Anything can happen on the final day of the NBA season. The teams already in the playoffs are looking ahead to potential first-round matchups, lotto teams are riding their tanks all the way to Cancún, and everyone else is playing with intense, sweaty desperation. Players you’ve never heard of will go for triple-doubles, score 30, take more shots in one game than they’ve taken all year. A no-holds-barred, all-bets-are-off potential shit show is around every corner.
The 2025 version did not disappoint. Every team in the league was in action, and the games proved to be a heady concoction of competition, absurdity, and fun. The East playoff picture was already set, so the Sunday slate was full of mostly yawns, save for a few spotty theatrics here and there. The West was decidedly wilder. That’s been its MO, the way it likes to conduct itself. Sunday’s games had huge implications for playoff seeding, with seeds 4 through 10 all up for grabs and the play-in waiting like coal in the stocking of whichever team wound up letting an automatic playoff berth slip through its fingers. To help make sense of a chaotic day of NBA basketball and set the stage for the upcoming playoffs, here are our biggest takeaways from Sunday’s finale.
Kawhi Leonard is in apex predator mode.
Of all the games on Sunday, Warriors-Clippers had the most at stake. By the time a missed Kawhi jumper sent the game into overtime, every other game of the day—and, ergo, the season—was in the books, making the stakes crystal clear: Win and you’re in, lose and it’s the play-in. Here’s the thing about the play-in: It’s not where you want to be. Anything can happen there, and half the outcomes are bad.
This was also the best game of the day, a back-and-forth battle of runs that saw both teams playing high-level basketball, each with chances to win late, each with multiple guys turning in big-time performances. For the Warriors, Playoff Jimothy showed up early and carried the load the first three quarters, with a thumb-wrapped Steph Curry going ballistic in the fourth quarter and overtime. For the Clips, James Harden put up 39 points, 10 assists, and seven boards, including huge back-to-back 3s in OT. But the most important takeaway from this game was Kawhi Leonard’s two-way dominance.
The Fun Guy dropped 33 points on 13-of-20 shooting and 4-of-8 from 3. Add to that seven assists, six rebounds, three steals, and 47 minutes. Kawhi is very back. You can see that the bounce in his step has returned. The zip has been resurrected. He’s looking spry out there in the baby blue New Balances. Bob Myers, who was calling the game, said, “That’s a heck of a bridge right there” when the broadcast showed B-roll of the Bay Bridge. He also said of Leonard, “This is the best I’ve seen him look in a long time.” He said that probably 30 times. More? Bobby was drooling over the movement.
Leonard is back in apex predator mode, looking once more like the Wing to End All Wings, and the Clips are extremely legit. Hard to adequately convey how scrappy the Clippers have been this year. You play them, and you’re in for a rock fight. Be prepared or be bodied. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but (caveat of the century) if Kawhi can stay healthy, they’ll be a load for the Nuggets in the first round. Yes, it is hard to trust that will happen, but it’s also hard not to get sucked into believing again because of the way they’re playing. L.A. has won 15 of its past 17, including Sunday’s road win against a desperate Warriors team. There is that thought that creeps up in the back of your mind: Kawhi can be the best player on a title team. He has been before, and he’s looking far more like his old self now than he has at any point over the past several years.
Chris Paul is your favorite grinder’s favorite grinder.
Chris Paul has a healthy respect for the grind, and he takes his job seriously. He sort of leads with that. That rep precedes him. Pretty serious guy in general, and about basketball he does not mess around. For sure, he has a deep appreciation for classic physical comedy gags like hitting guys in the nuts, but this basketball stuff is serious business to him. And so it’s fitting that at the age of 39 years old, Paul went out and played all 82 games this season for the Spurs, becoming the first player in NBA history to accomplish that feat in his 20th season or later. In LeBron’s NBA, we can be desensitized to other stars who have played historic amounts of basketball. Al Horford is one of these people. Paul is one of these people, too. What’s particularly impressive about Paul is that he’s doing this at 6 feet and 175 pounds. This is not some yoked-up 6-foot-9 wing doing this. Most nights he’s the smallest guy on the floor. Jeremy Sochan said it best: “He could be in flipping, I don’t know, Hawaii, doing nothing. And he’s here in San Antonio, Texas, busting his ass 82 fuckin’ games.” Some of you might look at that and ask, Why’d he use “flipping” early on if he’s just going to drop the “fucking” hammer late? If he’s going there, shouldn’t they just both be “fucking”? These are the kinds of big questions that come out of the final day of the regular season.
