The NBA regular season resumes Thursday night after the All-Star break, and we're into crunch time now. With a little more than a quarter of the season remaining, playoff spots, and seeds, are going to start fleshing out. Here are five predictions that I see happening as we move toward April and the playoffs.

The Warriors will get West 1 seed

As of Thursday, Golden State trails Houston for the West's No. 1 seed by one game in the loss column. In addition, the Rockets own the tiebreaker with a 2-1 record against the Warriors this season. Still, the Warriors will come out on top here and go into the playoffs with home-court advantage all the way through a potential fourth straight trip to the Finals. 

Two reasons for this: First, the Warriors have looked spent for the last month, and the All-Star break gave them the rest they needed, both mentally and physically. You can bank on them playing better basketball down the stretch. On top of that, the Warriors have the easiest closing schedule among Western Conference teams with just 11 of their remaining 24 games coming against current playoffs teams. Houston, meanwhile, has one of the 10 toughest schedules in the league the rest of the way. 

Isaiah Thomas' season will get even worse

You have to feel for Thomas, who at this time last year was one of the toasts of the league -- on his way to a second-team All-NBA appointment to go with a top-five MVP finish. If he wasn't going to get a max deal, he was going to get something close. Then his hip gave out on him, the Celtics and Cavs gave up on him and now he's playing for a Lakers team that, frankly, has absolutely no use for him. 

Thomas would love to use these final two months as a showcase to prove he deserves a lucrative long-term deal when he becomes a free agent this summer, but what do the Lakers -- a team focused entirely on a future that almost certainly will not include Thomas -- have to gain by giving him the opportunity to shine? Short-term winning (if Isaiah could even help with that in the first place) is a distant second on their priority list to developing young players for a hopefully brighter future. 

Speaking of which, Lonzo Ball is due back from injury soon, and he's the Lakers' future at the moment. Thomas, as we saw in Cleveland, and Boston, and everywhere else he's ever played, needs the ball and control of the offense to be effective, and the Lakers have no incentive to just give him the ball, or even regular minutes, at the expense of players who actually figure into their longer-term plans. It's harsh, but Thomas is an expiring contract to the Lakers. Nothing more. They took him on so they can turn right around and let him go this summer. 

Best case scenario for Thomas: He comes off the bench and shows he can still score in stints, but that would require him settling for a seriously reduced role, and he has never felt like the kind of player that's going to accept that. He still thinks he's one of the best offensive players in the league. Sitting on the bench and watching Ball brick jumpers is going to drive him crazy. This has conflict written all over it. My guess is the Lakers either buy him out and he moves on to his fourth team in less than a year with barely any time left in the season to get into a groove, or he fades away to the bench and has to go into this summer talking up his game rather than having had a real chance to prove it he is still the player he once was. 

Cavs about to go on serious run

After two games with this revamped roster, everyone is ready to put the Cavaliers in the Finals again. I have to admit, it's hard to bet against them right now. I'm holding onto the Raptors as the best team in the East for the moment, but my grip is slipping quickly. This new Cavs roster represents more than just a new energy around the team; it actually fits together. It's younger. More athletic. Better defensively. When Kevin Love comes back, there will be shooters all around LeBron James, who is devastating with that kind of floor spacing both as a passer and scorer. 

TNT's Kenny Smith made a good point at All-Star Weekend when he said these new-look Cavs are in the "honeymoon period," meaning nobody really knows how to defend them yet, or attack them on the other end for that matter. When teams come together in the offseason, we love to warn everyone about the inevitable "adjustment period" -- so it stands to reason that a team that came together on the fly in the middle of the season would have to go through the same thing, if not worse. 

But the Cavs have LeBron, and one of the easier remaining schedules in the league, and my gut tells me that as the playoffs draw closer and these new players become more and more focused on the opportunity they have to play for an NBA Championship -- an opportunity Rodney Hood, Larry Nance, Jordan Clarkson and George Hill have never had -- they're going to take off. I think they're too far back to catch Toronto for the top seed, or maybe even Boston for the No. 2 seed. But this isn't about their seed. This is about how they're playing going into the playoffs. Call me a prisoner of the moment, but I'm a firm believer that this team will be peaking at the right time. 

Thunder will get a top-four seed

Entering Thursday, the Thunder are two games from the No. 3 seed and two games from being out of the playoffs. This thing could go either way, but I'm betting on this team because they can play a very long, rim-protecting brand of defense, and they have superstar scorers. The news that Kawhi Leonard is likely out for the season combined with San Antonio's pretty murderous schedule down the stretch means the Spurs could easily fall out of a top-four slot, and to me, OKC is the team that moves in, though I'd keep a serious eye on Denver, too, with Paul Millsap set to return at some point and that team really starting to click. 

Pelicans, Pistons are lottery bound

Anthony Davis had this to say about the Pelicans' potential before Demarcus Cousins went down with a season-ending Achilles tear. Via ESPN:

"We could have gone through the playoffs. No one could really stop us as bigs. We go to the Finals if we went," Davis told ESPN's Rachel Nichols in an interview over All-Star weekend.

With all due respect, this is crazy. Even with Cousins and Davis having remarkable seasons, and indeed being the two best bigs in the league (Joel Embiid has a hell of a case here, too), the Pelicans have still been a .500 team at best for the majority of time they've been together. 

But the point is well taken: Cousins and Davis were a problem. Davis on his own? No so much of a problem. The Pels lack the firepower without Cousins and have the sixth-toughest remaining schedule in the league. The Jazz, meanwhile, have won 11 straight and have one of the 10 easiest schedules down the stretch, with 14 of their final 24 at home and only 11 of those games against current playoff teams. Give me the Jazz for the No. 8 slot in the West. 

As for the Pistons in the East, it's not going to happen. The Blake Griffin trade energized them, but they're still flawed. They don't have enough shooting to really make that two-big offense work, and I don't see either the Heat or 76ers falling out of their current 7- and 8-seeds. Detroit is headed for the lottery.