NBA Monthly Roundup: Knicks and Stephen Curry have risen; Lakers are back

NBA takeaways from April and looking ahead by making a few predictions for the playoffs. 

Well, the home stretch of the NBA regular season is finally here. It’s been a 72-game sprint since December to get back to a normal NBA calendar, but we made it (almost).

The last month or so of a typical season is always sort of a limp to the finish line. You have teams at the bottom of the league giving 30 minutes of playing time to players most fans have never heard of, and contenders starting to lean on some load management and extra caution as they approach the playoffs.

But there’s still a lot of loose ends that need to be tied up and important games to be played, specifically in terms of seeding and play-in tournament participants. So let’s do a quick recap of an eventful month of April before peeking ahead into what the playoffs will have in store for us in May.