The Western Conference is not the NBA’s only free-for-all when it comes to playoff seeding.
The East is staging quite the race for seeds 3-8 itself. The difference from the West is that only six teams are contending for those six spots, so everyone is safely in the field.
But only two games separate third-place Cleveland (42-29) from sixth-place Washington (40-31), with Miami (39-33) and Milwaukee (37-34) not that far behind, either.
Also unlike the West, the Eastern Conference teams play relatively easy schedules. In the West, only Minnesota among the contenders has remaining opponents with a cumulative winning percentage less than .