NBA’s play-in games don’t make everyone happy (hi, LeBron James!), but they exist in 2021 whether you like them or not.
So here’s what we’ll do ahead of the final day of the 2020-21 regular season on Sunday: we’ll look every day at what the matchups look like at the moment and the likelihood that some of the teams in the East and West will either avoid the play-ins or will probably need to win a game or two to make it to the true postseason.
We’re changing things up after Thursday’s results gave us a lot of scenarios to consider, both up in the top seeds and in the play-in games (all stats via Basketball-Reference):