nba is an American professional basketball league. The league is owned and operated by the National Basketball Association (NBA). Each year, the NBA has 30 teams and each team plays 82 regular season games, as well as up to four playoff games in the Conference Semifinals and a best-of-seven series for the championship.
After the summer break, the teams begin training camps in late September or October. These sessions allow the coaching staff to evaluate players, scout new recruits and prepare the team for the rigorous regular season. The teams also hold a series of preseason exhibition matches. Some of these are held in non-NBA cities or countries. The league also has a development league, the NBA G League, which allows it to assign players with less than two years of experience to the regular season.
The regular season begins in November and lasts until around the middle of April. During this time, the teams compete to finish with the best record in their conference and in the division. The top eight teams in each conference then qualify for the playoffs, where they are seeded by their record. The first-place team in each conference is given the home court advantage. The other seeds are assigned a game against each other, with the higher seeded team playing the lower-seeded one.
If the top six teams in each conference are tied in terms of winning percentage, tiebreakers are used to determine the final rankings. These include head-to-head competition; better record in division games; win-loss record against teams in the other conference; and winning percentage of teams in the play-in tournament for seventh and eighth seeds.
During the playoffs, the teams compete to be crowned champions of the Western Conference and the Eastern Conference. The winners of each conference are then rewarded with the Larry O’Brien championship trophy.
A player can be ejected from a game after committing five personal fouls or two technical fouls, which are given for unsportsmanlike conduct such as arguing with the referees. The NBA introduced a 24-second shot clock in 1954 to encourage shooting and discourage stalling.
In the late seventies, nba suffered from poor television ratings and struggling franchises. Much of the criticism came from the media, which blamed players for the troubles. A particularly controversial incident occurred in 1977, when Los Angeles Lakers guard Kermit Washington punched and seriously injured Rudy Tomjanovich of the Houston Rockets. The controversy led to a boycott by several cities that had previously supported the league.
The NBA began to diversify its ownership in the early nineties. This led to a growth in minority ownership, which has continued to this day. Despite this, there are still questions about the league’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Some argue that a lack of diversity in the ownership ranks is a contributing factor to the nba’s current financial struggles. Others, however, believe that the problems are mainly economic and stem from a general decline in the popularity of sports.