The NBA’s post All-Star Weekend “second half” of the regular season — actually, more like the final third — kicked off with a solo game featuring the Lakers and Hornets on Wednesday.

Everything else is back in action either Thursday or Friday as teams across the NBA gear up for the home stretch.

The NBA landscape is now clearly defined post-trade deadline. It’s clear which teams are likely going to the playoffs, which teams are still chasing spots and which organizations are counting the days, and lottery balls, until the season’s conclusion.

With that information in tow, here’s one view on what’s about to play out.

Luka and LeBron excite, but don’t excel

The Lakers tandem featuring two of the game’s current icons, Luka Doncic and LeBron James, creates a nice baseline of success on their own. Two of the most consistent producers the league has to offer should be able to keep the Lakers in that No. 4-5 first-round matchup in the Western Conference playoffs.

It’s tough not to see a couple of bona fide killers finding a way to best a less-experienced foe such as Houston or Memphis in Round 1 of the playoffs. But there will come a point, likely by the second round, when the Lakers’ roster is simply out-manned, especially on the interior, to a degree even Doncic and James cannot cover up.

Beware the sleeping Celtics

Boston was heavily favored to defend its NBA title this season. And while very few folks have stepped away from that belief, the Celtics’ play for chunks of this season has been less than inspiring.

The Celtics aren’t exactly putting the pedal to the metal, their intensity level so far shy of championship level. Such is to be expected for a defending champion; it’s hard to maintain the motivation required to play your best throughout an 82-game campaign when you know what truly matters still lies ahead.

But the Celtics know the runway to the playoffs starts now, so you can expect Boston to start ripping off wins in chunks and more closely resembling the title team of a year ago.

The East should still be afraid of Big, Bad, Boston.

It’s Minnesota and Denver in a(nother) thriller

This feels like destiny at this point, as the two Northwest Division foes further solidify a growing rivalry.

Denver looks like a good bet to secure the second or third seed in the West, while Minnesota seems poised to finish sixth or seventh. Another first- or second-round duel could be on the not-so-distant horizon.

What a treat that would be for basketball fans.

Minnesota seems to have the matchup advantage. It has the defensive wings capable of frustrating Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr., while Denver has no answer for Anthony Edwards.

But the Nuggets have the best player in the world in Nikola Jokic. That alone was nearly enough to out-last the Wolves in last year’s second round, only to have Minnesota ultimately wear Denver down in the second half of the decisive Game 7.

Expect more of the same later this spring.

Phoenix falls off

To be frank, the Suns’ descent has been well underway for weeks. They entered the all-star break as losers of seven of their past 10 games. There’s a reason Phoenix was willing to move Kevin Durant at the trade deadline: This current roster is going nowhere.

The Suns simply don’t possess enough defenders, or off-the-bounce offensive creators, to play offense or defense at a high enough level to consistently beat good teams. Phoenix will miss the play-in tournament in the West, and speculation of Durant’s offseason departure will grow.

The best teams meet in the Finals

WHAT? Yes, bold take. But “best” is often in the eye of the beholder. Yet despite the love previously given to Boston in this very piece, Cleveland is the current standard in the East, much as Oklahoma City is out West.

Both squads emerge from the break with 44-10 records, and both have the depth and balance on both sides of the court to endure and thrive in the marathon that is the NBA playoffs, though neither’s path will be easy.

Expect the Cavaliers to have to ward off the Celtics in seven games in the East Finals, while the Thunder get the benefit of a playoff road that likely includes the No. 8 seed, a Lakers team that can’t match up and a Nuggets — or, yes, Timberwolves — squad that could be running on empty by the West Finals.

In the end, Cleveland simply won’t have a defensive answer for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and the Thunder will hold off the Cavaliers in six games.

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By MARK KENNEDY, AP Entertainment Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The idea for a new TV show came to Craig Sweeny as he was driving. The producer and screenwriter, thinking about how to put his own stamp on a medical series, had to pull over when a familiar figure popped into his mind: Sherlock Holmes.

Why not combine a hospital procedural with the lore of Britain’s greatest detective? It would have a medical mystery every week and also tell stories of Holmes’ good friend, Dr. John Watson. It was a mashup of two popular draws, the TV equivalent of peanut butter and jelly.

