The National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs is the annual elimination tournament held to determine the league champion. The four-round, best-of-seven tournament is held after the league’s regular season and its preliminary postseason tournament, the NBA play-in tournament. Six teams from each of the two conferences automatically advance to the playoffs based on regular season winning percentage, while those teams finishing seven through 10 from each conference compete in the play-in tournament to determine the final two playoff seeds.

Prior to the 2020s, the NBA playoffs were widely regarded to comprise the entirety of the NBA postseason, although some sources suggested the NBA Finals should be regarded as separate. From the 2022–23 NBA season, when an expansion to the postseason implemented during the prior three seasons (including two COVID-shortened seasons) was made permanent, the NBA made it clearly known that the playoffs were to remain a four-round, best-of-seven tournament (including the Finals), and that thus qualification criteria for the playoffs and postseason are no longer identical.

The top six teams in both the Eastern Conference and Western Conference, ranked by winning percentage, directly advance to the playoffs. Teams ranked seventh through tenth compete in the NBA play-in tournament for the seventh and eighth seeds.

Officially considered separate from the NBA playoffs, the NBA play-in tournament uses a modified Page playoff format in which the seventh- and eighth-place teams play each other in a qualification game, with the winner being given the opportunity to play as the seventh seed of the playoffs. Meanwhile, the ninth- and tenth-place teams play each other in an elimination game, with the loser being eliminated and the winner playing the loser of the seven-eight game in a final game to determine who earns the eighth playoff seed.^[1]

Both conferences conduct the playoffs in the traditional bracket format. All rounds are best-of-seven series. Series are played in the 2–2–1–1–1 format, meaning the team with home-court advantage hosts games 1, 2, 5, and 7, while their opponent hosts games 3, 4, and 6, with games 5, 6 and 7 being played if needed. This format has been used since 2014, after NBA team owners unanimously voted to change the format of the NBA Finals from the 2–3–2 format on October 23, 2013. Once the playoffs start, the bracket is fixed; teams are never “reseeded”, unlike in the National Football League and formerly the National Hockey League (until the wild card format introduced in the 2013–14 season) where the strongest remaining teams face the weakest teams in subsequent rounds.