In the first round, at least.

Ty Lawson scored 26 points, including a jumper in the lane with 9.3 seconds left, and the Denver Nuggets clinched home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs with a 112-111 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks on Monday night.

Wilson Chandler added 21 points for the Nuggets, who are 37-3 at home and have a 22-game winning streak at home. They can secure the No. 3 seed in the West with one more victory or two losses by the Los Angeles Clippers.

“I think it’s huge,” Denver coach George Karl said. “Don’t get me wrong. The teams we’re going to play in the first round are capable of beating us on our home court. I’ve always felt that home court, if it was an even series, it’s tough for teams to win twice on your home court. And our home court, I know teams don’t like to play there. Hopefully mentally they struggle with the thought of playing there.”

Milwaukee lost its season-high fifth game in a row despite Monta Ellis scoring 38 points, one shy of his season high. His six 3-pointers were the most he’s had this season, and he didn’t even attend the morning shootaround because he was sick.

“Now is not the time to throw a pity party,” Ellis said.

Ellis’ four-point play with 14.2 seconds left gave the Bucks a 111-110 lead. Ellis, who had 19 fourth-quarter points, drilled a 3-pointer from the right side and made a free throw after he was fouled by Evan Fournier.

“He’s been a warrior for us all year,” Milwaukee coach Jim Boylan said. “He’s played hurt, sick, he’s done everything. … I can’t say enough about him, he’s had a great season. Without him I don’t know where we would be.”

After a timeout, Lawson got the ball in front of Milwaukee’s bench with Ellis guarding him. Lawson drove to his right and pulled up in the lane to hit the winning shot.

“I just wanted to (isolate),” Lawson said. “I passed to Wilson, got it back, saw a clean side, started pushing real hard and I knew he was trying to bite and make sure I didn’t get to the basket. So I kind of stepped back and had all the time in the world to knock down a shot.”

J.J. Redick, who contributed 20 points for the Bucks, missed a 3-pointer from the center of the arc as time expired.

Milwaukee, which already had clinched the No. 8 spot in the East, finished with a 21-20 record at home.

“We were one defensive stop short,” Ellis said. “J.J. had a great look at it.”

Forward Kenneth Faried did not play because of the left ankle he sprained in Denver’s victory over Portland on Sunday.

That didn’t stop the Nuggets (56-25), who added to their franchise record for victories in a season by winning for the 22nd time in their last 25 games.

JaVale McGee came off the bench and finished with a season-high 17 rebounds and 10 points for Denver, which closes the regular season Wednesday when it hosts Phoenix.

Milwaukee is closing the regular season with no momentum at all. The team has just three victories in its last 15 games and will try to halt a nine-game road losing streak Wednesday at Oklahoma City.

“It’d be nice for us to taste a victory,” Boylan said.

John Henson had 14 points and 15 rebounds for the Bucks, who lost their fifth straight game to Denver.

Milwaukee held a one-point lead with about 1 minute left when Ersan Ilyasova grabbed a rebound off a missed shot by Andre Miller, but he lost the ball out of bounds.

Denver capitalized with a basket by Andre Iguodala for a 108-107 lead with 52 seconds remaining.

Mike Dunleavy missed a shot and Miller’s two free throws gave the Nuggets a 110-107 lead with 25.4 seconds left.

Earlier in the quarter, Denver held a 98-92 lead when Ellis scored eight points in a row. He drilled a 3-pointer, a jump shot and then another 3-pointer to give Milwaukee a 100-98 lead with 4:30 to go.

A slam dunk along the baseline by Ekpe Udoh with 9:20 left gave Milwaukee an 87-86 lead, its first since early in the first quarter.

Game notes

Milwaukee gave up a season-high 46 free-throw attempts; Denver made 32 of them. … Ellis recorded his ninth 30-point game of the season. … The Nuggets finished with a 19-22 mark on the road. … An MRI exam Monday morning showed that Faried sprained a ligament. Faried, who averages 11.5 points and 9.2 rebounds per game, also will miss the final game of the regular season and will be listed as day-to-day for the playoffs. … Center Larry Sanders missed his third game in a row for the Bucks with a sore lower back.

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Mike Brown (Los Angeles) gone five games into the season; Avery Johnson (Brooklyn) gone the day after Christmas, 28 games into the season; Scott Skiles (Milwaukee) gone 32 games in, when his team fell to .500 for the fourth time this season. Gentry lasted 41 games.

And somehow, there have been no Phil Jackson (or Stan Van Gundy) sightings.

