The NBA regular season ends Sunday night with four Eastern Conference seedings and three Western Conference slots still mathematically undecided, leaving the league’s full playoff bracket to be set by a slate of games tipping off at 6 p.m. Eastern and stretching past midnight on the West Coast.

The picture at the top of each conference has already firmed up. The Boston Celtics, who clinched the East’s No. 1 seed earlier in the week, will close their regular season at home against the Washington Wizards in a game most observers expect to feature limited minutes for Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Oklahoma City, the West’s top seed since last weekend, will rest Shai Gilgeous-Alexander entirely against the Utah Jazz, head coach Mark Daigneault confirmed Saturday in a brief media availability following the Thunder’s morning shootaround.

Beneath those two locked positions, however, every other seed in each conference is in play.

In the East, the Orlando Magic, New York Knicks, Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers remain bunched within a single game of each other for the 4 through 7 slots. Orlando, riding a nine-of-eleven stretch since forward Paolo Banchero’s return from a six-week ankle absence, can finish as high as fourth or as low as seventh depending on Sunday’s results. The Magic close at home against Detroit; the Knicks travel to Atlanta; Miami hosts Charlotte; and Indiana, whose seeding could swing by two positions, plays the Cleveland Cavaliers at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in what is expected to be a near-full-strength matchup. Cleveland’s seeding is locked at No. 2 but the Cavaliers’ coaching staff has signaled that key rotation players will play meaningful minutes.

“We’re not going to manufacture rest just to manufacture it,” Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson said Saturday in Indianapolis. “We’ve been off enough. We want to play basketball that looks like the basketball we’ll play Tuesday. Whoever ends up where, we’ll figure that out at the same time everyone else does.”

Atlanta head coach Quin Snyder, whose team has already been eliminated from postseason contention, said the Hawks would treat the New York matchup as a competitive game despite the gap in stakes. “Our guys want to win in this building,” Snyder said. “We owe the building that.”

The Detroit Pistons enter Sunday holding the East’s 9 seed and the right to host a Wednesday play-in game, an outcome that would mark the franchise’s first postseason appearance since 2019. A Detroit loss to Orlando combined with a Chicago Bulls win in Milwaukee would flip the two clubs and send the Pistons on the road, a scenario Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff has described in recent days as “the only one we can prevent ourselves.”

Cade Cunningham, who has averaged 23.1 points and 7.8 assists across Detroit’s final ten games, said the team had spent much of Saturday’s film session re-watching its December overtime win in Orlando. “It’s not about the building or the seed,” Cunningham said. “It’s about playing the way we’ve played for two months. If we do that, the seed takes care of itself.”

In the Western Conference, the compression is even tighter. The Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Lakers, Minnesota Timberwolves, Memphis Grizzlies and Houston Rockets are separated by 2.5 games for seeds 2 through 6 — and three of those clubs play each other Sunday. Denver hosts Minnesota at Ball Arena in a game that could determine the conference’s second seed. The Lakers travel to face the Golden State Warriors, a contest the Warriors must win to clinch the West’s 7 seed and avoid the play-in. Houston closes its regular season in Memphis in a matchup that could swing both clubs by one or two positions.

The Lakers’ late surge — nine wins in their last 11, with LeBron James playing 32 minutes per night and rookie guard Kasparas Jakucionis emerging as a steady playmaker — has been the conference’s most-discussed late-season storyline. Head coach JJ Redick declined Saturday to commit to rest patterns for Sunday’s road game in San Francisco, saying only that the staff would “trust the room” on availability decisions.

“We earned the right to play meaningful minutes Sunday by playing meaningful basketball for six weeks,” Redick said. “I’m not going to dilute that by guessing now. We’ll see how we feel in the morning.”

Health questions continue to shape the bracket math. The Milwaukee Bucks confirmed Saturday afternoon that forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who has missed the past two games with right calf tightness, would be available for Sunday’s home game against Chicago, though the team did not commit to a minutes target. The Knicks’ Jalen Brunson, listed as questionable through the week with a sprained left wrist, is expected to play in Atlanta, head coach Tom Thibodeau told reporters Saturday. Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton, who sat out Thursday’s game against Toronto for what the team described as “general maintenance,” will play Sunday against Cleveland.

The league office confirmed the play-in tournament will tip off Tuesday with two games in each conference, hosted by the higher-seeded clubs. The opening round of the playoffs is scheduled to begin Saturday, April 18. Broadcast schedules for each first-round series will be finalized within hours of Sunday night’s final result, an NBA spokesperson said in an email Saturday evening.

The end of the regular season also closes a year shaped, more than usual, by external strain. Several team executives and front-office staff said in recent weeks that travel security protocols, adjusted in March after the onset of the Iran war, would remain in place through the postseason despite the ceasefire framework announced from the Islamabad talks earlier on Sunday. Two team security officials, granted anonymity to discuss internal procedures, said the NBA office had advised clubs to “hold the posture” through at least the second round.

Commissioner Adam Silver, addressing reporters briefly during a Saturday afternoon visit to the Boys & Girls Club of Indianapolis, called the season’s conclusion “the kind of finish that justifies 82 games” and said additional details on broadcast windows and matchup-specific scheduling would be released early Monday morning.