How Many Playoff Games Are There in the NBA?

The NBA Playoffs are a best-of-seven elimination tournament held after the NBA’s regular season to determine the league’s champion.

How the NBA Playoffs Work

Each conference in the NBA (Eastern and Western) has three divisions. The playoff field in each conference is made up of the division winner from each division and the next five best teams from anywhere in the conference, regardless of division. This means that a total of eight teams from each conference make the playoffs.

The NBA regular season

The NBA regular season is 82 games long, and it usually starts in late October and ends in early April. All 30 teams in the league play against each other, and they each play 82 games. Of those games, 41 are played at home and 41 are played on the road. The regular season is a long grind, and teams that can maintain their focus and win their share of games usually find themselves in the playoffs.

The playoffs are a completely different animal. In the playoffs, there are just 16 teams remaining, and they all battle it out until only one team is left standing. The playoff format has changed throughout the years, but the current format has been in place since 1984. In the current system, there are eight teams from each conference (Eastern and Western) that make the playoffs.

Those 16 teams are seeded based on their regular season record. The team with the best record in each conference gets seeded number one, and the team with the worst record gets seeded number eight. From there, it’s a single-elimination tournament until two teams remain from each conference. Those two teams then face off in a best-of-seven series to determine who goes to the NBA Finals.

In order to ensure that every game of the NBA Finals is fair, regardless of which conference the two finalists come from, a 2-3-2 format is used for the Finals. That means that if one team comes from the East and one team comes from
the West, then Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 will be played at the home arena of the East team while Games 3, 4 and 5 will be played at the home arena of
the West team.

The NBA playoff seeding

The NBA Playoffs are a best-of-seven elimination tournament annually held after the NBA’s regular season to determine the league’s champion.

The tournament brackets are made up of eight teams from each of the two conferences, the Western Conference and the Eastern Conference. These teams are seeded one to eight, with the conference’s top seed playing the conference’s eighth seed, second playing seventh, third playing sixth, and fourth playing fifth.

The four division winners in each conference are seeded one to four based on their regular season records. The division winner with the best record in a conference is given the first seed, while the division winner with the worst record is given the fourth seed.

The next three seeds are reserved for the three wild card teams in each conference, which are made up of the next best three records regardless of division.

How Many Playoff Games Are There in the NBA?

In the NBA, there are a total of 82 regular season games. Out of those 82 games, 16 teams make the playoffs. Therefore, there are a total of 16 playoff games.

The first round of the playoffs

In the first round of the playoffs, each team plays each other team in its own conference once. The team that wins four games first advances to the next round. If a series is tied at two games apiece, a fifth game (“Game 5”) is played. If the series is still tied, a sixth and final game (“Game 6”) is played.

The conference semifinals

The next round is the conference semifinals. The four teams that come out of the first round in each conference now face each other, with the matchups determined by who had the best regular-season record. These are best-of-seven series, meaning that the first team to win four games advances to the next round.

The conference finals

Each conference sends its three division winners and the team with the next best regular-season record to the playoffs. The conference semifinals are best-of-seven series. The 1-8 and 2-7 seeds play each otherin the first round, as do the 3-6 and 4-5 seeds. The winners advance to play the 1 and 2 seeds in the conference semifinals.

The NBA Finals

The NBA Finals is the championship series of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Eastern and Western conference champions play a best-of-seven game series to determine the league champion. The winning team of the series receives the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy.