Most Eyes On West As NBA Enters Final Regular-Season Week

The NBA regular season ends later this week, and it just feels wrong to call it regular, eh?

But 2020 is the most irregular year we have seen in our lifetimes, and by now all basketball fans have normalized seeing fans projected on a screen inside the NBA bubble in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

The NBA has been back for nearly two weeks now, and wee have learned quite a few things … most notably over the weekend that Luka Doncic can engineer one hell of a bounce pass.

The Slovenian sensation will be back on the court this afternoon as the Dallas Mavericks go up against the Utah Jazz, and over the next five days there will be a lot more attention paid to the NBA’s Western Conference than the East.

That’s because the Milwaukee Bucks are already locked into the No. 1 seed and know they will play the Orlando Magic in the first round, and the Toronto Raptors already know that they will begin the defense of their title against the Brooklyn Nets.

Fans of the Philadelphia 76ers will be most consumed by injury news after Ben Simmons dislocated his kneecap and Joel Embiid injured his ankle, and what’s left to be determined in the East is what’ll be the order of the teams ranked fourth through sixth. By the end of the night Friday, we’ll know whether it will be the Miami Heat, Indiana Pacers or the 76ers playing the Boston Celtics in the first round of the postseason.

The West is far more intriguing, because we already know that there will be a play-in game next Saturday between the teams that finish eighth and ninth. As Monday begins, the eighth place team is Memphis with a half-game lead over the Portland Trail Blazers, and the hottest bubble team — the Phoenix Suns — will go for six in a row later today against the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Moreover, the Los Angeles Clippers lost to the Brooklyn Nets on Sunday night to see their lead over the Denver Nuggets for second place cut to one game. Only one and a half games separate the fourth- fifth- and sixth-place teams (Houston, Oklahoma City and Utah).

Further down the standings, only 1 1/2 games separate the eighth-place Grizzlies and the 11th place Suns, and because teams will finish the season playing uneven amounts of games, the possibilities for playoff qualification require an advanced degree in calculus to figure out.

The start times for Thursday’s seven-game slate and Friday’s four-game slate have not been determined, but count on the games that have playoff implications beginning at the same time in an attempt to ensure no funny business (tanking) goes down.

The only day out of the next seven that has the possibility of being a dark day (no games) day is Sunday, but if the No. 9 seed in the West wins the first game of the play-in mini-tournament on Saturday (tipoff is 2:30 p.m.), the No. 8 seed will be determined on Sunday aat 4:30 p.m. EDT for sure.

All-in-all, it shapes up as a momentous week for the one league that has pulled off the nearly impossible in getting back to business, making a strong social statement and re-engaging a fan base that has been locked down for nearly five months during a pandemic and is suffering from an extreme case of collective cabin fever.

A week from now, we’ll have playoff matchups to break down. And it’ll be mid-August. Yes, 2020 is a strange year.