Not sure if you heard, but yesterday was the last day of the 2025-26 NBA regular season. Every squad in the league was in action. Thirty teams, 15 games. It was a basketball firehose to the face and a challenge from Adam Silver: I dare you to keep up.
[Commissioner Silver clears his throat. He is flipping me off.] Even if you could somehow configure your screens in such a way that you do, in fact, have all the games on at once …
[Silver is now flipping me off with both hands? So it’s double barrels right at me. He starts moving his middle fingers around like they’re planes.] There’s no way you could pay attention to them all.
[He now has both middle fingers almost touching, like Adam and God in The Creation of Adam.] Try. You’ll miss the forest and the trees.
Challenge accepted.
Heading into Sunday, many aspects of the NBA playoff picture were already decided. Ten seeds were already in stone, including the top four seeds in the East and the top two seeds in the West. But the remaining 10 seeds—and the final order of the draft lottery—were dependent on the day’s action. So to help make sense of a chaotic night of basketball and set the stage for the upcoming playoffs, here are our biggest winners and losers from the last day of the regular season.
Losers: Denver Nuggets and San Antonio Spurs
The sexiest game on the docket yesterday was Nuggets-Spurs, which had juicy playoff-seeding stakes on the line. The Spurs were locked into the 2-seed, but Denver entered Sunday just a game up on the Lakers for the 3-seed. If Denver won, it’d be the 3-seed and would face the Minnesota Timberwolves. If the Nuggets lost (and the Lakers beat Utah), they would drop to 4. This would mean that the top-seeded Thunder could see the Nuggets in the second round and the Spurs could avoid them.
It set up a fascinating series of choices. For the second straight game, the Nuggets sat almost their entire starting lineup: Jamal Murray, Christian Braun, Aaron Gordon, Peyton Watson, Cam Johnson, and Tim Hardaway were out, as Denver seemed to want to drop to the 4-seed, which would have matched the Nuggets against the Houston Rockets in the first round and then likely against the defending champion Thunder, instead of the Spurs, in Round 2. The Spurs seemed down for that: Victor Wembanyama was a late scratch as he recovered from a bruised rib, but everyone else of consequence (except for backup center Luke Kornet) was ready to go.
But we know what people say about the best-laid plans. Nikola Jokic scored 23 points in the first half and found himself smack in the midst of a heater, doing whatever he pleased against Mason Plumlee and Bismack Biyombo; then, he didn’t play a lick in the second half. Big Honey played long enough to cross the 15-minute threshold and become awards eligible (he also officially ends the season as the first player to lead the league in both rebounds and assists). And so you would think, even without Wemby, that the Spurs would find a way to take down the deeply depleted Nuggets and, in doing so, stick them on the other side of the bracket.
But Nuggets forward David Roddy had other ideas. Sick, twisted, chaotic ideas. Creativity disguised as madness and madness disguised as creativity. They can’t be on their toes if they’re on their heels. Roddy had 15 and 13 to power the Nuggets past San Antonio and keep Denver at the 3-seed—a loss for the Nuggets, who clearly preferred to end up fourth, and a loss for the Spurs, who are now on a collision course to face Jokic and Denver in the Western Conference semis.
Loser: Doc Rivers
Amid all of the basketball on Sunday, Shams Charania reported that Rivers and the Bucks have parted ways. After taking over for Adrian Griffin halfway through 2023-24, the 64-year-old Hall of Famer had spent two and a half seasons as Milwaukee’s coach. In his time at the helm, the Bucks never made it out of the first round, and Rivers leaves the Bucks after a complete trainwreck of a season. Giannis Antetokounmpo was in and out of the lineup, the team never caught a rhythm, and Milwaukee missed the playoffs entirely and had a record of 30-52. All told, Rivers presided over the most disappointing season of the Antetokounmpo era and one of the most fraught seasons in Bucks history.
Winner: Doc Rivers
But hey, at least he doesn’t have to deal with all the Giannis drama anymore. He won’t have to field questions about Shams reports, Giannis’s favorite kind of eggs, or anything else regarding the pivotal summer ahead for Milwaukee. And what a win that is.
