Rockets NBA Playoff picture: What do the Lakers & Nuggets want?

What do the Lakers want? That’s not a question I like asking, but as the final day of the NBA 2025-26 regular season gets underway, it’s a question we must ask.

Here are the playoff scenarios, and what might happen.

First:

1. The Rockets have two possible opponents: Lakers, Nuggets

2. The Rockets can’t change anything about their seeding. They’re 5th. The loss to Minnesota’s B Team guaranteed it.

The Nuggets have a record of 53-28. The Lakers have a record of 52-29. Today the Nuggets play the Spurs, who will apparently rest everyone of note. The Lakers will play the Jazz, who are 22-59. I’m not sure if a loss changes much about their draft odds, as they can’t “catch” Washington, Indiana, or Brooklyn in the loss column. They’re going to finish with the 4th or 5th worst record in the NBA no matter what happens today. The Kings can “pass” the Jazz in the loss column if they win and the Jazz lose. The two teams both have 22 wins. Being 5th greatly increases the odds of getting a pick that falls down as far as seventh in the draft. You have to expect both teams want to lose.

The Lakers own the tiebreaker over the Nuggets, meaning if their records end up identical, that is, Laker win, Denver loss, the Lakers will move up to 3rd in the Western Conference and play the Timberwolves.

If Denver wins, everything stays the same, Rockets play Lakers. Denver holds on to 3rd place in the West due to a superior record. It won’t matter whether LA wins or loses, as the Lakers can’t catch Denver in the wins column if the Nuggets get a win over the Spurs.

Denver can’t really control anything, though, if the Lakers lose. They’ll still be ahead of LA in the win column, win or lose.

Then there’s the Spurs. Do the Spurs want to keep Denver where they are, on OKC’s side of the playoff bracket in future rounds? If San Antonio thinks Denver is a tougher opponent for OKC than a Laker team missing its two best players, then they definitely want to keep the Nuggets at 3rd. They can do that by losing to Denver.

So this is simply a brilliant situation in which every team playing with seeding at stake in the West has a good reason to lose.

Denver can’t get out of their 3rd seed, if they’d rather play the Rockets, unless LA wins and they lose. But the Spurs may well want to lose, too.

Do the Lakers want to play the Rockets or the Nuggets? Give that the Lakers beat down the Rockets twice in a row, albeit with their roster largely intact, they very well might. They might have reason to believe that if they can steal a win or two early in the series, on some sort of 41 year old Lebron James magic, then Luka and Reaves might be able to return to finish the series against the Rockets. Sure, that leaves them facing OKC, almost certainly, but it also means they advanced a round.

Going to 3rd place gets LA the Timberwolves, but they might think the same thing, steal a game early, hope for medical miracles, and avoid OKC in the second round.

But then the Jazz likely want to lose as well.

Who wants it less? This should be a night of puzzling player choices, baffling substitutions, dubious coaching decisions. So, just another Rockets game for the Rockets. But for the Lakers, Timberwolves, Spurs and Jazz, a night of something else. We’ll see what Denver and LA want, and who they play. Denver played no one in their previous game, and won anyway.

We’ll know by the end of the day. In any case it’s out of the Rockets hands. After losing last night, and LA winning, it doesn’t matter, in playoff terms, what they do. They’ll be in 5th, even if they tie the Lakers, due to those two losses to LA in the baseball series.