The Remainder

Hollinger wrote a great column sussing out how the Western Conference seeding chips may fall. I highly recommend you read it.

He claims that there are two three-team tiers remaining after the Lakers and the Nuggets (who more or less have the #2 seed locked up). Tier #1 consists of the Spurs, Rockets, and Blazers. Those teams will end up 3, 4, 5 in some order. The team that secures the #3 seed will be at a great advantage for a couple of reasons. First, they’ll get to play the 6 seed in the first round with home court advantage. That will be either the Hornets, Jazz, or Mavericks. All formidable teams, certainly. But also very inconsistent teams all year. Second, assuming seeds hold, they’ll get to face the Nuggets in the second round and, more importantly, avoid the Lakers. The 4/5 seeds, however, will have to play each other in the first round, which would most likely be a more difficult match-up than either of the lower 3 seeds. And then they would have to face the Lakers in the second round.

Basically, we want that 3 seed.

But how do we get it? Obviously, we have to win as many of our remaining games as possible. (I know you come here for razor sharp analysis like that.) We don’t hold the tiebreaker against Portland as they won the season series 3-1 (except in one scenario, which i’ll get to in a moment). The tiebreaker between us and the Rockets gets very complicated, but according to Hollinger’s article, it looks as if the Rockets would have it. So if all three teams end up with the same record (a very distinct possibility), then the Rockets would end up 3 by virtue of having the tie-break over both us and the Blazers. The Blazers would be 4 due to the tiebreak over us, and we’d be 5. Which means we’d have to open the playoffs on the road in Portland, one of the best home court advantages in the NBA.

However, if we can win the Southwest Division, we’d get the 3 seed, even if we tie with the Blazers, because winning the division overrides other tiebreakers. That is the best case scenario.

Unfortunately, Houston won last night and is a half game up on us. They play at Golden State tonight. Golden State is the most chaotic team in the league, and a 30 point win or a 30 point loss wouldn’t surprise me. Let’s hope for a Golden State win. After that, the Rockets play New Orleans at home then Dallas on the road. Both very losable games for them. If they win only one of those games, they would end up with 52 wins. If we can win at least 3 or our remaining 4 games, that would give us the division with 53 wins. I think that is a real possibility, even with one more back-to-back remaining on our schedule.

The Blazers close the season with the Lakers at home (tonight), then on the road against the Clippers tomorrow night, followed by OKC and Denver, both at home. There’s a distinct possibility that they could sweep those 4 games. The last time they Lakers came to the Rose Garden, Portland annihilated them. Denver could be another loss in there, but they’ll probably have the 2 seed locked up by then and might not have anything to play for. We can hope there’s at least one loss in there and that we can tie with 53 wins, thus giving us the 3 seed by virtue of winning our division.

I love numbers.