Plus, he’s still getting paid eight figures for the 2026-27 season. I have to believe that Rivers, a man who’s famously averse to playing rookies, doesn’t have much interest in coaching a rebuilding team if, in fact, Giannis does finally ask out. I can’t imagine he tried too hard to talk them out of it.
Winner: Basketball Reference
The injury report was the place to be on Sunday, the hottest club in town, very crowded. Heading into Sunday’s action, 155 players were listed as out, nine were doubtful, 37 were questionable, and eight were probable. Thirteen teams had at least seven guys out. That’s almost half the league running skeleton crews out there for Game 82. A lot of street clothes on the bench.
With so many guys injured, so many teams tanking, and so many other teams resting starters before the playoffs, the last day of the season always features a bunch of dudes you have never heard of before. Not only will these unknowns play, but they’ll play a lot. They’ll get major minutes and major shots. And you will have to look them up because you’ll have no clue who they are. You will rack your brain, try to shake loose some shred of info that will make clear to you who this player is that you have never seen before. But no answer comes. So you get to work. You search for them on Basketball Reference, see where they went to school and whether they have any strange nicknames you should know about.
Here are a few trivia questions. For each one, three of these people are real NBA players who suited up on Sunday, and one is completely made up. Do you know ball?
(Click the footnote to see the answers.)
Baylor Scheierman during the game against the Orlando Magic on April 12
Loser: Orlando Magic
There was so much promise, so much excitement. It really seemed like this would be the year the Magic would take a step forward, make it to the second round of the playoffs. Who knows? Maybe further. That’s not to say that such a run is impossible now, only much less likely than it had seemed before yet another season from hell for the Magic, who fell victim to untimely injuries, rudimentary offense, and lofty expectations. And they didn’t exactly end the regular season on a high note.
Going into Sunday, the situation for the Magic was simple. Beat the Celtics, who were sitting basically everyone important, and the 7-seed is yours, with an outside shot at the 6-seed, depending on other games. Lose and fall to 8, and they’d be forced to go on the road for the first round of the play-in. As you can probably guess based on the “Loser: Orlando Magic” heading above, the Magic did lose. The end of the Celtics rotation went berserk. Baylor Scheierman, Ron Harper Jr., Luka Garza, and John Tonje dropped 97 combined points and sent Orlando—who had Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner both available—packing for the play-in, where it will face Philadelphia.
Winner: Oklahoma City Thunder
The Spurs and Nuggets ended the day on the same side of the bracket. That’s a win for Oklahoma City, who will now face the 8-seed that comes out of the play-in and then the winner of Lakers-Rockets in the second round. Now the Thunder’s road back to the Finals will include only one of Denver and San Antonio, who can beat up on each other before any matchup with OKC.
Winner: Mark Jones
Jones did play-by-play on ESPN for the final time on Sunday. For 36 years he was employed by the mothership, and it was only fitting that he got to say “Scheierman might be him tonight” before his tenure was complete. Baylor Scheierman went on a shotmaking run late in the third quarter that had TD Garden in a light frenzy. The lefty flick of the wrist, pulling up off the dribble from deep—Scheierman had Jones screaming Rich the Kid lyrics. “On a wave like a durag!”
Winner: Tankers
Except for the Mavericks, every tanker in the league lost yesterday. And the only reason Dallas didn’t join the ranks of the losers was because it played a fellow tanker, the Chicago Bulls—and look, you’re not going to out-sad the Bulls these days. Cooper Flagg left the game with a finger injury after 10 minutes, but it didn’t even matter. Ryan Nembhard had 23 assists. Twenty-three. That happens only if the team you’re playing is checked out. Chicago deserves a better basketball team.
Loser: The Jurassic Park Xfinity Commercials
What are these? Why are they still happening? They feel to me like the work of Satan. Can someone please make them stop before the playoffs begin? The world’s hard enough already.