Paul and Jarrett Jack came out of college the same year. Both were point guards in the ACC, Paul at Wake Forest, Jack at Georgia Tech. Sunday afternoon, when Paul started his 82nd game of the season, Jack was in Milwaukee with the Pistons as an assistant coach. The latter is the far more normal thing for someone in the neighborhood of 40 to be doing. Paul’s the anomaly. He gave up Bojangles for the game. That's a level of commitment very few are capable of. Special shout-out to the sentence “I eat a variety of beans, grains, and veggies.” This is someone unafraid of drastic measures. We toast our sautéed vegetable bowls in admiration.
Lottery odds are provisional. Bub Carrington’s game winner is forever.
It would have surprised exactly no one if the Heat had scorched the Wizards on Sunday. Washington has nothing to play for, was sitting seemingly half its team, and has been actively tanking for months. Entering Sunday, the Wizards needed to lose to maintain the worst record in the league, give themselves the best odds in the draft lottery, and guarantee themselves a top-five pick. Yet the Wizards were thorns all afternoon. Kept a lead for much of the game, with Tristan Vukcevic and Justin Champagnie splashing enough 3s to put the Wizards in danger of pulling out a win—until Jaime Jaquez Jr.’s 41/10/7 helped the Heat pull ahead in the final minutes, setting the stage for an absurd bit of Washington wizardry.
With 8.5 seconds left and the Wizards down four, Washington had the ball on a sideline out of bounds play. Champagnie threw the ball in to Bub Carrington and stepped inbounds. Carrington threw the ball right back to Champagnie, who cashed in a triple from the wing. After a Miami timeout to advance the ball across half court, the Heat inbounded the ball to Josh Christopher, who caught it with his foot on the midcourt line and was immediately called for over and back. Now it was the Wizards’ ball, and they were down one with 4.4 seconds left. Carrington caught an inbound pass near half court, got to work, drove on Jaquez, and let a high-arcing fallaway runner go as the buzzer sounded. With the backboard red and the clock at 0:00, the ball hit off the glass and went in. Washington mobbed Carrington.
It was a we-know-you-wouldn’t-hold-it-against-us-if-we-rolled-over-but-we’re-gonna-fight-anway kind of win. I believe in the goodness of the basketball gods. Seems like the Wiz do, too. May those gods look upon them with favor and reward them for showing up when it mattered least.
The Rockets aren't worried about matchups.
When their place in the playoff pecking order is set, most teams rest their starters, at the very least, and sometimes even more players than that. We saw that all over the Association yesterday. But the Rockets do not behave like most teams. They will go about things differently, and you being on board with it makes zero difference to them. On Sunday, that meant playing their starters against the Nuggets in a game that, had the Rockets won, could have pushed Denver to the 7-seed and matched them up against Houston in Round 1 of the West playoffs. With no disrespect to the Rockets' incredible season, it's generally better not to face Nikola Jokic in the playoffs if you can help it.
Now, the Rockets won't have to face Jokic after all because the Nuggets blew them out in a game that Denver really needed. But the decision to take the matchup seriously is indicative of what got Houston here in the first place. The Rockets are interested in setting a particular kind of tone that is one part “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks” and two parts “I’ll hit you.” But even though their brand of mean, flexible basketball carried them to the 2-seed in a brutal conference, many still doubt their ability to make a deep playoff run. This is what we do with young teams. In spite of their résumés, we give them zero benefit of the doubt until they’ve gone out and earned it when the lights are brightest. The final score on Sunday wasn't necessarily encouraging, but in a roundabout way, the manner in which they got there was. If nothing else, getting their shit rocked by the Nuggets should give head coach Ime Udoka fresh material for the bulletin board.
Kyle Kuzma had the most absurd performance of the day.
In Milwaukee and Detroit’s regular-season finale on Sunday, there were two Bucks performances that stood out for their only-on-the-last-day singularity. The first was a Pat Connaughton fever dream in which he went for 43 points, 11 rebounds, five assists, and two steals in 44 minutes. The second, and my favorite of the day, was by Kyle Kuzma. Kuz came out of the gates with his hands on fire, scoring 22 points in the first quarter on 8-of-10 shooting from the field, 5-of-7 from 3, and 1-for-1 from the line. He didn’t play at all in the second quarter, and when he came out after halftime, he was already in street clothes. He had changed at halftime. During his interview to open the fourth, Milwaukee head coach Doc Rivers told ESPN that Kuzma had told him he was playing only one quarter today. Rivers finished the interview by asking who was winning the Masters, then said, “Go Rory.”
