seventh through tenth in each conference. The seventh-place team plays the eighth-place team for the No. 7 seed, while the ninth-place team plays the tenth-place team in an elimination game, and the last playoff spot goes to the winner of one final game. (sports.yahoo.com) (usatoday.com) So the line between sixth and seventh is the one everyone is staring at. ESPN’s playoff watch said the more urgent Eastern Conference race was for sixth place, because the team that gets it skips the Play-In Tournament entirely while the team behind it has to survive extra games just to reach the bracket. (espn.com) The Eastern Conference is mostly set at the top, but not in order. National Basketball Association playoff pages showed Detroit in first, Boston in second, New York in third, and Cleveland in fourth as of April 10, with Boston at 54-26 and New York at 52-28, which is why the Celtics are close but not finished. (nba.com 1) (nba.com 2) The middle of the East is where the bracket can still swing hardest. The same National Basketball Association postseason page showed Toronto and Atlanta at 45-35, with Orlando at 44-36 and Philadelphia at 43-37, which means one win or loss can still move teams between a guaranteed series and the Play-In Tournament. (nba.com) The Western Conference has the same kind of traffic jam, just with different stakes near the top. The Oklahoma City Thunder were listed first at 64-16 and the San Antonio Spurs second at 61-19, but seeds three through six were packed with Denver at 52-28, the Los Angeles Lakers at 51-29, Houston at 51-29, and Minnesota at 47-33. (nba.com) Below that line, the West already had its Play-In Tournament zone taking shape. National Basketball Association standings listed Phoenix seventh, the Los Angeles Clippers eighth, Portland ninth, and Golden State tenth, so those clubs are now playing for home court inside the Play-In bracket as much as for survival. (nba.com) (sportingnews.com) That is why late-season games that look ordinary on the schedule are not ordinary at all. A team that finishes sixth gets several days to prepare for a best-of-seven series, while a team that finishes seventh has to burn energy in a win-or-else week that starts on Tuesday, April 14. (nba.com) (sports.yahoo.com) And the clock is short now. The first round opens April 18, Game 1 of the National Basketball Association Finals is scheduled for June 3, and the only thing left before then is two days of regular-season scoreboard watching to see who gets a clean runway and who gets shoved into the trap door. (nba.com) (sportingnews.com)