Potential Heat-Bucks tie at East’s tip prompts paranoia

The Bucks’ home win over the Celtics in the early hours of Friday (4/8) elevated the champions to 50-30 and kept them on an equalizer course in Miami that remains at the top of the East. The Heat are up 52-38, but both teams have two games left in the regular season and a 52-30 draw shouldn’t be considered that unlikely. We explain how that can happen and how we’ll ultimately arrive at the answer as to whether Miami or Milwaukee will have home advantage through to the region’s finals.

The Heat and the Bucks have won two games in a row in the regular season, so if they finish 52-30, the first criterion will be automatically removed again. To do that, Eric Spolstra’s side need to rest their main players in the final game of the regular season, when the veteran coach may want to lose at home to the winning Atlanta Hawks and away to the indifferent Orlando Magic. Logically, if he needed the result, he wouldn’t have done it… You’ll see that he doesn’t care about this match and he’ll probably respond to it in the second. The 52-30 requires two wins for the Bucks, in Detroit against the Pistons and in Cleveland against the Cavaliers.

Since the first criterion is not discussed (2-2 games between them), the second is the position of each team in the division in which it participates. And there’s a tie as the Heat head Southeast and the Bucks head Central. The third criterion is the percentage of wins/losses in the division when the two teams are in the same league. They’re not, so let’s go to the fourth criterion, which is the percentage of wins/losses in the East. If the Heat and Bucks finish 52-30, that means Miami has lost two games to Eastern teams and is down to 34-18 against Eastern teams and Milwaukee has won two Eastern teams and is up to 34-18 against Eastern teams . So goes the fourth criterion.

The fifth criterion is the best odds against teams from the Eastern Region who are in a position that leads straight into the playoffs and play-in tournament (Celtics, Sixers, Raptors, Bulls, Cavaliers, Nets, Hawks, Hornets) . In the hypothetical scenario of the Heat’s two losses and the Bucks’ two wins, Miami will play 21-14 and Milwaukee 19-16 against the top ten teams, leaving the Florida team superior by only two results.

For the record, if we had to use the sixth criterion, We’d see Miami excel even there, even for just one result. It has a record of 10-10 against the top ten teams against the Mavericks, Nuggets, Warriors, Clippers, Grizzlies, Pelicans, Suns, Spurs, Jazz, Timberwolves while Milwaukee is at 9-11 as it is 1-1 against on every team except Minnesota, where he lost twice!