NBA Playoff Teams That Will Fade Down the Stretch

The final month of the NBA regular season holds a number of meanings for the league's 30 teams.

For the elites, the last stretch of basketball is a luxurious gift. There's time for a few minor adjustments to the playoff rotation. Rest takes precedence of wins and losses as the playoff picture grows clearer.

As for the bottom feeders, the focus shifts (or stays in some cases) to player development with future seasons in mind. Young talent takes center stage, with flashes of brilliance sprinkled between the inevitable growing pains.

For the franchises on this list, though, the final weeks of the season are nothing more than survival mode. That might mean fighting for playoff berths or defending lofty playoff seeds built on successes now fading in the rearview mirror.

No game is more important than the next one for these teams. But these stumbling clubs need to make sure that they keep their recent struggles from becoming a defining theme.

Chicago Bulls

Maybe fatigue has started to set in after a season's worth of speculation over the return of former MVP Derrick Rose.

Maybe that fatigue is the simple result of some of the heaviest workloads handed out in the NBA—both Luol Deng (39.0 minutes per game) and Joakim Noah (38.0) rank in the top 10.

Whatever the reason may be, the Chicago Bulls have appeared to hit a wall of late. They have just a .368 winning percentage since Feb. 1 and find themselves entangled in a three-team race for the Eastern Conference's fifth seed.

Rose may be hoping for a return to normalcy whenever he gets back on the floor (via K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune), but even a superstar can't prepare for the league's blistering pace.

The Bulls won't fall out of the playoff picture, but it's getting harder to see them doing anything when they get there.

Golden State Warriors

The Golden State Warriors have spent the last month-plus going from the Western Conference trendy sleeper to being the team every top seed hopes to face in the postseason.

A 7-12 stretch has the tendency to do that sort of thing.

With Andrew Bogut still working his way back to 100 percent—Warriors fans would probably settle for 80 percent if it came with a guarantee of health at this point—and Stephen Curry struggling to find consistent support, the Warriors' best hope may lie in finding some "We Believe" magic that greeted the franchise in its last postseason appearance (via Lee Jenkins of The New York Times).

The Warriors have the talent to play with any team in the league, but the track record to keep bottom feeders from being sure-fire wins. Golden State's lack of experience (in terms of both its players and coach) and lack of interior scorers (its 37.8 points in the paint per game ranks 25th via teamrankings.com) leave it incapable of putting away lesser opponents far too often.

Los Angeles Clippers

The Los Angeles Clippers may have won the battle for L.A., but they've never carried the kind of respect a 45-21 team usually receives.

When the team dropped six of nine games during Chris Paul's absence (knee cap) even their 17-game winning streak earlier this season wasn't enough to keep them from fighting for just one playoff series with home-court advantage.

Although they've stabilized of late (10-4 in their last 14 games), they've struggled to compete with the other conference elites.

The Clippers haven't beaten another top-six Western Conference team (San Antonio Spurs, Oklahoma City Thunder, Memphis Grizzlies, Denver Nuggets and Golden State Warriors) since toppling the Rudy Gay-led Grizzlies back on Jan. 14. They're 0-6 against that group since then and hold just a 6-10 record against those clubs on the season.

New York Knicks

With all of the panic that surrounded Amar'e Stoudemire's return from his first knee surgery of the season, I don't recall hearing many concerns over a possible second operation. When the team raced out to an 18-5 start without him (tops in the Eastern Conference), that news would have probably been music to the ears of Knicks fans.

While news of Stoudemire's season-ending injury was hard to hear, it was far from this team's only problem.

Since that torrid beginning they're just a .500 ballclub (20-20). The perimeter attack that carried this team early (41 percent through those 23 games) has plummeted back to Earth (34 percent since).

As a result, they've gone from a menacing perch atop the conference standings to staring at an 11-game deficit at the new conference leaders, the defending champion Miami Heat (stats via TNT's postgame following the Knicks' 105-90 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on Mar. 14).

And things could still get worse. Carmelo Anthony's knee injury doesn't sound too severe (via Howard Beck of The New York Times), but it's still an obvious concern. Seeing Tyson Chandler join Anthony on the sideline with a knee bruise that has left him listed as "day-to-day" (via Frank Isola of the New York Daily News) is equally concerning with Stoudemire and Rasheed Wallace (foot) removed from New York's frontcourt.

Utah Jazz

If there's one thing keeping the Los Angeles Lakers' playoff hopes alive after Kobe Bryant's severe ankle sprain left him out "indefinitely" (via Lakers.com reporter Mike Trudell), it's the Utah Jazz.

The Jazz chose to hold on to both of their impending free agents, Paul Millsap and Al Jefferson, at the Feb. 21 NBA trade deadline with hopes of getting a playoff run out of the duo. 

Considering how the team has played since, it's a decision the franchise may soon regret. Utah has dropped eight of its 10 games since that time. The Jazz have stumbled into a minus-3.1 point differential over that stretch, despite having a 30-point win over the lowly Charlotte Bobcats during that period.

The surging Lakers nipped at their heels during the early part of those struggles and have since surpassed the Jazz for the eighth and final playoff spot. With five playoff locks or hopefuls awaiting them in their next five games and both the Dallas Mavericks and Portland Trail Blazers moving within 2.5 games of the Jazz, it might be time for Utah fans to start checking out some mock draft boards.