Fencer reregistered wrote:15 games left, and nobody catches us for home court unless we lose 6 of those.
Unless I'm misremembering:
3 of the games are against really good teams who have more to play for than we do -- or at least with really good records and current health in line with what got them there, namely OKC and 2x Bucks. The rest are all Knicks or worse, mainly much worse.
Yeah the magic number for home court throughout the entire playoffs is currently 10, as we're 6 games up on OKC.
Technically if we were to beat them head to head in our final matchup to draw the season series, the number is at 9 since we'd have the tiebreaker of best conference record (which is what it is for Denver since they are 7 games back but have already won the season series and own the tiebreaker if we finish with the same record).
We've got 9 very winnable games: Detroit twice, Atlanta twice, Charlotte twice, Chicago, Portland and Washington again.
The other 6 are against legit competition but teams we have and should beat again (Bucks twice, OKC, New Orleans, Sacramento and the Knicks).
OKC is running a similar gauntlet with the Bucks twice, SAC/NOP/NYK plus the C's again, but they've also got games agains Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Indy etc. So not quite as soft as ours. Denver is the real threat even though they're 7 games back because they've lucked out with 3 games against the T-Wolves without KAT, but still have PHX/LAC/CLE/NYK sprinkled in there as well.
So as long as we take care of business over the next soft stretch, we should end up with some wiggle room at the end of the season to get some extra rest and still confidently have HCA all the way through the finals.
