5 things to watch for in the final stretch of the NBA’s regular season

The trade deadline has come and gone, the All-Star Game is over with and each NBA team has around 25 games remaining on their schedule.

We’ve officially entered the final stretch of the regular season.

There is still plenty to play for between now and April 11. For example, no team has secured a playoff berth yet and a number of teams made some notable changes to their roster at the trade deadline. There’s also the case of end-of-season-awards. 20-something games isn’t enough for someone new to enter the MVP, Rookie of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year or Sixth Man of the Year conversation, but how the leading candidates in those categories perform from this point forward can help sway voters one way or another.

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With that in mind, let’s take a look at five things to keep an eye on as we enter the backend of the NBA’s regular season.

The Rockets and Warriors

The Rockets, not the Warriors, currently have the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference. Having won two of their three meetings with the Warriors this season, the Rockets also own the tiebreaker should they finish the regular season with the same record. It’s possible home court advantage won’t make a difference in a potential series with the Warriors, who have an identical record at home and on the road this season, but the Rockets need every advantage they can get if they are going to take down the defending champions and return to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1995.

Locking up the No. 1 seed would strengthen James Harden’s MVP case, too. He’s already the front-runner for the award — Basketball-Reference gives him a 71.8 percent chance to win it this season — but it’ll be incredibly difficult to make a convincing case for anyone else if Harden continues to put up the same numbers on the best regular season team in the league.

Beating the Warriors out for the No. 1 seed, however, won’t come easy:

The Western Conference playoff race

While the Rockets and Warriors battle for the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference, there are a total of eight teams competing for the remaining six seeds.

The Spurs and Timberwolves have been the third and fourth best team in the Western Conference for most of the season, but they’re only 4.5 games ahead of the Jazz, who are on the outside looking in on the playoff race following an 11-game (and counting) win streak.

Between the Spurs (35-24), Timberwolves (36-25) and Jazz (30-28) are the Clippers (30-26), Pelicans (31-26), Trail Blazers (32-26), Nuggets (32-26) and Thunder (33-26). Whereas the Spurs have the toughest remaining schedule — they still have to play the Rockets and Warriors two more times this season and will make a trip to Cleveland to play the Cavaliers on Feb. 25 — the Jazz have the easiest remaining schedule.

Based solely on their star power, it’s hard to believe the Spurs, Timberwolves and Thunder won’t make the playoffs. If so, it would leave the Nuggets, Trail Blazers, Pelicans, Clippers and Jazz to fight over the final three seeds. It’ll be fascinating to see which of those teams are able to separate themselves from the group over the next seven weeks.

The Eastern Conference playoff race

The Eastern Conference isn’t quite as competitive as the Western Conference, though there’s still a battle going on in the middle of the standings. There are only 3.5 games separating the Wizards at No. 4 and the Heat at No. 8 right now, and the Pistons are only 1.5 games out of the eighth seed.

The next couple of weeks will be particularly interesting for the Pistons, as they play the Raptors twice and the Celtics, Cavaliers, Bucks and Heat once between now and March 7. Considering each of those teams are ahead of them in the standings, how they perform in those games could go a long way in determining whether or not they’re still playing at the end of April.

Other than the Pistons, all eyes should be on the Bucks. Not only because they have an opportunity to secure home court advantage for the first round — they currently trail the Wizards by only one game — but also because they would be matched up with the Cavaliers in the opening round if the playoffs began today. Any fan of the NBA should be rooting for at least four games of LeBron James vs. Giannis Antetokounmpo.

The Rookie of the Year

This season’s Rookie of the Year race has quickly become last season’s MVP race.

There’s no doubt that Ben Simmons has been the most consistent rookie this season. Aside from a slight scoring dip in the month of December, he’s put up similar splits each month this season, culminating in averages of 16.4 points, 7.8 rebounds and 7.3 assists per game. He already has six triple-doubles — the most for a rookie since Magic Johnson — and he’s done it on a team that has been in the playoff race for almost the entire season. His defense, which was a concern entering the 2016 NBA Draft, has been much better than advertised as well.

Donovan Mitchell, meanwhile, has been more of a slow burn. He came off the bench for eight of his first 11 games with the Jazz and it wasn’t until December that he started to break out. He’s been fantastic since then, with averages of 22.4 points, 3.8 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game on 46.4 percent shooting from the field and 35.2 percent shooting from the perimeter from Dec. 1 onwards. He hasn’t shot the ball as well during the Jazz’s on-going win streak, but it hasn’t prevented him from stepping up in big moments.

Although the Rookie of the Year award is still Simmons’ to lose, the gap has closed over the last couple of months and it could become even closer depending on how the remainder of the season plays out. The fact that both of their teams have an opportunity to make the playoffs and move up in the standings only adds to the intrigue.

The Cavaliers

After the moves they made at the trade deadline, the Cavaliers are much better suited to make the NBA Finals this season. They no longer have someone who can fill Kyrie Irving’s role in the offense as a consistent secondary scorer — Isaiah Thomas was supposed to be that person this season — but they got younger, more athletic and added some outside shooting around LeBron James. The combination should be what they need to improve offensively and defensively, both of which were disasters heading into the trade deadline.

The problem the Cavaliers face is they only have 26 games to develop the chemistry they need to make another deep postseason run. While the new pieces they added should have a better understanding of their role in the system, Tyronn Lue still has to integrate at least one starter in George Hill and three key pieces off their bench in Larry Nance Jr., Jordan Clarkson and Rodney Hood, the latter of whom could end up in the starting lineup depending on how J.R. Smith and Cedi Osman perform down the final stretch of the regular season.

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James playing like an MVP candidate again will make for an easier transition, but he’ll need some help if the Cavaliers are going to emerge from the Eastern Conference and compete with the Warriors in the NBA Finals. As promising as their road wins against the Celtics and Thunder were before All-Star Weekend, consistency will be the true test.