Wali Jones

Walter "Wali" Jones (born February 14, 1942) is a retired American professional basketball player. He was a 6'2" (1.88 m) 180 lb (82 kg) guard.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jones played at Overbrook High School, the same school that had produced Wilt Chamberlain a few years earlier. He played college ball for coach Jack Kraft at Villanova University.

In his first NBA season, Jones played for the Baltimore Bullets and was named to the NBA All-Rookie Team. The next season, he was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers where he would play for the next six years.

Jones and Hal Greer were the starting guards on the 1966-67 76ers team that also featured Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Lucious Jackson and Billy Cunningham. That team went 68-13 during the regular season, then easily won three playoff series in dethroning the eight-time defending NBA champion Boston Celtics. Jones made the 76ers' starting lineup after Larry Costello tore his Achilles tendon on January 6, 1967.

Later, Jones played for the Baltimore Bullets, Detroit Pistons, Milwaukee Bucks and Utah Stars.

NBA playoffs

The National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs are a best-of-seven elimination tournament among 16 teams in the Eastern Conference and Western Conference (called divisions, pre-1970), ultimately deciding the winner of the NBA Finals.

Format

The NBA announced the current revised playoff seeding system on September 8, 2015. Following the NBA regular season, eight teams in each conference qualify for the playoffs and are seeded one to eight.

The new format stipulates that the top eight teams in each conference, ranked in order by win-loss records, qualify for the playoffs. The NBA Board of Governors also announced the new tie-break criteria for playoff seeding and home-court advantage: head-to-head results between the tied teams is the first tie-breaker, and whether a team won its division championship is the second tie-breaker.

These seedings are used to create a bracket that determines the match-ups throughout the playoffs. Once the playoffs start, the bracket is fixed; teams are never "reseeded", unlike in the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Soccer (MLS) where the strongest remaining teams face the weakest teams in subsequent rounds. The first round of the NBA playoffs, or conference quarterfinals, consists of four match-ups in each conference based on the seedings (1–8, 2–7, 3–6, and 4–5). The four winners advance to the second round, or conference semifinals, with a match-up between the 1–8 and 4–5 winners and a match-up between the 2–7 and 3–6 winners. The two winners advance to the third round, or conference finals. The winner from each conference will advance to the final round, or the NBA finals.

1967 NBA Playoffs

The 1967 NBA Playoffs was the postseason tournament of the National Basketball Association's 1966-67 season. The tournament concluded with the Eastern Division champion Philadelphia 76ers defeating the Western Division champion San Francisco Warriors 4 games to 2 in the NBA Finals.

It was the 76ers' second NBA title in franchise history; their first had come in 1955 as the Syracuse Nationals.

The Boston Celtics were denied the chance to win their ninth straight championship, though they would win the title the following two seasons.

The expansion Chicago Bulls made the playoffs in their debut season, and the New York Knicks returned to the postseason for the first time since 1959. It is the longest gap in Knicks franchise history, a record they matched when they missed the playoffs starting in 2004 and ending in 2011.

The 1967 NBA Playoffs marked a change in the league's playoff format; every tournament since 1955 had given the top-ranked team in each division a first-round bye, but starting this season, the NBA upped the number of playoff teams to eight, thereby eliminating a first-round bye for the regular-season division champions.

Philadelphia 76ers

The Philadelphia 76ers (also commonly known as the Sixers) are an American professional basketball team based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The 76ers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member team of the league's Eastern Conference Atlantic Division. Founded in 1946 and originally known as the Syracuse Nationals, they are one of the oldest franchises in the NBA, and one of only eight (out of 23) to survive the league's first decade.

The 76ers have had a rich history, with many of the greatest players in NBA history having played for the organization, including Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, and Dikembe Mutombo. They have won three NBA championships, with their first coming as the Syracuse Nationals in 1955. The second title came in the 1966–67 season, a team which was led by Chamberlain. The third title came in the 1982–83 season, won by a team led by Erving and Malone. They have only been back to the Finals once since then, during the 2001 campaign, led by Iverson and Mutombo, only to fall to the Los Angeles Lakers, 4 games to 1.