April 2, 2026, 8:46 p.m. CT

For a second consecutive season, the Houston Rockets will advance to the eight-team Western Conference playoffs.

The Rockets (47-29), who have won four straight games, clinched a top-six spot in the West standings when Phoenix lost at Charlotte on Thursday night. The Suns (42-35) are currently at No. 7, and Houston owns the head-to-head tiebreaker.

In each conference, teams seeded at No. 6 and above advance directly to the playoffs without having to go through the NBA’s play-in tournament. And with Houston having only six games left to play in its 2025-26 regular season, it is no longer mathematically possible to fall below Phoenix.

For the Rockets as a franchise, their appearances in the 2025 and 2026 playoffs are a welcome turn of events after a multi-year rebuilding project at the start of the decade. From 2021 through 2024, Houston missed the playoffs each spring.

Led by an All-Star duo of Kevin Durant and Alperen Sengun, the Rockets are currently seeded fifth in the West. As the regular season winds down, that’s just ahead of the Minnesota Timberwolves (46-30) and narrowly behind the Los Angeles Lakers (50-26) and Denver Nuggets (49-28).

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Each team is well behind the West’s No. 2 seed, the San Antonio Spurs (58-18), so it’s a certainty that those four will be the No. 3 through No. 6 seeds, in some order. The teams seeded third and fourth will own home-court advantage (Game 1, Game 2, Game 5, and Game 7) in the resulting best-of-seven, first-round series.

Since Houston will be in either the 3-6 or 4-5 series, it guarantees that either the Lakers, Nuggets, or Timberwolves will be the eventual first-round opponent. For the Rockets, playoffstatus.com currently lists the Nuggets at a 66% probability; the Lakers at 29%; and the Timberwolves at 4%.

As of Thursday, PlayoffStatus.com gave the Rockets only a 20% chance at securing a top-four seed and home-court advantage in the first round. Then again, Houston fans learned one year ago that home-court advantage does not guarantee success.

In the 2025 first round, the second-seeded Rockets lost a decisive, winner-take-all Game 7 at home versus the seventh-seeded Golden State Warriors.

Houston might have an opportunity to make amends as a lower seed in 2026, though its first-round matchup won’t be against Golden State.

And then there’s this to consider: Houston’s most recent NBA championship came as a No. 6 seed, in 1995.

Whether in Houston or away, Game 1 of the 2026 first-round series will be played on Saturday, April 18 or Sunday, April 19. A complete schedule will be announced shortly after the regular season concludes on Sunday, April 12.

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