The Indiana Pacers-Boston Celtics tiebreaker could be decided tonight

The remaining regular season games between the Indiana Pacers and Boston Celtics hold the utmost importance.

My, how quickly things can change. Just a few weeks ago, I was diagraming the playoff seeding tiebreaker scenarios between the Indiana Pacers and the Philadelphia 76ers.

Well, that’s likely not going to matter now.

The Pacers have fallen in the standings and are sitting in the 4 seed in the Eastern Conference. They are 3 games behind the third spot, and with only 7 games to go, it’s really hard to imagine the Pacers moving up to that third seed.

But the Pacers can still have homecourt advantage in the first round of the playoffs if they finish with a better record than the Boston Celtics. That would lock Indiana into the 4 spot, and would make it so four of the seven games in the first-round series between those two teams would be played at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Sweet!

Getting the 4-seed might not seem like much. Many “fans” in my Twitter mentions have resigned to the team losing in the first round because they don’t think the Pacers are good enough. Maybe that’s the case. I’m not so sure, I think having homecourt is a huge deal.

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Mark Montieth wrote a terrific story for Pacers.com discussing load management and brought up an interesting factoid about the Pacers as the home team in a playoff series:

“How important [is homecourt advantage]? The Pacers are 14-5 in NBA playoff series when they have homecourt advantage and 5-20 when they don’t.”

So, yeah, homecourt would be a big deal as it would substantially increase Indiana’s chances of moving on to the second round. If that isn’t the goal, I don’t know what we are doing here. Thus, the Pacers earn a ton of benefits from chasing the fourth seed.

Currently, Indiana is one game up on Boston in the standings. 1 game may not sound like much, but both teams have 7 games left. In a normal scenario, picking up an extra win over a 7 game stretch is somewhat hard.

But this is not at all a normal scenario. Why is that?

Because the Indiana Pacers and Boston Celtics play each other two more times. Those two games will decide the season series tiebreaker. They will have a massive, massive bearing on who finishes higher in the standings.

Currently, the two teams have played each other 2 times this season and split the series 1-1.  If they split the final two games, they will finish tied and nobody will gain an advantage in head to head matchups, which would make the tiebreaker even MORE complicated.

If you read my Sixers tiebreaker piece, you’ve already seen this, but let’s look back at the way the NBA determines the winner of a two-way tiebreaker:

1. Better record in head-to-head games
2. Division winner (this criterion is applied regardless of whether the tied teams are in the same division)
3. Higher winning percentage within division (if teams are in the same division)
4. Higher winning percentage in conference games
5. Higher winning percentage against playoff teams in own conference
6. Higher winning percentage against playoff teams in the opposite conference
7. Higher point differential between points scored and points allowed

If the Pacers take care of business against the Boston Celtics in both of the upcoming matchups, then we are done here. They would clinch the tiebreaker over the Green and White and should the teams finish with the same record, the Pacers would get the higher seed.

If the teams split the two games, then things get much more complicated. Neither team will win their respective division and they play in different divisions, so scenarios 2 and 3 are not applicable. Thus, the tiebreaker would default to “higher winning percentage in conference games”.

This is also where the tiebreaker would be decided should the teams need to be separated. Let me explain why.

Currently, both the Pacers and Celtics are 30-15 against the Eastern Conference with 7 games to go. Since we are assuming that the two teams split the games against each other in this scenario, for all intents and purposes, they would both be 31-16 against the East with 5 games to go.

The Pacers are currently ahead by 1 game in the standings, and if the teams’ alternate victories in their two remaining games, Indiana would still hold a 1 game lead. But we are discussing a tiebreaker, and discussing what would happen if the teams ended up with the same record. If they end up with the same record, that means the Pacers lead would be zero games ahead.

For the Celtics to catch the Pacers in the standings in this scenario, they would have to win one more game than the Pacers in the 5 games that aren’t against each other. But here’s the thing. If they do that (win exactly one more than Indiana in the 5 games) they would finish with a better conference record than the Pacers no matter how you slice it.

For example, say they split the remaining two games and then the Pacers go 4-1 in their other 5 games and the Celtics go 5-0. That would mean both teams would finish with a 50-32 record and would be 2-2 against each other. But the Cs would have notched one more win against Eastern Conference opponents, meaning they would get the tiebreaker.

What does this mean? It means that there is no path in which the Pacers lose any game to the Celtics and end up with the tiebreaker over them. One single Indiana Pacers loss to Boston in the two remaining games would mean that Boston owns the seeding advantage should the teams finished equal in the standings.

So, yeah, tonight’s game is of the highest importance. If the Pacers lose, they would drop to 5th in the East as they would lose the tiebreaker to Boston and fall behind them in the standings. They could pass them back with a strong finish, but for a moment, they would be fifth.

Tiebreakers are complicated, but I can sum this one up pretty easily. If the Indiana Pacers lose tonight, the Boston Celtics would have the head-to-head two-team tiebreaker. It’s that simple. Thankfully, the Pacers will still control their own destiny for the 4-seed, loss or not.