The Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics secured spots in their respective conference finals over the past 48 hours, while the Cleveland Cavaliers and Oklahoma City Thunder forced winner-take-all Game 7s on the road, leaving the NBA’s bracket half-resolved and pushing two of the league’s marquee second-round matchups into Friday and Saturday.

Denver closed out the Los Angeles Clippers in five games with a 118-103 win at Ball Arena on Tuesday night, sending Nikola Jokic to a fourth consecutive Western Conference final and ending a Clippers season that began with championship odds inside the league’s top five. Jokic finished with 32 points, 14 rebounds and 11 assists, his fourth triple-double of the series, and Jamal Murray added 24 points on 10-of-17 shooting. Aaron Gordon, who had hit a corner three to ice Game 4 in Los Angeles, scored 19 of his 22 in the first half and helped Denver build a 17-point lead by intermission that the Clippers never seriously threatened.

“This group has been together long enough to know what closing looks like,” Nuggets head coach Michael Malone said in his postgame remarks. “We didn’t come into tonight talking about Game 5. We came in talking about the first six minutes of Game 5. That’s the only way I know how to coach this team in May.”

Boston followed Wednesday night at TD Garden with a 114-101 win over the Indiana Pacers, also in five games, behind 36 points from Jayson Tatum and a 24-point, 12-assist outing from Jrue Holiday. Jaylen Brown, who had been limited by a left hamstring strain through the opening games of the series, scored 22 points and was on the floor for the closing four minutes. Tyrese Haliburton, the Pacers’ All-NBA guard who had played through a wrist sprain since Game 1, finished with 19 points on 7-of-21 shooting and committed five turnovers. Indiana head coach Rick Carlisle, asked afterward whether Haliburton would require offseason surgery, said the team’s medical staff would meet with the player Friday and that no decision had been made.

“He gave us everything he had, and that is the only sentence I want to use about him tonight,” Carlisle told reporters in a brief postgame availability. The Pacers’ season, their first conference semifinal appearance since 2014, ends with the franchise’s most playoff wins in eleven years.

The Eastern Conference final, league officials confirmed Wednesday night, will not begin before Sunday and could be pushed to Monday if Game 7 between Cleveland and Milwaukee runs into Friday evening. The Cavaliers forced that decisive game with a 116-105 win at Fiserv Forum on Tuesday night, behind another 38-point performance from Donovan Mitchell and a 19-point, 9-rebound outing from Evan Mobley, who has averaged a double-double across the series. Giannis Antetokounmpo finished with 31 points and 14 rebounds in the loss, but the Bucks shot just 9-of-31 from beyond the arc and committed 18 turnovers. Damian Lillard, in his sixth game back from an Achilles strain, scored 16 points off the bench but was again held out of Milwaukee’s final defensive possession by head coach Doc Rivers.

“We have one game left, and it’s at home, and that’s what we wanted when this series started,” Rivers said. “I’m not going to relitigate anything from tonight. The film is the film, and we’ll watch it tomorrow.”

The Thunder, meanwhile, completed their own come-from-behind escape on Tuesday night, beating the top-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves 119-112 at Target Center to tie the series 3-3. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander followed his Game 5 career-best 42-point outing with 37 points, 8 rebounds and 6 assists, and Chet Holmgren posted his second straight 20-and-10 performance with five additional blocks. Lu Dort hit a corner three with 47 seconds left that pushed the Oklahoma City lead to seven, after Minnesota had cut what was once a 14-point deficit to two with under three minutes to play.

Anthony Edwards, the Timberwolves’ fifth-year guard, finished with 30 points but went 4 of 14 in the fourth quarter and missed a contested three with 19 seconds left that would have cut the deficit to four. “We have one game in this building to figure it out,” Edwards told reporters afterward. “If we don’t, it’s on us. Nobody else.” Game 7 in Minneapolis is scheduled for Saturday night, with Game 7 in Cleveland set for Friday.

“Two Game 7s in the second round is the kind of bracket the league hasn’t seen since 2018, and the only thing that has stopped this postseason from setting overall ratings records is the calendar,” said Karen Maldonado, a sports-media analyst at MoffettNathanson. “If both Game 7s happen, the conference finals will start later than the league wanted, but the lead-in is going to be enormous. That tradeoff isn’t a hard one.”

ESPN and TNT, in a joint statement Wednesday, said combined viewership across the second round was running 21 percent ahead of the same window in 2025, with Tuesday’s Thunder-Timberwolves game drawing the round’s largest cable audience to date. League officials privately attributed part of the surge to the broader return of casual sports audiences since the April 15 Iran ceasefire, which has pulled household viewing patterns back toward entertainment and playoff programming.

In Major League Baseball, the Detroit Tigers maintained their lead in the American League Central with a 6-2 win over the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday night, behind seven shutout innings from right-hander Tarik Skubal, whose ERA dropped to 1.61 across seven starts. Detroit closed Tuesday at 22-10. The Cincinnati Reds, who hold a five-game lead in the NL Central, split a two-game set with the Milwaukee Brewers, with shortstop Elly De La Cruz hitting his 13th home run of the season Tuesday night at American Family Field. The New York Yankees, who fired bench coach Brad Ausmus last weekend, won three of four against the Toronto Blue Jays to close their road trip at 13-20.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, in a statement released Wednesday night, said the league would confirm Eastern and Western Conference final tipoff times within 12 hours of each Game 7’s conclusion. Officials said the Finals remained tentatively scheduled to open June 4 in the higher-seeded team’s arena, and that schedule adjustments would be communicated to broadcast partners by Sunday evening.