Suns 114, Blazers 108: Booker Powers Phoenix Past Portland

How the Play-In actually works in 2026

The format is the same one the league installed for the 2020-21 bubble restart and kept permanent two seasons later, but the stakes are easier to forget if you only tune in for the real playoffs. The Play-In Tournament runs from seeds seven through 10 in each conference. Seeds seven and eight play each other, and the winner grabs the seventh spot. Seeds nine and 10 play each other, and the loser goes home. The loser of the 7-vs-8 game then hosts the winner of the 9-vs-10 game for the final playoff seed.

So the Blazers are not done. Portland dropped Tuesday's game but still hosts an elimination matchup Friday against whoever wins the Los Angeles Clippers-Golden State Warriors game Wednesday. For Phoenix, the route is cleaner. The Suns are now slotted as the seven, and Game 1 of their first-round series at the second-seeded San Antonio Spurs is set for Sunday.

Advanced numbers on a 45-37 Phoenix team

The Suns finished the regular season 45-37, a comfortable winning mark that undersells how uneven they were. Phoenix sat in the middle of the Western Conference in net rating for most of the year, with a defense that ranked outside the top 12 in opponent effective field-goal percentage (eFG%) and an offense that got its boost from Booker's iso scoring and Brooks's catch-and-shoot efficiency. Coach Jordan Ott's first year on the bench was mostly about finding a rotation that could survive without Kevin Durant, who was traded out of Phoenix earlier in the season.

Portland came in at 42-40 and a lot more interesting on tape. Splitter took over after Chauncey Billups was placed on administrative leave in October during a federal illegal gambling investigation, and the Blazers went from a muddled season to a team with real defensive identity under the interim staff. Portland funnels everything at Clingan, the 7-foot-2 second-year center, and Ott spent most of his pregame press conference talking about how that coverage shaped his offensive script. The Blazers won five of their last seven and seven of their last 10 heading into Tuesday.

The pregame read was that Portland's defense would keep the game close and Phoenix's closing ability would decide it. That is almost exactly what happened. The Suns shot 52.8% from the field, posted a plus-6 turnover margin, and won the fourth quarter 28-22 behind Booker's two late post-ups against Avdija. Portland kept it within a possession entering the final three minutes, which is all any Play-In underdog can really ask for.

Ott, Splitter, and two very different benches

The coaching story is the most interesting subplot of this round. Jordan Ott is a first-year head coach, elevated to replace the previous staff after Phoenix reset the roster mid-season, and he has been direct about what his group is. Tuesday was the first postseason game of his head coaching career.

"Whoever's available, we'll make it work. We know we are a competitive group. We have more than enough to go out there and play and play as hard as we possibly can."

Jordan Ott, Phoenix Suns head coach, pregame

Splitter, meanwhile, is an interim who took over a top-tier Western Conference problem and turned it into a playoff push. He won an NBA title as a player with the 2014 San Antonio Spurs and spent the buildup to Tuesday trying to talk his young team into the right headspace for a single-elimination game.

"You can play that game super tense. It's a balance between playing hard and playing free a little bit. You cannot be in fear. You just have to play hard and enjoy that."

Tiago Splitter, Portland Trail Blazers interim head coach

That quote is worth sitting with. The Play-In has a way of bleeding teams that tighten up in transition and late-shot-clock offense, and Splitter watched the Blazers shoot 3-of-17 from distance in the second half before a garbage-time three from Shaedon Sharpe made the margin look a little friendlier. Phoenix closed games better all year and closed this one too.

What Prime Video as the broadcaster means

This is the first Play-In Tournament under the NBA's new 11-year national media rights deal, which runs through 2036 and splits the league across NBC, ESPN, and Amazon's Prime Video. Amazon paid for a package that includes the entire Play-In, a slate of regular-season games, a share of the Christmas window, select first-round playoff games, and the Conference Finals on a rotating basis with NBC. Tuesday's Suns-Blazers game was the first streaming-exclusive Play-In in league history, carried nationally only on Prime Video with no over-the-air or traditional cable alternative beyond local radio in each market.

That is a significant shift for casual fans. Local radio carried the game in Oregon and Arizona, but the national audience for the entire Play-In is now gated behind a Prime subscription. The NBA's official 2026 playoff schedule confirms the broadcast allocation for the rest of the postseason. Last year's Play-In averaged roughly 3.4 million viewers across four games on TNT. Amazon's number, once it surfaces, is the one the league is really watching.

The road to the first round

With the win, Phoenix heads to San Antonio for a first-round series against the second-seeded Spurs, a team that won 58 games and finished second in the West in defensive rating. That is a bad matchup for a Suns team that lives in the mid-post and relies on Booker to create for others. San Antonio's wing length and the emerging rim presence in its frontcourt figure to force Phoenix into more movement offense than Ott has run all year.

Portland's path is simpler and more brutal. The Blazers have to win Friday to survive. Their best version of itself relies on its defense, Avdija's heat check, and whatever Clingan can give as a rim-protecting anchor. Portland has not won a playoff series since 2019 and has not been to the postseason since 2021, the longest drought in the Western Conference.

For more on how the full bracket set up, see our breakdown of the NBA playoff picture from the final week and the broader 2026 NBA lottery outlook for the teams who missed the cut entirely.

What to watch Friday and next week

The Clippers-Warriors game Wednesday is the more fun night-in-isolation matchup on paper, which means Portland's Friday opponent will be a team that just played a high-minutes Play-In 48 hours earlier. Expect rotation shrinkage, a shorter bench, and Clingan's rim coverage to decide the first half. Our coverage of the Curry return and the Warriors' Play-In push and the final-night scramble for seeding has more on how the rest of the field got here.

The thing worth tracking, beyond any one bracket line, is what the Play-In looks like on Prime Video compared to what it looked like on TNT last year. AL.com reported that Amazon offered a free trial window for the Suns-Blazers tip, which suggests Amazon itself understands the on-ramp problem for fans who do not already have Prime. And the Springfield News-Sun's listing for the Prime Video broadcast made the same point about the new gating.

Tuesday was the first live test of the new deal. Phoenix won the game, but the league is watching a different scoreboard.