Old Zhang had missed the playoffs yet again.
But that was no big deal.
As everyone knew, the Lakers had lost, but Old Zhang hadn't!
For LeBron, who had enjoyed an entire illustrious career, missing the playoffs just once was nothing... He didn't care in the slightest.
Not in the slightest...
The play-in tournament had concluded.
After several grueling elimination games, the teams that ultimately advanced were the Detroit Pistons, the Miami Heat, the San Antonio Spurs, and the Los Angeles Lakers.
With those four teams' spots officially secured, what came next was naturally the thrilling main event: the playoffs themselves.
The first-round matchups!
In the Eastern Conference, the matchups were the New York Knicks against the Miami Heat, the Boston Celtics against the Detroit Pistons, the Brooklyn Nets against the Atlanta Hawks, and finally, the Milwaukee Bucks against the Philadelphia 76ers.
In the Western Conference, the Oklahoma Thunder faced the Los Angeles Lakers, the Denver Nuggets faced the San Antonio Spurs, the Golden State Warriors faced the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the Phoenix Suns faced the Dallas Mavericks.
Among those eight matchups, there was no shortage of seemingly evenly matched contests.
In particular, most fans probably found the outcomes of the fourth-versus-fifth-seed matchups in both conferences extremely difficult to predict.
The teams seemed close in strength, and all of them were formidable.
Perhaps the direction of those series would ultimately come down to how each team's stars performed.
There was little time to wait. April 21 arrived.
The playoffs for the 2023–2024 season officially tipped off.
The games opening that day were the Nets against the Hawks, the Bucks against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Warriors against the Timberwolves, and the Suns against the Mavericks.
They were precisely the four closely matched series that countless fans had been eagerly anticipating.