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.

Cleveland Cavaliers

The Cleveland Cavaliers, also known as the Cavs, are an American professional basketball team based in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cavaliers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA), as a member of the league's Eastern Conference Central Division. The Cavaliers are the only remaining charter member of the division (all the other Central Division teams joined later from the now-defunct Midwest Division).

The team began play in the league in 1970 as an expansion team. Home games are played at Quicken Loans Arena, which the team shares with the Cleveland Gladiators of the Arena Football League, and the Lake Erie Monsters of the American Hockey League. The Cavaliers have featured many NBA stars during their history, including All-Stars Austin Carr, Brad Daugherty, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Mark Price, LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Mo Williams and Kevin Love. Past NBA greats such as Nate Thurmond, Lenny Wilkens, Walt "Clyde" Frazier, and Shaquille O'Neal have also played in Cleveland (albeit near the end of their careers).

National Basketball Association

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America, and is widely considered to be the premier men's professional basketball league in the world. It has 30 franchised member clubs (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada), and is an active member of USA Basketball (USAB), which is recognized by FIBA (also known as the International Basketball Federation) as the national governing body for basketball in the United States. The NBA is one of the four major North American professional sports leagues. NBA players are the world's best paid sportsmen, by average annual salary per player.

The league was founded in New York City on June 6, 1946, as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). The league adopted the name National Basketball Association on August 3, 1949, after merging with its rival National Basketball League (NBL). The league's several international as well as individual team offices are directed out of its head offices located in the Olympic Tower at 645 Fifth Avenue in New York City. NBA Entertainment and NBA TV studios are directed out of offices located in Secaucus, New Jersey.

Golden State

Golden State may refer to:

Golden State Warriors

The Golden State Warriors are an American professional basketball team based in Oakland, California. The Warriors compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member club of the league's Western Conference Pacific Division. The team was established in 1946 as the Philadelphia Warriors based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a founding member of the Basketball Association of America (BAA), and it won the inaugural 1947 BAA Finals that is now considered the first NBA Championship.

In 1962, the franchise relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and was renamed as the San Francisco Warriors until 1971, when it changed its geographic moniker to Golden State, California's state nickname. Since 1972, the team's home court has been Oracle Arena in Oakland.

The Warriors have won four NBA championships. They most recently won the NBA championship by defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2015 Finals.

Franchise history

Team creation

The Warriors were founded in 1946 as the Philadelphia Warriors, a charter member of the Basketball Association of America. They were owned by Peter A. Tyrrell, who also owned the Philadelphia Rockets of the American Hockey League. Tyrrell hired Eddie Gottlieb, a longtime basketball promoter in the Philadelphia area, as coach and general manager. He named the team after an early professional team in the city.