Predicting how many wins the Los Angeles Lakers need to avoid NBA Play-In Tournament

How many more wins do the Los Angeles Lakers need to secure a top 6 seed in the West?

Now we get to the difficult part of this exercise; how many games do the Los Angeles Lakers have to win in order to secure a top 6 seed in the Western Conference standings heading into the playoffs? That could be difficult to answer. However, for the sake of this article, we're going to attempt to get an answer.

Let's project out and assume the Suns and Pelicans are going to close the season with an above .500 record over the last handful of games they have on their schedule. A safe assumption is that they're going to win 10-12 more games considering they have 17 and 18 games remaining on their schedule.

That puts the Pelicans and Suns around the 47-48 win range; again, it could be slightly less or perhaps more if one of them gets hot. Under that assumption, that means the Lakers would be in a good position to finish as a top 6 seed if they end up with 47 wins on the season. That means the Lakers have to close the season with an 11-5 record over the last 16 games remaining on their schedule.

Considering the Lakers are 12-5 in their last 17 games, finishing 11-5 over the final few weeks of the season isn't that outlandish. The question is, can they be consistent enough down the stretch to get the job done? We shall see.