The NBA playoffs are the knockout phase that decides the season's champion: 16 teams (8 per conference) play four rounds, all best-of-seven, all the way to the NBA Finals between the Eastern Conference champion and the Western Conference champion.
The top 8 teams from each of the two conferences (East and West) qualify at the end of the regular season, with the 7th and 8th seeds now decided through the play-in. Within each conference, the bracket is organized by seeding: the 1st seed faces the 8th, the 2nd faces the 7th, the 3rd faces the 6th, and the 4th faces the 5th in the first round, so that, in theory, the top finishers face the weakest opponents in the early rounds.
Unlike other competitions where early rounds are played as a single match or two legs, all four NBA playoff rounds — first round, conference semifinals, conference finals, and the NBA Finals — are always played best-of-seven: the first team to reach four wins takes the series. This greatly reduces the upset factor of a single game, since the superior team tends to prevail over a long series, though comeback series remain some of the most talked-about moments of every season.
Each conference's champion (whoever survives the first three rounds within their half of the bracket) advances directly to the NBA Finals, where they face the other conference's champion for the title, also best-of-seven. It's the only round where teams from different conferences meet: up to that point, East and West compete in completely separate brackets.
In an NBA league on Match Prophets, every game of a playoff series counts as an independent prediction, so a single best-of-seven tie gives you up to seven chances to score points with the same pair of teams, with the standings updating automatically game by game.