Basketball guide
The NBA season explained (and where the PBA fits)
The NBA runs from late October to June. Here's how the season is structured, how teams reach the playoffs, and what a US tip-off time means where you live.
Teams and conferences
There are 30 teams, split into the Eastern and Western Conferences with 15 teams each. Teams are ranked within their own conference, and the playoffs are played conference by conference until the two champions meet in the NBA Finals.
The regular season
Each team plays 82 games between late October and mid-April. Standings list wins, losses and GB (games behind the leader). To work out GB, add the leader's extra wins to the team's extra losses and divide by two.
The NBA Cup is a tournament held inside the regular season. Group games take place in November and the knockout rounds in December. The group games count in the normal standings; the championship game does not.
The Play-In Tournament
In each conference, seeds 1–6 go straight to the playoffs. Seeds 7–10 play in:
- 7th plays 8th. The winner takes the 7th seed.
- 9th plays 10th. The loser is out.
- The loser of 7 v 8 plays the winner of 9 v 10. The winner takes the 8th seed.
The playoffs
Sixteen teams, eight per conference, play four rounds: the First Round, the Conference Semifinals, the Conference Finals and the NBA Finals in June. Every round is best-of-seven, so the first team to four wins goes through.
Reading a live basketball score
Games have four 12-minute quarters. A status like Q3 5:32 means five minutes and 32 seconds are left in the third quarter. Tied games go to five-minute overtime periods, shown as OT, 2OT and so on.
What tip-off time means for you
Most NBA games start in the US evening, which is morning in Asia. A 7:30 PM Eastern tip-off is 7:30 AM the next day in Manila and 5:00 AM in India while the US is on daylight time (until early November), and an hour later after that. Our basketball scoreboard converts every start time to your local time, so you don't have to.
Where the PBA fits
The Philippine Basketball Association, founded in 1975, was Asia's first professional basketball league. Its season is split into separate tournaments called conferences. The Philippine Cup is all-Filipino, while other conferences let each team add a foreign player, known as an import. We add PBA games to the scoreboard by hand, because the international data feeds we use don't cover the league.