Seeding is the system that orders teams in a knockout bracket or draw based on their previous position or ranking, to keep favorites from meeting too early. In the NBA it's based on the regular-season standings; in European football, on each club's coefficient or previous results.
The idea behind seeding is the same in any sport: if the best teams or players could randomly meet in the first round, the tournament would lose interest because two favorites could knock each other out too early. By ranking participants by seed and pairing the best against the worst (1st vs. 8th, 2nd vs. 7th, and so on), the goal is for the most exciting — and in theory more even — matchups to happen in the later rounds, not the first.
In the NBA playoffs, seeding is calculated directly from the regular-season standings within each conference, now adjusted with the play-in result for the 7th and 8th seeds. The 1st seed plays the 8th, the 2nd plays the 7th, the 3rd plays the 6th, and the 4th plays the 5th in the first round. It's a purely sporting form of seeding, with no draw or random element: table position determines the opponent.
In tournaments like the Champions League, seeding works differently: it's organized through draw pots, where teams are grouped by their UEFA coefficient (an accumulated score from previous seasons' results) or their league-phase position, and then a draw decides the specific matchups within those constraints. There is an element of chance within each pot here, unlike the NBA's fully deterministic seeding, although the underlying goal — keeping the best teams from meeting too early — is identical.
Knowing how the bracket is built helps you anticipate which matchups are most likely in the following rounds, useful whether you follow the NBA or European football competitions on Match Prophets. Either way, every prediction is judged solely on the match's real result: 3 points for the exact score, 2 for picking the winner, whatever each team's seeding may be.