The second half of the NBA’s opening playoff weekend tips Sunday with four Game 1s spread across nine hours, beginning with the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 1 p.m. Eastern home opener against the Sacramento Kings at Paycom Center and closing with the Golden State Warriors’ late-night meeting with the Phoenix Suns at Chase Center. The slate follows a Saturday in which the Los Angeles Lakers stunned the top-seeded Denver Nuggets in overtime and the Boston Celtics outlasted the Chicago Bulls by a single possession in front of a TD Garden crowd that did not exhale until the final horn.

Boston’s 104-101 escape, sealed when Jayson Tatum blocked a Coby White step-back three-pointer at the buzzer, was the closer of Saturday’s four games and the closest opener the East’s top seed has played at home since the 2018 first round. Tatum finished with 31 points and 11 rebounds; White led all scorers with 33 for a Chicago club that had backed into the postseason through Wednesday’s play-in win over Atlanta. Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla, asked whether the margin had caught the staff off guard, said it had not.

“You don’t get to choose the texture of a Game 1,” Mazzulla told reporters at TD Garden on Saturday night. “Chicago is a young team and a hungry one. If you thought they would arrive here intimidated, you were going to be wrong, and we were not going to be wrong about that.”

The day’s other three results split. The No. 2 Cleveland Cavaliers held off a Miami Heat club that played without Jimmy Butler in the second half — Butler exited after twisting his right knee in the third quarter and did not return — to win 109-99 behind 28 points from Donovan Mitchell and 22 from Evan Mobley. The Indiana Pacers, returning to the postseason as the East’s No. 6 seed, defeated the No. 3 New York Knicks 112-106 at Madison Square Garden, with Tyrese Haliburton recording 26 points and 14 assists in 38 minutes of work and Pascal Siakam scoring 24. And in the late game, the Lakers’ 117-114 overtime road win over Denver delivered the upset of the opening day, with LeBron James adding 34 points, 12 rebounds and 9 assists in 44 minutes and rookie guard Kasparas Jakucionis scoring 18 points off the bench.

Sunday’s tip times stretch the weekend’s bracket across each remaining first-round series. Oklahoma City, which surrendered the West’s top seed in the final weekend of the regular season and now enters as the No. 2, will host a Sacramento Kings team appearing in its first playoff series since 2023. The Milwaukee Bucks visit the No. 4-seeded Orlando Magic at 3:30 p.m. Eastern at Kia Center, a series several analysts have flagged as the East’s most stylistically uncertain matchup. The Houston Rockets, who survived their own play-in scare to claim the No. 3 seed in the West, host the No. 6 Minnesota Timberwolves at 7 p.m. And the No. 4 Warriors, fresh off Tuesday’s play-in win over the Lakers, close the weekend against the No. 5 Suns at 9:30 p.m. Eastern.

Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault, addressing reporters Saturday morning in Oklahoma City, declined to characterize his team’s slide to the No. 2 seed as a setback. “Where we sit changes one thing and one thing only, which is who we play,” Daigneault said. “We’re playing Sacramento. We have spent the last 96 hours preparing for Sacramento. That is what we are going to do.”

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who finished the regular season averaging 30.4 points and 6.2 assists and was named an MVP finalist Thursday alongside Denver’s Nikola Jokic and Boston’s Tatum, will start Sunday after sitting out the regular-season finale. Kings head coach Doug Christie, in his second postseason at the helm of a club that ended its longest playoff drought in franchise history two seasons ago, said the Kings would not adjust their rotation in light of OKC’s full availability.

“We’re going to play our game,” Christie said Saturday in a brief media availability at Paycom Center. “If we tighten the rotation, it’ll be because the game asks us to. Not because of who is in the other huddle.”

Orlando’s series against Milwaukee will be the first postseason matchup for Magic forward Paolo Banchero since the 2024 first round, and the first since his six-week absence with an ankle sprain that ended in late March. Banchero played in nine of Orlando’s final eleven regular-season games. Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who missed two games in early April with right calf tightness, is on the active list with no minutes restriction, the team said Saturday evening.

In Houston, the Rockets’ opener against Minnesota brings together two clubs whose seeding was decided in regular-season head-to-head play less than a week ago. Houston guard Jalen Green, whose 39 points in Wednesday’s play-in loss to Memphis went unrewarded after the Rockets dropped that game and won their follow-up to claim the No. 3 seed, will start Sunday alongside center Alperen Sengun. Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch, asked about Anthony Edwards’s right ankle, said the All-Star guard would play full minutes. “Ant is good,” Finch said. “That’s the whole report.”

The Warriors-Suns nightcap will be the third-oldest postseason matchup on the calendar by average roster age, league data indicated. Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Jimmy Butler will be joined in the rotation by Phoenix’s Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal, a Suns trio that has reached the postseason intact for the first time since 2024. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who guided his club through Tuesday’s play-in win in San Francisco, said Friday that the team’s preparation had been “calibrated to a different opponent” earlier in the week and reset on Wednesday after Phoenix locked the No. 5 seed.

Travel-security protocols put in place across the league in March remain at elevated levels for Sunday’s slate, an NBA spokesperson confirmed Saturday, with no changes to bag-check or venue-perimeter procedures despite the prisoner exchange announced from Doha and the ceasefire that took effect Wednesday. Commissioner Adam Silver, speaking briefly in Cleveland before Saturday’s Cavaliers-Heat tip and again in Denver before the late game, said the league office would review the posture “after the first round, not during it.”

Game 2 of each of Saturday’s series tips Monday and Tuesday. Sunday’s Game 2 windows will be confirmed within hours of the final result Sunday night, the league office said in a Saturday evening email to club communications staffs.