How many games are in the NBA playoffs?
By Ben Handler
Thursday night the NBA gets back underway after a week-long all-star break. The next big benchmark on the schedule will be the end of the regular season and the start of the NBA playoffs.
We’ve already established that the regular season ends on April 14th, the play-in tournament runs from April 16th through April 19th, and the playoffs start on April 20th.
We’ve also already established that the playoffs are a four-round knockout-style tournament with 16 teams competing to win the NBA Finals. But how many games will be played and what is the format?
How many games in the playoffs?
Each round of the NBA playoffs is now a best-of-7 series, and that has been the case since 2003. For many years, the first-round series were only best of 5 games, but that has changed and now best of 7 series are played across the board.
So there are four rounds, and each team must win four games in a round to advance. That means to win the title, a team must win 16 playoff games, including the Finals. The maximum amount of games a team could play is 28. That would require going to a game 7 in all four rounds.
If every single playoff and finals series ended in a four-game sweep, the least possible amount of games that would be played in total is 60. And in the event that every single series were to go 7 games, then we would get 105 total games played.
Hornets history
The Hornets currently have the longest playoff drought of any team in the NBA, as they last made it in the 2015-16 seasons - a drought that looks almost certain to continue. Furthermore, the Hornets haven’t actually won a playoff series since the 2001-02 season - also the longest drought in the NBA.
The Hornets have also only won four playoff series in franchise history, and all of those were first-round series. As they all occurred before 2003, those were all best-of-5 game series’. So the Hornets, as a franchise, have never won a 7 game series in their existence.
That’s yet another pitiful Hornets stat and one that they can hopefully change in the coming years.