Since the firings, the Lakers, Nets and Bucks have gone three different directions. The Nets are 9-2 post-AJ, the Lakers are 16-18 since firing Brown, the Bucks 3-3 since Skiles was asked to return the keys. One coach is catching hell (Mike D’Antoni with the Lakers), one is so under-the-radar that hardly anyone knows he is a current head coach of an NBA team (Jim Boylan with the Bucks), one is on pace to have a statue built in his likeness outside the Barclays Center (P.J. Carlesimo with the Nets). With the Suns, it’s too early to tell.

Each team had different reasons for enforcing a head coaching change when it did. The results of each are so all over the place that it’s hard to determine if there is a right or wrong in what each team did, the way the teams went about doing it and/or the arguable timing of them all.

No rhyme, less reason. Nothing seems to fit when the immediate results are so random and varied. Owners flip a coin, hoping it’ll land on the opposite side of their current results.

Just two weeks ago, we watched the NFL fire seven coaches on Black Monday. The NBA? Owners don’t have patience like that. They embrace change in a different way. They react with quickness. Regardless of how the firings are rationalized internally or justified publicly, two things are certain: Job security for an NBA coach is maybe the greatest oxymoron in sports, and there is no assurance that the immediate results under a new leader will give any team the answer it sought.

For instance, there were four coaching changes during the 2011-12 shortened season. Of those four, three of the coaches were retained and have not been pink-slipped. Yet.

Yet, there’s no telling if Randy Wittman in Washington, Keith Smart in Sacramento or Mike Woodson in New York (although he seems relatively safe, nothing is guaranteed if the Knicks fall out of the top four seeding in the East or the “Amar’e Experiment” doesn’t work out soon) were the right choices. There’s no telling if there would be any difference if the teams did what Orlando did when it rode the season out with the existing/sacrificial coach, dismissed him in the offseason, hired the guy the owner and organization “really” wanted (Jacque Vaughn) and began the new season fresh.

The Bulls waited until the offseason to hire Tom Thibodeau a few years ago, as did the Clippers with Vinny Del Negro and Golden State with Mark Jackson. Indiana did not with Frank Vogel. And all these teams are remarkably better than they were the day the current coaches took over.

Go figure.

In the NFL, going back a few years, Marty Schottenheimer (his first job) and Don Coryell (his second) replaced fired head coaches in the middle of a season, and their careers turned out well. In comparison, Jason Garrett took over the Cowboys in November 2010 when Jerry Jones fired Wade Phillips after a 1-7 start. Now the odds are, even after two 8-8 full seasons as Jerry’s puppet, Garrett might not make it to Black Monday next year.

In the NHL, Ken Hitchcock took over a 6-7-0 team in St. Louis last season and proceeded to finish 49-22-11 and first in the Central. Bruce Boudreau was on both ends of an owner’s midseason whims: fired in D.C. with a 12-9-1 record only to be hired by Anaheim and go 27-23-8 with a team that finished last in the Pacific, even after improving under him.

In MLB. In the English Premier League. In the National Rugby League. In any team sport at the pro level, the same theory-less theory holds true. The results prove to be the same: inconclusive. Same no rhyme. Same less reason.

So how do we judge and or generalize when it is a good/bad, appropriate/inexcusable, smart/incompetent time to fire/hire head coaches?

The best example of how (and why) there may never be an answer to this, especially in the NBA where the coaching carousel can get extreme and thoughtless, can be found in the head coaching history of Gregg Popovich in San Antonio.

He, too, was an interim coach who replaced Bob Hill 18 games into the 1996-97 season. (His was one of eight midseason coaching changes by seven teams.) Since then, Popovich has gone on to become the sensei of all active coaches. And he would be the perfect example of the upside to firing a coach during or somewhere in the middle of an NBA season if … at the time he wasn’t the GM and VP of basketball operations for the Spurs and he hadn’t appointed himself as head coach.

Despite owners’ certainty that a change on the bench will bring different results, flipping a coin often lands with the same ugly results staring them in the face. Heads or tails. And sometimes, because they limit their thinking to those two options, either this or that, they’re surprised when it lands on the coin’s narrow third surface, spinning on its edge.

Coaches in all sports come and go. Coaches in the NBA just seem to do so at an advanced pace.

When it comes to the revolving door at the core of most relationships between ownership and a head coach, how the coin will land after it stops spinning is too hard to guess. A few games midseason rarely determine — especially in the NBA — the good decision/bad decision outcome of a bad fire/new hire.

Or is it new fire/bad hire? Looking at the immediate results, I can’t tell if there’s even any difference.

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