NBA Scoreboard Watch: Thursday, March 26th

Today’s slate of NBA games is just 1: Indiana Pacers at the Milwaukee Bucks.

Since that game has zero implications on the Western Conference, I was going to take the time to do a write up about NBA playoff seeding. Part of this is due to my mistake over the previous few NBA Scoreboard Watch threads where I kept discussing tiebreakers in terms of divisional records. As boltsfan21 correctly pointed out, that’s wrong. Another reason is to update y’all on the state of the seeding race in the West. In the process of doing this, I realized that SB Nation was awesome and has already produced a post that completely updates every morning the stats and tie breaking status of the entire playoff picture. Go <a href="http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2015/3/11/8174759/nba-playoffs-2015-tiebreakers-western-conference" target="new">here </a>to see it.

To highlight a bit of relevant information though:

The Clippers are only 2 games behind Houston. The Clippers own the relevant tiebreaker (conference record) by 3 games. There however remain zero games between Houston and the Clippers.

Houston probably should have lost last night against the Pelicans, but New Orleans choked away a lead. Nevertheless, with injuries aplenty, Houston faces a daunting remaining schedule including:

On the road at: D.C., Toronto (back end of a back to back on the road), Dallas, OKC, San Antonio, and Charlotte (second of a back to back, first being at home)

At home: San Antonio

So in theory, the Clippers should get the chance to catch up and surpass  Houston if they so please. This would allow the Clippers to avoid the Warriors until the Conference final, but sets up a first round date then against likely 6th seed San Antonio. Yikes.

To that end, I would ask anyone/everyone: is there a concern with facing San Antonio in the first round? Is everyone just fixated with avoiding Golden State until the Conference finals?