Weekly NBA Game Thread: Week of May 17th, 2021

Every Monday at 5:00 PM Central this all-purpose thread goes up, and the comments section is where it’s going down. This is your place to discuss all the NBA’s action happening during the week when the Bucks are off-duty.

You know why we’re here.

This abomination:

For reference’s sake, the way I understand it is like this: The Lakers need to lose to Golden State and then to either the Grizzlies or Spurs for maximum schadenfreude to be within our grasp. Everything else is just shuffling of the deck chairs on eight mini-Titanics prior to their likely envelopment in the cold embrace of being the record-wise worse teams in each respective conference.

The play-in teams can console themselves with the theory that they’ll be going into their matchups against the one and two seeds as warmed-up as you could hope to be. On the other side of the ledger, everyone else is getting something of a bye-week in an NBA season bereft of them and the one/two seeds get an opponent who had to exert themselves a bit to reach the matchup.

As long as chaos reigns supreme, that’s all that matters.