How Teams Qualify for Post-Season Play | The Teams to Watch Out for This Year
The NCAA championships are over, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to feed your roundball appetite. The NBA season ends on Sunday, April 14 and the elite teams will then engage in battle to see who takes home the coveted Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy. The NBA Finals are scheduled to be played between June 6 and June 23, 2024.
How Do Teams Qualify for the NBA Playoffs?
The National Basketball Association is divided between the Eastern and Western conferences, with 15 teams in each. The six teams in each conference with the highest regular season winning percentage are automatically in the playoffs. If two or more teams finish the regular season with the same record, a number of criteria, in the following order, will be used to rank them:
- Their head-to-head records
- Their winning percentage within their division (only as applies to teams in the same division)
- Their winning percentage within the conference
- Their winning percentage against playoff teams in their conference
- Their winning percentage against all other playoff teams
- The total point differential in all regular season games
An additional four teams from each conference will qualify for the NBA play-in tournament. In this competition:
- The 7th and 8th seeds will play each other, with the winner automatically advancing to the post-season as the 7th seed
- The 9th and 10th seeds will play each other, with the winner playing the loser of the 7th-8th seed game. The winner of this game will advance to the playoffs as the 8th
Who Looks Primed to Take the NBA Crown This Year?
When the season started, the Boston Celtics (Eastern Conference) and the defending champion Denver Nuggets (Western Conference) were the odds-on favorites to advance to the finals. Those teams have both proven the experts right, as they are at the top of their respective conferences. The Celtics appear to be a shoo-in for the top seed in the East, but the Nuggets face stiff competition in the West, with the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Oklahoma City Thunder both a win or two away from taking the top seed.
