The benighted sport of professional basketball wraps up its six-month long regular season in the next two days, to be followed by a ten-week post-season. The old saw about how basketball games never start until the final five minutes is equally true now: a playoff series never begins until Game 5, and the playoffs don't really get interesting until the semis. The NBA has seen fit to eliminate only half the league from the playoffs, most of whom were playing for the draft lottery since Christmas, thereby creating a situation where the game gets overshadowed by its college counterpart (which appeals to serious fans of the sport due to the fact that its participants use something called "strategy") for months at a time, and the only thing of interest to fans since February is playoff seeding.

And tonight, in Memphis, a clusterfuck of monumental proportions is about to result. The NBA, in its infinite wisdom, has drawn up a playoff system where the divisional winners (San Antonio, Phoenix and Denver in the West, Detroit, Miami and New Jersey in the East) are assured of the top three seeds in each bracket. There is also a longstanding rule that gives the team with the best-record home court advantage in any series. The one drawback is where, due to an imbalanced league, one of the divisions is so weak that a divisional titlist has a worse record than almost every other team in the playoffs. In that situation, it's theoretically possible for such a "champion", which would automatically receive the third seed, to face a sixth-seed with a better record (and hence, have the home-court advantage), while the fifth-seed, a team with a superior record, would be forced to go on the road against the 4-spot.

And behold, that's exactly what's going to happen in the West. The Clippers, one of the teams that's usually preparing for summer vacation right now, is set to play the Grizzlies, with the winner probably assured of the fifth seed in the Western Conference playoffs. That will mean a face-off with the Dallas Mavericks, the team which barely missed out on the top record in the conference, with the winner likely playing the team with the best record, the world champion San Antonio Spurs, in the conference semis. The loser of tonight's game will play the third-seeded Denver Nuggets, but since both Memphis and the Clips have better records than Denver, they will get to play 4-out-of-7 at home (and the winner will likely get Phoenix, a much easier opponent than the Spurs).

Both teams are going through the motions, claiming that they're all about winning and developing momentum for the playoffs, but the temptation is too obvious to ignore. It makes no sense to create a "loser wins" situation, but that's what's going to happen tonight.