NBA playoff chaos: Lakers up 3-0, Celtics up 2-1, Spurs up 2-1
The playoff board is getting ugly fast. The Houston Rockets fell to the Los Angeles Lakers 112-108 in overtime and are now down 3-0. The Philadelphia 76ers lost to the Boston Celtics 108-100 and trail 2-1. The San Antonio Spurs beat the Portland Trail Blazers 120-108 to take a 2-1 lead. And the injury ledger is doing half the talking: Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid, Victor Wembanyama, Luka Doncic, and Austin Reaves are all absent, all consequential, all shaping this mess.
LeBron James, at 41, put up 29 points, 13 rebounds, and six assists — and became the oldest player to log 45 minutes in a playoff game. That is not subtle. Meanwhile, Jayson Tatum said "I'll get even better," which is exactly the sort of thing you say when your opponents are busy surviving their own depth chart.
Gobble's Take: At this point the playoffs are less about matchups and more about who can still field five players without checking WebMD first.
Source: Times Now News
The 2025 WNBA playoff field is set — and the injury trail getting here was brutal
Eight spots filled. A little seed jockeying left at the edges. But the real season story is what injuries did to the league's shape on the way here. The New York Liberty burned through 18 unique five-player starting combos, and their opening-night unit has only played 11 games together — Natasha Cloud, Sabrina Ionescu, Breanna Stewart, and Jonquel Jones all missed significant time. Over 130 player-games lost, just for the Liberty alone. The Storm matched them. The Fever lost their entire backcourt, including Caitlin Clark, as the season wore on.
League-wide, nearly 1,000 player-games vanished to injury this season. The Aces stayed the healthiest. The Connecticut Sun stayed relatively healthy too, without it translating into anything. The schedule sits in the background of all of it: the WNBA is now at 44 games per team, up from 40 last season and 34 before that. More games, more TV ad spots, more money — and fewer days between games for players to recover.
Gobble's Take: Nearly 1,000 player-games lost, and "depth" stopped being a buzzword somewhere around game 30. It just became the season.
Source: WNBA Visualized
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