The NBA’s 2026 postseason gets underway Saturday with four first-round openers, beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern with the Boston Celtics’ Game 1 against the Chicago Bulls at TD Garden and stretching past midnight on the West Coast with the Los Angeles Lakers’ visit to Ball Arena in Denver — a matchup that emerged from this week’s play-in tournament and has already become the marquee draw of the opening weekend.

The bracket settled into its final form Friday night when the Lakers, having stumbled into the West’s No. 8 seed after losing Sunday in San Francisco, dispatched the Memphis Grizzlies 118-109 in their second play-in game to claim the conference’s last playoff spot. The result pits LeBron James, in what he confirmed last month would be his 23rd and final NBA season, against a Denver club that opens the postseason as the West’s No. 1 seed after Oklahoma City surrendered the top line in the regular season’s final weekend.

“We earned the right to be in this building tonight,” Lakers head coach JJ Redick said after Friday’s win, referring to Saturday’s tip-off in Denver. “We didn’t earn the right to be comfortable in it. Nothing about this gets easier from here.”

Boston, the East’s No. 1 seed for the third consecutive season, will face a Bulls team that backed into the postseason by winning its play-in opener over Atlanta on Wednesday. The Celtics enter the series with the league’s deepest rotation and what head coach Joe Mazzulla on Friday described as “the healthiest 1-through-9 we’ve had at this point in any year I’ve coached.” Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Kristaps Porzingis and Derrick White are all available; the only listed absence is rookie wing Baylor Scheierman, ruled out with a left thumb sprain.

The day’s second Game 1 tips at 3:30 p.m. Eastern in Cleveland, where the No. 2-seeded Cavaliers host the Miami Heat. Miami, seeded sixth, earned the matchup after a Sunday-night win over Charlotte that pushed Indiana into the seventh slot. Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra, whose club has reached the conference finals in two of the past four postseasons despite middling seeding, said Friday that Jimmy Butler — listed as questionable for two weeks with a right knee contusion — would play. Tyler Herro, the Heat’s leading scorer through the regular season, will start.

“You can lean on history if you want to lean on it,” Spoelstra told reporters at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Friday afternoon. “We don’t. We have a group that has to figure out this Cleveland team, and Cleveland has a group that has to figure out us. That’s the only history that matters in this series.”

The early-evening Eastern game features the No. 3 Knicks at home against the No. 6 Pacers, a rematch of last year’s second-round series, which Indiana won in seven games. Both clubs are entering at full health: New York guard Jalen Brunson, whose left wrist had been a question through the season’s final week, was upgraded to available on Friday’s official injury report; Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton, who missed seven games in March with a hamstring strain, has played at least 32 minutes in each of the Pacers’ last six games.

The Lakers-Nuggets opener, tipping at 10 p.m. Eastern, is the only Game 1 of the weekend featuring two former MVPs on the floor in James and Denver center Nikola Jokic. The Lakers and Nuggets last met in the postseason in 2024, a series Denver won in five games. Jokic, who finished the regular season averaging 28.3 points, 12.1 rebounds and 9.4 assists, was named a finalist for his fourth Most Valuable Player award earlier in the week alongside Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Boston’s Tatum. The MVP winner will be announced during the conference semifinals.

Denver head coach Michael Malone, whose club entered the play-in chaos as a possible 2 or 3 seed only to inherit the West’s top line when Oklahoma City lost in Phoenix on Sunday, said the unexpected promotion had not changed his team’s preparation.

“We were going to play whoever the West gave us. The West gave us the Lakers,” Malone said Friday at Ball Arena. “Whatever I was going to say to my group at three was the same thing I was going to say to them at one or at two.”

Saturday’s three earlier games will be broadcast nationally on ABC; the late game shifts to ESPN. The remaining four Game 1s are scheduled for Sunday, with Oklahoma City hosting the Sacramento Kings at 1 p.m. Eastern, the Milwaukee Bucks visiting the No. 4-seeded Orlando Magic at 3:30, the Houston Rockets opening their series at home against the No. 5 Minnesota Timberwolves at 7 p.m., and the No. 4 Golden State Warriors hosting the No. 5 Phoenix Suns to close the weekend at 9:30. The league office finalized those windows on Monday morning, hours after Sunday night’s final regular-season tip-off.

Travel and arena security protocols put in place after the onset of the Iran war remain at elevated levels through the postseason, an NBA spokesperson confirmed by email Friday, despite the ceasefire that took effect Wednesday and Doha’s announcement earlier Saturday of a prisoner exchange involving detained foreigners. The league had advised teams in March to expect heightened bag-check and venue-perimeter procedures through “at least the second round,” two team security officials said at the time, and the spokesperson Friday said no rollback was scheduled.

Game 2 of each first-round series is set for Monday and Tuesday, with the league expected to finalize broadcast windows after Saturday’s results. Commissioner Adam Silver is scheduled to address reporters in Cleveland before the Cavaliers-Heat tip and again in Denver before the late game, an NBA communications staffer said Friday evening.