NBA Playoff Picture Update: Bulls run roughshod over Raptors, take control of East’s 3 spot
With just a few weeks remaining until the NBA postseason, every night can impact the standings. The NBA Playoff Picture Update keeps you up to date on all the most important news for all 16 berths and seeds.
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Pamplona status: The Toronto Raptors held an 11-point lead midway through the third quarter but spit the bit down the stretch, getting absolutely overwhelmed in the fourth by a Chicago Bulls club led by a somewhat unlikely lineup.
As of Tuesday, the five-man unit of Pau Gasol, Nikola Mirotic, Jimmy Butler, Tony Snell and Aaron Brooks had shared the court for all of nine minutes this season, outscoring opponents by a total of two points. That group closed out the Raptors on Wednesday, topping Toronto by a whopping 13 points over the final five minutes and change, finishing off a fourth quarter in which the Bulls got whatever they wanted against the Raptors’ hapless defense.
The stiffest resistance any Bull faced in the fourth was this bit of final-minute friendly fire, as Taj Gibson took a swipe at pal Joakim Noah:
With Snell and Brooks bombing away from deep, Butler and Gasol getting to the line, Mirotic doing a little bit of everything (including checking DeMar DeRozan on the perimeter), Chicago just stampeded past the Raptors late, finishing off a 116-103 win that moved Tom Thibodeau’s third-seeded Bulls 1 1/2 games ahead of No. 4 Toronto in the standings. Moreover, it capped a 4-0 season sweep of the Raptors for the Bulls, ensuring that Chicago would have the head-to-head tiebreaker should the two teams finish the regular season with the same record.
How bad did it get for Toronto? The most creative bit of offense the Raptors mustered up in the fourth quarter might well have been this DeRozan pass with about 90 seconds remaining … which he sent sailing out of bounds, directly to Noah:
Noah’s post-game breakdown of the play was, as you’d expect, just about perfect:
Go Bulls, indeed.
Butler (23 points on 7-for-8 shooting from the field, 7-for-9 from the foul line) led eight Bulls to score at least seven points, as Chicago shot a scorching 60.8 percent from the floor to win their fourth game in five tries and improve to 44-29. Greivis Vasquez scored a Raptors-high 22 points starting in place of injured All-Star Kyle Lowry, but Toronto shot just 33 percent in the fourth quarter and couldn’t get a stop when it counted, posting their third loss in the last four games to fall to 42-30.
There was a bit of good news for Toronto on Wednesday, though. Thanks to the Boston Celtics’ loss to the Miami Heat, which we’ll get to in a second, the Raptors clinched their second straight playoff berth. We’re sure Dwane Casey’s thrilled.
Shuffle up and, y’know, deal with it: OK, so this might not be the most thrilling “playoff race” in league history:
… but there was some moving and shaking in the lower reaches of the Eastern Conference bracket on Wednesday. to wit:
• The Indiana Pacers beat the Washington Wizards on a buzzer-beating layup by point guard George Hill, helping keep Indy’s playoff hopes alive while dropping the fifth-seeded Wiz (who might have been able to use Lionel Messi’s friend on that last defensive possession) to 40-32, two games behind the Raptors;
• The Brooklyn Nets eked out a 91-88 win over the Charlotte Hornets thanks in part to a monster night from center Brook Lopez (34 points on 16-for-26 shooting, 10 rebounds, three blocks, two steals in 39 minutes) and also, to some degree, thanks to the Hornets’ inability to inbound the basketball in a critical situation:
• The Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics despite playing without Dwyane Wade (left knee contusion), Hassan Whiteside (lacerated right hand) and Chris Andersen (left calf contusion) on the second night of a road back-to-back, because no matter who they didn’t have, they did have Goran Dragic (22 points, seven assists, five rebounds) and the determination to play hard from the opening tip, which the Celtics didn’t.
So, where does all that leave us?
The Heat, now 33-38, stay put in seventh place. They’re now two games behind the sixth-seeded Milwaukee Bucks, who knocked Miami off Tuesday on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer by Khris Middleton.
The Pacers’ win, combined with the Celtics’ loss, creates a virtual tie for the final spot in the playoffs, with both Indiana and Boston holding 31-40 records. The Celtics currently hold the tiebreaker with a 2-1 advantage in the season series, but a Pacers win in their matchup next Wednesday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse would move the tiebreaker to the criterion of in-conference record, in which the Pacers currently have a two-game lead.
Brooklyn and Charlotte both now sit at 30-40, a half-game back of the Celtics-Pacers tandem. The Nets, however, have the edge on the Hornets, by virtue of a 2-1 win in their head-to-head season series.
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Bears down, liftoff nearing? The Cleveland Cavaliers laid what noted karaoke matchmaker Tony Allen called “an old fashioned beat down” on the Memphis Grizzlies on Wednesday. The 111-89 whipping saw the Cavs outscore the grit-deficient and grindless Grizz 69-47 in the second and third quarters behind ping-ponging ball movement (30 assists on 43 made field goals) and a hail of long balls (14-for-34 from beyond the arc). Cleveland’s offense was clicking so well that even two guys who clearly hate each other with the fury of 1,000 white-hot burning suns were able to link up on a lob:
Meanwhile, in the Big Easy, big nights from James Harden (25 points, 10 assists, six rebounds), Trevor Ariza (22 points, nine boards, five assists, three steals) and Donatas Motiejunas (21 points, eight caroms, two steals) helped make Dwight Howard’s long-awaited return to the lineup a happy one, as the Houston Rockets topped the New Orleans Pelicans, 95-93. That narrows the gap between the Grizzlies (50-22) and Rockets (48-23) to just 1 1/2 games, making the races for both the Southwest Division title and the No. 2 spot behind the conference-leading Golden State Warriors even tighter.
Losing games, holding ground: The race for the final playoff berth in the West continues to look like the Oklahoma City Thunder’s to lose, but they sent a message that they can be caught by falling to the sixth-place San Antonio Spurs by a not-very-close-at-all 130-91 score. The good news for OKC is that their next-closest competitors also lost — the Pelicans dropped that aforementioned home game to the Rockets and the Phoenix Suns lost 108-99 to the tank-averse Sacramento Kings, who had seven players score in double figures. The 41-31 Thunder are still three games up on the Suns but four games off the pace of the seventh-place Dallas Mavericks, which suggests that they’re going to face the NBA-best Golden State Warriors in the first round. Such things happen when you allow the Spurs to shoot 58 percent from the field.
Quickly: The Portland Trail Blazers held off the Utah Jazz, snapping their five-game losing streak and improving to 45-25, 2 1/2 games behind the third-seeded Rockets. If the playoffs started today, though, the Blazers still wouldn’t have home-court advantage in Round 1, as they’d face a Los Angeles Clippers team that still boasts a superior record, 47-25, after dismantling the New York Knicks with vicious highlight dunks.
Thursday’s Most Important Only Game
Only one game on the Thursday slate, as the NBA steps aside for the Sweet 16 to tip off, so let’s get to it:
Pacers at Bucks, 8 p.m. ET: The 35-36 Bucks can get back to .500 and open up a 2 1/2-game lead on the Miami Heat in the race to avoid the Cavs and Hawks in the first round, but the key stakes of this game belong to the Pacers. A win would end their virtual tie with the Celtics and move them a half-game ahead in the race for the No. 8 seed, a slight but meaningful advantage ahead of their potentially tiebreak-deciding matchup next Wednesday in Boston.
