With the three-day long party that was the NBA All-Star weekend out of the way, teams are gearing up for the postseason stretch run.
There are 28 games remaining and a hand full of teams fighting for playoff spots.
In the Eastern Conference, Charlotte, Miami, Chicago and Milwaukee are all separated by two games for three remaining seeds. And with teams like the 76ers on the rise recently, this as usual not so interesting race might get exciting in the final two months of the season.
The Western Conference, on the other hand, is having its as usual more interesting race for the remaining playoff spot.
Portland currently holds the eighth seed, but Houston, New Orleans and Memphis are all within only three and a half games. On top of that, seeds two through eight are separated by only five games. The seeds two and eight in the Eastern Conference are double that gap.
While watching teams battle for remaining playoff spots is always exciting to see in sports, those who win the bottom seeds are usually irrelevant come playoff time in the NBA. There’s not as much of a gap between the “good” teams and “elite” teams this year, but you’d probably have a better chance of catching Tiger Woods with his wife than catching an NBA Finals match up of Oklahoma City and Toronto. The best teams are still the ones favored to go furthest in the playoffs. It’s Sports 101, and the NBA likes to keep it that way.
I’ll admit I don’t watch much pro basketball, but I’d still be a sucker to see a Kobe-LeBron showdown in the Finals.
The team to watch out for might be the team that this city watches, the Denver Nuggets. The Nuggets are seated comfortably in the second seed of the Western Conference and show no signs of slowing down.
Despite being five games behind Los Angeles, I have a feeling that Denver doesn’t feel too threatened by the Lakers. The Nuggets are 5-1 against Cleveland and L.A. this year — the two teams annually considered the best in the East and West. And four of those wins were against the Lakers, the team most likely to stand in the way between Denver and its first trip to the NBA finals.
With the laundry list that is Kobe’s plethora of injuries and the Nugget’s memories of last season’s Western Conference finals loss, Denver might be in a better position going into the playoffs this season than they were last year. And for those who forgot, the Nuggets were sitting pretty nicely this time last year.
As long as LeBron James is wearing a Cavs jersey and the Celtics continue to file for social security, Cleveland is the one to beat in the East — if not in all of basketball. But there’s a not-so-dark horse looming in the West. The season has a way to go still, but if the Nuggets can get by L.A., this could be Denver’s year.
