Recapping the Blazers’ Possible Draft Scenarios In Play Sunday

All thirty NBA teams play Sunday in the league’s final day before the play-in begins. By the end of the day, the Portland Trail Blazers will know their draft positioning. They control their destiny, but the Suns could rain on their plans. Let’s walk through the scenarios.

The Suns currently have one more win than the Blazers with one game to play. So these are the two games that matter to the Blazers:

12:30 pm: Los Angeles Lakers at Portland Trail Blazers. The Lakers are now locked into the third seed in the West, and have nothing to play for. LeBron James also may have tweaked his groin injury in the previous game. Expect this game to feature copious minutes from the bench contingents of both teams.

12:30 pm: Phoenix Suns at Sacramento Kings. The Suns do not own their pick, so they have no reason to tank. However, Kevin Durant has been shut down, and the Kings are preparing for the 9-10 play-in game, and control their destiny for the 9th seed and home court advantage. They have already announced that they are not resting their starters.

Here are the rooting interests for Blazers fans:

• If the Blazers lose, they are locked into the 9th spot in the draft.
• If the Blazers win and the Suns win, the Blazers are still locked into the 9th spot.
• If the Blazers win and the Suns lose, the Blazers and Suns will finish tied for the 9th/10th spots. This is the only scenario where the Blazers don’t finish alone in 9th.

If the teams end the season tied, the draft tiebreaker is different than the playoffs. Their ping-pong ball combinations are gathered and split in half. And the NBA holds a “coin flip” (actually using ping pong balls) to decide the tiebreaker. The winner of the tiebreaker would get one extra ping-pong ball combination. And if neither team moves up in the lottery, the winner would also be slotted 9th, and the loser slotted 10th. The tiebreaker is typically decided on the Monday after the first weekend of the playoffs, and if that continues, we’ll learn the result on April 21st. A year ago, the Blazers lost the lottery to the Hornets, and fell to the 7th pick.

For far more details, we’ve covered the tiebreaker specifics here.

Blazer’s Edge will have the final Gameday Threads and recaps of the season Sunday morning, then we’ll recap the season and the draft scenarios as we move into the offseason.