NBA:National Basketball Association

 •NBA

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada). The NBA is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and is considered the premier professional basketball league in the world.^[3] The league is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan.

The NBA was created on August 3, 1949, with the merger of the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and the National Basketball League (NBL). The league later adopted the BAA's history and considers its founding on June 6, 1946, as its own.^[4][1][5] In 1976, the NBA and the American Basketball Association (ABA) merged, adding four franchises to the NBA. The NBA's regular season runs from October to April, with each team playing 82 games. The league's playoff tournament extends into June, culminating with the NBA Finals championship series.

The NBA is an active member of USA Basketball (USAB),^[6] which is recognized by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) as the governing body for basketball in the United States. The NBA is the second-wealthiest professional sports league in the world by revenue after the National Football League (NFL).^[7] As of 2020, NBA players are the world's highest paid athletes by average annual salary per player.^[8][9][10]

The Boston Celtics have the most NBA championships with 18 and are the reigning league champions, having defeated the Dallas Mavericks in the 2024 NBA Finals. 

 

 

•NBA Play-in

 The NBA play-in tournament is the preliminary National Basketball Association (NBA) postseason tournament. It determines the final two playoff seeds in the Eastern Conference and Western Conference and is played immediately prior to the NBA playoffs, which is the main tournament of the postseason and regarded by the league as separate from the play-in tournament. Teams finishing the regular season in positions 7 through 10 in the standings for each conference compete to determine the number 7 and 8 seeds in each conference's bracket tournament. 

•NBA Playoffs

 

Both conferences conduct the playoffs in the traditional bracket format. All rounds are best-of-seven series. Series are played in the 2–2–1–1–1 format, meaning the team with home-court advantage hosts games 1, 2, 5, and 7, while their opponent hosts games 3, 4, and 6, with games 5, 6 and 7 being played if needed. This format has been used since 2014, after NBA team owners unanimously voted to change the format of the NBA Finals from the 2–3–2 format on October 23, 2013. Once the playoffs start, the bracket is fixed; teams are never "reseeded", unlike in the National Football League and formerly the National Hockey League (until the wild card format introduced in the 2013–14 season), where the strongest remaining teams face the weakest teams in subsequent rounds.^[2]
 

 

 

•NBA Finals

The NBA Finals is the annual championship series of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Eastern and Western Conference champions play a best-of-seven series to determine the league champion. The team that wins the series is awarded the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy, which replaced the original Walter A. Brown Trophy in 1976–77, though under the same name until 1984. 

Πηγη:wikipedia