For all the carping about the NBA's multitude of failings—ask Shaquille O'Neal if you need the full bill of complaints—the end of this regular season has become a thoroughly organic motherlode of chaos, in ways that can only be good. Not necessarily for the sport in some macro sense, mind you; these things tend to even out after the second round, anyway. But the chaos in the Western Conference is inarguably good for the fan who wants games that matter at a point in the season when games almost always don’t.
And no, we are not talking about the lineups that the tanking teams are trotting out nightly to guarantee the success of that night's tactical failure ritual. The nightmarish tapestry of the worst eight teams is a thing to behold, and lopsided defeats have been weaponized as never before. Utah has lost 19 of its last 20 games, by an average of 17 points per game; this includes losses in the last two weeks alone of 38, 37, 36, 29, 28, and 26 points. Philadelphia is 3-27 over their last 30, Brooklyn is surfing a 4-18 skid, Charlotte a 6-20 one. Washington is 4-12 in its last 16 games and might be the most dignified of the turbotankers, and when the Wizards aren't the worst team in any department, you've got yourself a whopper of an anomaly.
But those teams are all pretty much locked into their draft positions, and they are all so good at avoiding the team ahead of them that there won't be any late burst to get from, say, four to three. Utah will pick first; playing .050 basketball is its own reward.
But if you're not interested in the NBA's version of tariffs, the real fun—and the stuff worth more than a rubbernecker’s token attention—is north of the playoff line. Phoenix is going to miss the postseason on merit, and Sacramento will either host Dallas or Dallas will host Sacramento for the right to get their brains beaten in by Oklahoma City. That concludes the boring part of all this.
Places three through eight is a basketball nerd's Carnaval, even more so now that winning teams can fire their coaches at will for the silliest and most opaque of reasons. The idea that the Lakers, Nuggets, Warriors, Clippers, Grizzlies, and Timberwolves are all separated in the standings by just two games is a delicious one; the latter four have exactly the same record (46-32) with the final sprint commencing tonight. This makes bracket manipulation, one of Don Nelson's least heralded specialties, almost entirely impossible. Better yet, at least eight remaining games involve two teams in the Knotted Six playing against each other, making each of those games potentially cataclysmic. That is, provided you think the play-in tournament is an infinitely worse predicament than simply being a playoff team. The 2023 Heat and Lakers would want a word on that.
That's not the point, though. This marks the beginning of just about a week of high-tension uncertainty in multiple places, which in a basketball context is never a bad thing; you already know how it feels when applied more broadly elsewhere. In fact, the slapstick had already begun even before the Nuggets fired general manager Calvin Booth and head coach Michael Malone. It seems that each hated the other, among other issues, but normally one gets to stay just on the basis of the law of big numbers. Plus, IT'S THE LAST WEEK OF THE SEASON AND THE NUGGETS HAVE NIKOLA JOKIC, YOU LUNATICS. This move makes the Grizzlies, to name another team winning three out of every five games that just fired its coach within the last two weeks, seem stable.
True, other than the Nuggets going full cannibal, this is not ultimately orbit-changing stuff; once the playoffs begin, we will largely forget the specifics of the various matchups. But for basketball deep-divers who could use some relief from watching the bottom quartile of the league trying to lose more games than they play by more points than can be scored, and who could use a break from the angst over a post-LeBron-Curry future that hasn't even begun yet, this is a week to get lost in the radical notion that the regular season might have real and immediate impact, and in five different cities.
A team in seeming freefall—yes, perhaps even Denver and Memphis—can get well at the most advantageous time. A team that's been on a month-long heater—Golden State and the L.A. Clippers spring to mind, here—can always hit the wall at the least opportune moment. It is essentially a week to immerse yourself in a league that has been on its heels for much of the season. Consider it a reward at the end of what felt like an endless litany of Sixers-Wizards and Trail Blazers-Jazz, and a break from the grating truth that tanking is still being rewarded at far too great a rate and stupidity is not punished severely enough.
And so a season that has felt way too Phoenix in freefall/Dallas in meltdown/Philadelphia industrially shame-soaked has created for itself a potentially delightful April through sheer dumb luck. It is a reminder that, for all the effort put into engineering solutions to problems both real and manufactured, there are few things better than unplanned and entirely accidental fun. Here's hoping all six teams end up 49-33, and that Warriors-Clippers goes three overtimes on Sunday afternoon. Hell, maybe J.J. Redick and Steve Kerr will get fired on Saturday's off-day, just for snicks and giggles. It may not ultimately matter to whatever the bigger picture is supposed to be, but at least the Hornets won't be involved, just to name a terrible team that is keeping its coach.
