With the Trailblazers win over the seventh-place Hawks on Tuesday night, the Pacers clinched a top-six finish in the Eastern Conference which guarantees they'll be in the playoffs for a second straight year without having to go through the play-in round.
The Pacers are 44-31 with seven games to play and the Hawks fell to 36-39 with seven games left on their schedule. The Hawks held the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Pacers with wins in two of three games in their series this year, so they would have had the advantage if the two teams had the same record, but Tuesday's result guarantees Atlanta can't match Indiana.
The Pacers didn't clinch a playoff berth last season until the season's final day when they beat the Hawks to clinch the No. 6 seed, which they rode to the Eastern Conference finals, pulling mild upsets over the No. 3 seed Bucks and No. 2 seed Knicks before losing to the No. 1 seed and eventual NBA champion Celtics. Though they won't be on the same razor's edge for the last 12 days of this season, their remaining games still matter for seeding purposes. They currently sit at fourth place in the Eastern Conference and holding that position would mean home-court advantage in four games out of seven in the first round. They are four games back of the third-place Knicks, two games ahead of the fifth-place Pistons and three ahead of the sixth place Bucks. The Pacers have experienced some level of chippiness in series with all three of those teams, and home-court with any of them could make a difference and that could come down to the regular season's final weekend.
The Pacers play five of their seven remaining games at home. They host lottery-bound Charlotte on Wednesday and Utah on Friday before going to Denver to play a Nuggets team fighting for a top-four seed in the West on Sunday. They return to play another lottery-bound team in the Wizards on April 8 before a home back-to-back against first-place Cleveland on April 10 and eighth-place Orlando on April 11. They close the season in Cleveland against the Cavaliers on April 13.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Pacers playoff seeding: Clinch top-6 seed and NBA playoff berth
