The NBA regular season is a sorting exercise. It is long enough that injuries, rest and scheduling quirks mostly cancel out, and by April the standings are a reasonable description of how good each team is. Then the playoffs begin and the format deliberately stops caring about most of it.
Seeding survives, and it matters — home advantage in a seventh game is real. But everything else resets. A team that won sixty games and one that won forty-eight arrive in the same bracket, and a seven-game series is short enough that a matchup problem can outweigh a twelve-win gap.
The play-in tournament, added at the bottom of the bracket, changed the incentives of the whole second half of the season. Tenth place used to be the start of the lottery queue. Now it is a live playoff position, and teams that would once have shut down in March keep competing into April.
What follows is four rounds of best-of-seven, sixteen wins, and a level of tactical adjustment no other sport sustains for two months. Coaches see the same opponent up to seven times in two weeks. Nothing that worked in game one survives untouched to game five.
The regular season itself is unbalanced by design. Teams play divisional opponents more often than distant ones, so records are not built against identical schedules, and the standings are read alongside how difficult each team's fixtures actually were.
Seeding is straightforward once the play-in has resolved: the top six in each conference are safe, seventh through tenth fight for the last two places, and the bracket that follows is fixed rather than reseeded between rounds. A team's route to the Finals is therefore knowable in advance, which is why the final weeks of the regular season involve as much positioning as competing.
Home advantage runs through the series in a 2-2-1-1-1 pattern, giving the higher seed games one, two, five and seven. In a sport where a home crowd measurably affects free-throw shooting and referee decisions, that seventh game is the whole prize for eighty-two games of work.