Adam Silver and the NBA front office have to be happy with what they’ve seen from the league this year, as the NBA currently has as much parity as it’s had in decades while still featuring household names like LeBron James and Stephen Curry. Ironically enough, both Curry and James find themselves in the lower half of the Western Conference playoff picture at this current juncture as the NBA prepares for the upcoming postseason, which is set to begin with the Play-In tournament starting on Tuesday evening.
One thing that fans looking at the upcoming schedule might notice is the fact that there are no NBA games set to take place on Saturday, April 13. The reason for this is that all 30 teams are scheduled to take part in action on both Friday the 12th and Sunday the 14th, which is the last day of the regular season. The logic is that it wouldn’t be fair for any team to play their last game of the season, when so much is potentially at stake, on the second night of a back-to-back.
Oddly enough, this will mark the second time in the span of a week that a day will go by with no NBA teams in action. On Monday, April 8, the league took the night off to clear the way for the NCAA Tournament National Championship game, which saw the UConn Huskies defeat the Purdue Boilermakers in blowout fashion to win their second straight college basketball crown.
The league will also be out of the office on Monday, April 15, to give teams participating in the Play-In tournament a night to gather themselves before embarking on their respective postseason journeys.
Stories to watch as the season winds down
In the Eastern Conference, the Boston Celtics have long since clinched the number one seed in the conference–and the NBA as a whole, for that matter–but have stumbled a bit as of late, leading some fans to wonder whether or not they can flip the switch back on once the playoffs arrive.
Beneath them, teams like the Milwaukee Bucks, New York Knicks, Orlando Magic, and others are working to put themselves in the best position possible ahead of the postseason.
Meanwhile out in the Western Conference, the Denver Nuggets are likely to be the conference’s number one seed for the second straight year, while the Minnesota Timberwolves and Oklahoma City Thunder will probably fill out the top three. Many of the more marquee teams and names–namely the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers–are currently locked into a Play-In tournament situation, meaning that we could see a postseason this year that features neither LeBron James nor Stephen Curry for the first time in a long while.
As previously noted, the league has not seen this level of parity in quite a long time, as every team has ample talent and a player who would be considered a star by previous generational standards. All of this sets the stage for what figures to be an exciting NBA postseason.
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