The Nets can avoid the sudden-death NBA Play-In Tournament and sneak into the Top 6 in the Eastern Conference.
It won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible. It’ll take extreme intentionality and a little bit of luck for these Nets to be guaranteed safe passage into the postseason.
Here’s a short explainer on the play-in tournament, as a referesher: The No. 7 and No. 8 seeds play to determines the seventh seed. The loser of that game plays the winner of the matchup between the No. 9 and No. 10 seeds to determine the eighth seed. The losers are eliminated from the playoff picture altogether.
And that means there’s a chance the Nets could finish the season eighth and still miss the playoffs.
That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Toronto Raptors, the two teams standing in-between the Nets and playoff security.
As of Sunday morning, the Nets (37-34) were four games behind the sixth-place Cavaliers (41-30) and 2.5 games behind the seventh-seeded Raptors (39-31). That means the Nets would need to win four more games than the Cavaliers to tie them for sixth in the standings at the end of the season and three more games than the Raptors to leapfrog them for seventh.
And the Nets are watching the standings, looking at Cleveland and Toronto’s results as a source of fuel for the rest of the season.
“I think it’s kind of natural,” Nic Claxton said. “You can get caught up in that a little bit, but at the end of the day, we’ve just gotta control what we can control and try to win as many games as we can.”
They should be. With 11 games left, the Nets have no margin for error, but their schedule, even if Kyrie Irving can play only on the road, is lighter than their Eastern Conference competition.
In theory, the Nets should be underdogs in only two more games this season — Monday at Barclays Center without Irving (unvaccinated, ineligible in NYC) against Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert and the Utah Jazz and March 31 at home, again without Irving, against the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks.
There are another pair of games that could go either way — Wednesday in Memphis against Ja Morant’s second-seeded Grizzlies, and then March 26 in Miami against the East’s top-seeded Heat. Irving will be available for both games, which gives the Nets better odds.
The Nets can’t go out to celebrate after their game in South Beach, because they have to catch a flight back to Brooklyn to play the Charlotte Hornets at Barclays the next day. The Nets drilled the Hornets in their last game … in Charlotte with Irving. A back-to-back after a hard fought game against the Heat could be a tricky game to maneuver, especially against a Hornets team also positioning itself for the play-in.
Then, of course, there’s the luck aspect. The Nets need both the Raptors and the Cavs to lose enough games to keep the Nets in the mix for the sixth seed.
To be more precise, the Nets need the Raptors to lose the games they’re likely to lose — two to the 76ers, and one apiece to the Bulls, Celtics, Timberwolves, Heat — and then beat the Cavaliers on March 24.
The Nets also need to beat the Cavaliers and need Cleveland to lose to the Lakers, Bulls, Mavericks, 76ers and Bucks. The Nets could also use some help from Trae Young, whose Hawks play the Cavs on March 31.
If all that happens, the Cavs will finish this season with just four wins. And if the Nets only lose three, they’ll finish with eight wins, which will be enough to tie the Cavaliers.
The Nets have a 2-1 record against the Cavs this season, meaning in the event of a tied record at the end of the season, the tiebreaker would go to the Nets for winning more head-to-head matchups.
That outcome would give the Nets the sixth seed and playoff certainty.
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