“They’re sort of each their own show-worthy premise in a way. And we’re blessed to have both. So they compete for space in a really interesting way,” says Sweeny.

So was born “Watson,” a CBS series starring Morris Chestnut as the titular character who leads a team of medical detectives set in a present-day Pittsburgh populated with Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters.

“It’s one of those blessed moments,” says Sweeny, who was well-versed with the world of Holmes after executive producing and writing for “Elementary,” a contemporary update.

This image released by CBS shows Morris Chestnut as Dr. John Watson in a scene from “Watson.” (Colin Bentley/CBS via AP)

“Watson” is not alone among the networks jazzing up the tried-and-true procedural. While the traditional form remains the bedrock of modern TV — think the prime-time blocks of “NCIS,” “FBI” and “Chicago Med” — new twists are emerging.

New TV recipes are heavy on the quirk

ABC’s “Doctor Odyssey” is a medical procedural aboard a luxury cruise ship and NBC’s “The Hunting Party” mashes up “The Blacklist” and “Criminal Minds.” CBS has Kathy Bates in “Matlock” playing an underestimated, retirement-age lawyer — with the twist that she’s really a hard-charging mom out for vengeance.

“There’s something really pleasurable about the self-contained, 43-minute procedural that gives you a beginning, middle and end, a little bit of a mystery and the fun of watching something get figured out,” says Jonathan Tolins, a playwright, TV writer and showrunner. “I think that the audience is so familiar with it that it does reward you if you come up with a sort of fun twist on it.”

Tolins’ own current take on the procedural is CBS’ “Elsbeth,” which takes the quirky character Elsbeth Tascioni from “The Good Wife” and plops her down in a “Columbo”-style police procedural.

Elsbeth, played by Carrie Preston, is a sleuth in bright colors and a bucket hat, blunt and unpredictable, playing off the guest star of the week. Tolins says the writers and camera crew try not to make her feel like the show’s lead, even though she’s the very title.

“I said early on that I think the show works best when it feels like a CBS police procedural with Elsbeth thrown into it,” he says. “We talked about always keeping her sort of out of the center of the frame in wide shots.”

Another elevated procedural with a quirky lead character is ABC’s “High Potential,” a police show starring a genius — but this time, she’s a single mom of three who has an IQ of 160 and is played by Kaitlin Olson.

“She’s a bit of a unicorn,” says Todd Harthan, executive producer and showrunner. “You throw a unicorn into the bullpen with a bunch of detectives and they go, ‘What are we supposed to do with this colorful creature with the horn coming out of her head?’”

This image released by Disney shows Kate Berlant, left, and Joshua Jackson in a scene from “Doctor Odyssey.” (Ray Mickshaw/Disney via AP)

Streaming’s menus push traditional TV forward

Supercharging procedurals comes as streaming increasingly offers subscribers a highly curated selection of unconventional, relatively short series with big names and high production values.

“I think that, inevitably, the innovations that streaming is doing bleed into what happens in network TV and challenge what we’re doing to compete for eyeballs in a healthy way,” says Sweeny.

Procedurals are often referred to as the comfort food of TV, offering a predictable, solvable hour with a familiar cast. So strong is our attachment to the form that streaming services have also been stretching their form with shows like the also “Columbo”-like “Poker Face” on Peacock and Max’s “The Pitt,” which takes a medical show like “ER” and breaks it down into different hours of a hospital shift, like “24.”

Harthan believes the gap between the streaming and network may be closing as networks offer writers a bit of a longer leash to try different things and streaming looks enviously at the broad audiences that networks pull.

“You’re always sort of learning and trying to glean certain things from different shows that are very different than the one you’re working on day-to-day,” Harthan says. “It’s just part of the growth of doing what we do for a living.”

Showrunners caution that mixing different elements into a show to raise the level can’t be done willy-nilly. The creator of “Watson” notes that its hero was already a doctor in the world of Sherlock Holmes, so making him head of a clinic makes sense.

