On April 17, the battle for the regular season between the East and West officially ended, and the 16 teams that made the playoffs were officially announced.

The Western Conference was decided in the final game, and sadly the Jazz team of veteran coach Jerry Sloan ended the season 42-40. It is only one win away from the Nuggets, who are eighth in the West.

The Jazz, who had an elderly Utah duo last season, only finished 7th in the West, which fully shows that Karl Malone's last 20-point season is not very golden.

The most notable thing in the West is that the Lakers only finished third in the West, and this season's Lakers started high and low, with a wave of 16 consecutive wins at the beginning of the season, but by the end of the season, the team had problems. Veteran injuries and news of discord within the team have been reported repeatedly.

For the first time, Minnesota's wolves dominated the West, and they took the crown with a 58-24 record. This time, the wolves played a tough defense, and the opponent scored just 94.5 points per 100 rounds.

At the same time, offense is the Timberwolves' formidable weapon. The Timberwolves have had perfect chemistry throughout the season, playing with the same offensive efficiency as the Kings, and their 46.2% shooting percentage is also the highest in the league.

In second place in the West is Vicky's Spurs, a team that has never fallen out of the championship contenders since Duncan joined the team. Even if David Robinson retires this season, it will not have the slightest impact on the team.

Duncan has applied his influence to every aspect of the team, which is no longer the team of the "admirals" that people are familiar with. Now welcome to Duncan's Great Demon King's team.

Duncan did appear in front of the world like a demon king, people like OK combinations, and he knocked OK to the ground many times. Even if the Lakers formed F4 this time, they still ended up trailing the Spurs, who didn't make any moves in the offseason.

Duncan's existence, for the time being, is to shatter all people's illusions of beauty. He used the painful reality to teach those romantic fans that no matter how good-looking the style of the ball is, no matter how luxurious the team is, it must be done on the field. You can't blow it up by blowing.

The fourth to eighth places in the West are the Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks, Memphis Grizzlies, Sacramento Kings and Denver Nuggets.

The Rockets have risen four spots from last season, and people attribute the credit to Yao Ming's growth and the team's defensive improvement.

The offseason team hired coach Jeff Van Gundy, who used to coach Ewing in New York. Van Gundy Jr. is a quintessential collegiate coach who believes that he can win games close to the basket, and he overhauled the Rockets' system.

Francis has completely lost the position of the boss, and now everything in the Rockets revolves around Yao Ming, whether it is on the offensive end or the defensive end, Yao Ming bears the most important responsibility, and in the end the results show that Yao Ming has done a good job.

People think that it was Van Gundy Jr. who improved the Rockets' defense, but Hu Qingniu disagreed, knowing that there was a master behind Van Gundy Jr. Hu Qingniu generally likes to call him the originator of modern space defense theory.

He's Tom Thibodeau.

Throughout the 20th century, out of the last Timberwolves, Thibodeau joined three teams.

He first worked as a defensive coach for the Rockets, who went from being a mid-to-bottom defensive team in the league to one of the top three defensive teams in the league. This has the role of Yao Ming, but it is also indispensable to the credit of Thibodeau.

Van Gundy Jr. then lost his job and was fired by the Rockets. Thibodeau had no choice but to join Rivers and join the Celtics in the 07-08 season. The world knows that the Celtics once played the best defense in history. But before 08, the two brothers Ray Allen and Pierce gave the impression of poor defense, can they change the overall situation with just one kg, obviously not, Thibodeau has made a lot of contributions in it.

But until this time, the fans did not know Thibodeau, who was still hiding behind the scenes, giving Rivers all the credit. But it was at Celtic that Thibodeau's theory of spatial defense had come to fruition.

The opportunity finally came, and for the 2010 season, the Bulls hired Thibodeau as the team's official head coach. An ecstatic Thibodeau couldn't wait to move to Chicago, and an offseason gave the team a new look.

How long does it take for a team with 8th 41 wins in the East to become the first team in the East with 62 wins without much change, Thibodeau gave the answer in one year.

In just one year, perhaps just a few months, Thibodeau's transformation of the bull worked. A team that had been rotten for more than a decade after Jordan retired became the first team in the East.

Here we have to mention Thibodeau's defensive philosophy.

Both the Celtics and the Bulls defend and dismantle, and they both take: the guards (Rondo, Rose) put pressure on the ball, while the big men (kg, Noah, Boozer) press the ball, and the local short two clamp one, and the package clamp against the ball handler. At the same time, several other players collectively cut off the long passing line, leaving one person on the weak side (Deng and Pierce) to control both at the same time.

The focus here is to put pressure on the ball, rotate quickly, form a local two-clamp one, and form a situation where one person can also contain two on the weak side, compressing the living space of the attacking team.

This strategy was later imitated by many teams, including the Heat during the Big Three period, and their killer feature was this spatial defense theory, emphasizing space and speed, combined with James and Wade's high mobility attributes, this set of spatial theory built the Heat's strong defense without a center, which was simply unimaginable before.

Later, James brought this system to the Cavaliers, and in the 2016 playoffs before Hu Qingniu crossed, the Cavaliers also used this system many times and were invincible in the East. Whether it's George, Rory, or Thomas Jr., they are all wildly targeted by this system.

This philosophy makes it harder for the attacker to break through in the paint, so in order to score, the attacker will have to come up with more ways to break through the opponent's brass wall.

This defensive system has been learned by almost every team in the league, and with it comes the difficulty of playing the age-old art of singles.

Since the Celtics won the championship, the percentage of offense finishers through front-to-basket singles and low-post back-to-back shots has been declining year by year.

In the 2008-09 season, a year after the Celtics won the championship using the Thibodo defensive system, 27 of the league's 30 teams still had more than 9 percent of their offense finished by singles. That season, the Magic had the lowest singles percentage in the league (7.4 percent).

By the 2016-17 season, more than 20 teams in the league had dropped below 9% in singles, and 15 of them had less than "7.4" in singles. The trend in the proportion of low-post back-to-back plays is similar to that of basket singles, and these numbers indicate that teams are shifting more and more off-end balls.

It was Vicky's Spurs who took the lead in leading the trend of shifting the ball, and Vicky also started a reform journey after being perfectly copied by the Grizzlies' Black Eight who perfectly copied Thibodeau's defensive strategy.

Then, on the basis of the Spurs' system, Kerr improved it based on the shooting characteristics of the Warriors and Curry's shooting characteristics with the ball. So the terrifying Golden State cover shooting brigade also appeared.

To put it simply, Thibodeau changed the history of the NBA's defensive end and indirectly influenced the NBA's offensive end. It's his defensive philosophy that kills games that are filled with a lot of singles, a lot of simple and rough. Even the superstars had to change their basketball philosophies to fit into the changed league.