Qualifying: the top six, then the play-in
Each conference sends eight teams to the playoffs. The first six places are settled by regular-season record alone. The remaining two are decided by a short play-in tournament between the teams that finished seventh through tenth, which gives the seventh and eighth seeds more than one chance and the ninth and tenth exactly one.
The play-in changed the shape of the season more than its size suggests. Before it existed, a team out of the top eight in March had a straightforward incentive to lose, because a worse record improved its draft position. Now tenth place is a live playoff position, and the tanking window has shrunk to teams genuinely far from contention.
The bracket and home advantage
Once the eight teams per conference are known, the bracket is fixed: the top seed faces the eighth, the second faces the seventh, and so on, with the winners meeting in a predetermined path. There is no reseeding after each round, so a team's likely route to the Finals is visible in April.
Home advantage goes to the better-seeded team and is distributed across a series in a 2-2-1-1-1 pattern — games one, two, five and seven at home. The value of that is concentrated almost entirely in the seventh game. Everything a team does across eighty-two games buys the right to play a decider in its own building.
The two conference winners meet in the Finals, where home advantage goes to whichever team had the better regular-season record regardless of conference.
Why a series is not a longer game
A best-of-seven series is a repeated contest between the same two coaching staffs, and that repetition is the whole point. The tactic that produced an easy win in game one is scouted, countered and dead by game three. Series basketball rewards depth of preparation over the ability to produce one good night.
It also exposes narrow rosters. A weakness that a team could hide across a long season — one poor defender, one player who cannot shoot — is attacked relentlessly for two weeks, because the opponent can build an entire game plan around a single matchup and run it fourteen times a night.
That is why regular-season record is a poor predictor of a playoff run and why upsets, while less common than in single-elimination sports, are never surprising. Four wins is a real barrier, but a matchup problem is a real weapon.