“It is an exotic combo, but it’s also very organic,” says Sweeny. “Mechanically you don’t have to force anything into place. Everything’s already there.”

Network TV orders up a ‘gourmet cheeseburger,’ well done

A few years ago, the term “gourmet cheeseburger” was given to streaming shows that were both premium and commercial — take “Bridgerton” — and network TV may be going through their own gourmet cheeseburger phase.

“The more the two converge, the better,” says Robert King. He and his wife, Michelle King, are the prolific creators of shows on networks (“The Good Wife,” “Evil” and “Elsbeth”) and streaming (“Happy Face”).

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“We love working in both and we don’t start with, ‘Oh, we must do a network show,’ or, ‘We must do a streaming show.’ It’s very much, ‘This idea we have fits more comfortably either in network or in streaming,’” says Michelle King.

Robert King considers one of the greatest TV hybrids to be “The Sopranos,” which mixed a comic premise with violence and put it into a serialized format. It was a hit for HBO but was originally pitched to a network, Fox.

“I do think the hybrid goes back to ‘The Sopranos,’ at least and I’m sure beyond that,” he says.

Tolins, who leads the “Elsbeth” writing room, recently got some nice feedback about his elevated procedural skills. CBS did a focus group about the new season’s premiere episode, which starred — spoilers — Nathan Lane as the killer of an obnoxious operagoer.

“One of the women who saw it afterwards kept saying, ‘This is network? I’m going to have to watch more network television,’ which of course was very, very satisfying for all of us listening,” Tolins says.

With fans counting down the hours until the Minnesota Wild’s season re-starts Saturday with an early game in Detroit versus the Red Wings, assistant coach Jack Capuano — running practices while head coach John Hynes works with Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off in Boston — admitted sometimes the on-ice work feels more like September than February.

But he likes what he’s seen so far.

“When you go on break for so long, it’s almost like a mini training camp,” said Capuano, following the team’s Wednesday practice at TRIA Rink. “But I thought the last couple days the guys were dialed in, they were detailed, they had good execution and pace, and they worked hard. So that’s a credit to them.”

The schedule is for the three players who skated for Team Sweden — Jonas Brodin, Joel Eriksson Ek and Filip Gustavsson — to return to practice on Friday, before the team flies to Michigan that afternoon. Hynes, general manager Bill Guerin, defenseman Brock Faber and forward Matt Boldy are expected to join the team in Detroit prior to its meeting with the Red Wings.

To fill the gaps created by the current absences, the Wild called up forward Travis Boyd and goalie Dylan Ferguson from their AHL team in Iowa this week just for a practice or two. And while that meant 10 total hours in the car for both men, they jumped at the chance to get some work with the NHL team at the practice rink, even if they would have preferred to be a few blocks away at Xcel Energy Center.

“It’s obviously a big deal. Just try and take what you can from it,” said Boyd, the former Gophers standout who has played three NHL games for his home state team — all of them on the road — this season.

“These guys are coming off their break, so they’re trying to get back up to speed, so you just try to be a sponge and take it in. There’s always a small thing or two you can take away from every practice, and try to get one percent better every day.”

With Filip Gustavsson getting some rest after backstopping two overtime losses for Team Sweden at the 4 Nations, Marc-Andre Fleury has had Ferguson as his counterpart for the recent practices. Ferguson was signed by the Wild to a AHL contract in the fall, and recently inked a two-way deal with the team.

The practices this week were the first time he has been called up by the NHL team, but he began his pro career in Vegas and knows Fleury from their time together with the Golden Knights.

“These are the best players in the world, and I think any chance you get to get up here and experience that is better for me and for my growth moving forward,” said Ferguson, who has played 10 games with Iowa this season.

Capuano said the team plans more of a light “training and treatment” day on Thursday, then will have a more complete roster on Friday, prompting them to send both Boyd and Ferguson back to Des Moines after practice on Wednesday. But the coaches were thankful for the extra bodies and what they contributed on the practice rink this week.

“Boyd’s been around and has played a lot of NHL games, and Fergie’s up here so he gets some NHL shots, so it’s good to have those guys around,” Capuano said. “It’s good to see the guys and it’s good to compete at this level.”

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