A shortened NBA regular season now gives way to the usual four-series, 16-team sprint to determine the league's champion. The 66-game campaign — shortened by 16 games due to the owners' lockout — concluded Thursday, April 26. All the playoff berths were clinched prior to Thursday, though some seedings remained up in the air entering the final games of the regular season.

The first round, which begins Saturday, April 28, features plenty of enticing matchups for fans and ticket brokers alike, though it remains to be seen if resellers get a dream NBA Finals like they did last year, when the underdog Dallas Mavericks stunned the Miami Heat in six games.

When the lockout-delayed NBA season finally began, most experts figured the revamped New York Knicks — before everyone had heard of Jeremy Lin — or the aging Boston Celtics would challenge the Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls for supremacy in the Eastern Conference.

Turns out the Knicks and Celtics have been staring up at the surprising Philadelphia 76ers in the Atlantic Division standings throughout the first half of the shortened, 66-game season.

To the surprise of nobody, the National Basketball Association celebrated the start of summer Thursday, July 1 by locking out the players and embarking upon what could be its nuclear winter. As if to signify the long road ahead, the NBA.com Web site — usually a hyperactively garish mix of images and videos — turned into something straight out of 1995 as of 12:01 a.m. July 1, when the home page featured simply the league's official release announcing the lockout on one side of the page and a WNBA story on the other.

The Web site has since rejoined this century, albeit with a more subdued design than usual, but the rhetoric hasn't subsided.

The San Antonio Spurs, Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics have dominated the NBA since the turn of the century — the trio combined to win nine of 11 championships since 2000 and accounted for 12 out of a possible 22 appearances in the NBA Finals in that time — but this year's NBA playoffs have not been kind to the trio of traditional powers. The top-seeded Spurs were stunned by the eighth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies in six games in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs while the Lakers were swept by the Dallas Mavericks in the Western semis and the Celtics wiped out by the Miami Heat in five games in the Eastern semis.

Three of the four All-Star Games in the major American professional sports will be played over the next three weeks, but only one of the exhibitions has created a stir on the ticket resale market.

The NBA All-Star Game is annually a weekend filled with A-listers on and off the court and this year will certainly be no different with the game scheduled for Sunday, February 20 at Staples Center in Los Angeles, home to Hollywood stars and the three-time defending NBA champion Lakers alike.