How Many Teams Are in the NBA? Conferences and Divisions

There are 30 teams in the NBA. Twenty-nine play in American cities and one, the Toronto Raptors, plays in Ontario. The National Basketball Association sorts them into two conferences of 15, the Eastern and the Western, and divides each conference into three divisions of five teams. That makes six divisions: the Atlantic, Central and Southeast in the East, and the Northwest, Pacific and Southwest in the West. The number has been 30 since the 2004-05 season and the division map has not been redrawn since then either, the longest the league has ever gone without a realignment.

The first game the league ever staged was played in Canada. On November 1, 1946, the New York Knickerbockers beat the Toronto Huskies 68-66 at Maple Leaf Gardens, and the Huskies folded after that one season. Toronto returned with the Raptors in 1995, and it is still the only city outside the United States with a team.

How many teams are in the NBA: 30, in two conferences and six divisions

The structure is symmetrical, which is rarer in American sports than it sounds. Thirty divides evenly into two halves of 15 and six groups of five, with no division larger than another and no conference carrying a spare team.

• 30Teams
• 2Conferences
• 6Divisions
• 5Teams per division

The league's alignment since the 2004-05 season. All six divisions are the same size.

A few practical facts follow from the count. With 30 teams and a 16-team playoff bracket, a little more than half the league reaches the postseason proper, and 20 teams play at least one game after the regular season once the play-in is included. With 15 teams in a conference, a team has 14 conference opponents and 15 outside it. With five teams in a division, it has four division rivals. Those three figures, 14, 15 and four, are the raw material of the schedule, and every team's 82 games are assembled from them.

Each franchise is a separately owned business holding a membership in the league, and the owners or their representatives sit together as the Board of Governors. That body votes on expansion, relocation and realignment, and nothing about the number 30 changes without it. Thirty teams also means a fixed number of jobs. Each club can carry up to 15 players on standard contracts and three more on two-way deals, so the league has room for 450 of the first kind and 540 players in all. The limits and exceptions are in our guide to how many players are on an NBA roster.

Each team also operates or is affiliated with a developmental club, a system described in our explainer on the NBA G League, but those are not NBA teams and are not counted in the 30.

The conference and the division do different jobs. One of them decides who makes the playoffs. The other decides very little, and the gap between the two is the part of the alignment that most often surprises people who follow the NFL first.

The Eastern Conference division by division

Fifteen teams, from Boston down to Miami and as far west as Milwaukee and Chicago.

Division	Team	First NBA season	Earlier homes of the franchise
Atlantic	Boston Celtics	1946-47	None
Atlantic	Brooklyn Nets	1976-77	Long Island and New Jersey; two ABA titles before the merger
Atlantic	New York Knicks	1946-47	None
Atlantic	Philadelphia 76ers	1949-50	Syracuse, as the Nationals, until 1963
Atlantic	Toronto Raptors	1995-96	None
Central	Chicago Bulls	1966-67	None
Central	Cleveland Cavaliers	1970-71	None
Central	Detroit Pistons	1948-49	Fort Wayne until 1957
Central	Indiana Pacers	1976-77	None; an ABA club from 1967
Central	Milwaukee Bucks	1968-69	None
Southeast	Atlanta Hawks	1949-50	Tri-Cities, Milwaukee and St. Louis
Southeast	Charlotte Hornets	1988-89	None; see the note below
Southeast	Miami Heat	1988-89	None
Southeast	Orlando Magic	1989-90	None
Southeast	Washington Wizards	1961-62	Chicago and Baltimore

The Atlantic and Central

The Atlantic is the old Northeast corridor plus Toronto. The Celtics and Knicks are the only two franchises that have played every season since 1946 without moving. The 76ers and the Nets round out a division in which four of the five cities sit on the same rail line. Toronto was placed here in 2004, having spent its first nine seasons in the Central.

The Central is the Great Lakes division: Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis and Milwaukee. It is the most compact of the six. When the map was redrawn in 2004 it shed Atlanta, Toronto and New Orleans and added nobody. It has not always been an Eastern group. The Bulls and Bucks played in the Western Conference through the 1970s and came east in 1980.

The Southeast

The Southeast did not exist before 2004. It was assembled from Atlanta, which came over from the Central, three teams lifted out of the Atlantic in Miami, Orlando and Washington, and the new Charlotte club.

Charlotte's entry in the table needs a sentence of explanation. The original Hornets began play in 1988 and moved to New Orleans in 2002. The league gave Charlotte an expansion team, the Bobcats, for 2004. In 2014 the Bobcats took the Hornets name, and the league reassigned the records of the 1988-2002 Hornets to the Charlotte franchise. So today's Hornets are, on paper, a club founded in 1988 that did not operate for two seasons. The full list of moves like this one is in our guide to NBA teams that relocated.

The Western Conference division by division

For anyone searching which NBA teams are in the Western Conference, these are the 15, running from Memphis and New Orleans on the Mississippi to the Pacific coast.

Division	Team	First NBA season	Earlier homes of the franchise
Northwest	Denver Nuggets	1976-77	None; an ABA club from 1967
Northwest	Minnesota Timberwolves	1989-90	None
Northwest	Oklahoma City Thunder	1967-68	Seattle, as the SuperSonics, until 2008
Northwest	Portland Trail Blazers	1970-71	None
Northwest	Utah Jazz	1974-75	New Orleans until 1979
Pacific	Golden State Warriors	1946-47	Philadelphia until 1962
Pacific	LA Clippers	1970-71	Buffalo, as the Braves, and San Diego
Pacific	Los Angeles Lakers	1948-49	Minneapolis until 1960
Pacific	Phoenix Suns	1968-69	None
Pacific	Sacramento Kings	1948-49	Rochester, Cincinnati and Kansas City
Southwest	Dallas Mavericks	1980-81	None
Southwest	Houston Rockets	1967-68	San Diego until 1971
Southwest	Memphis Grizzlies	1995-96	Vancouver until 2001
Southwest	New Orleans Pelicans	2002-03	Arrived from Charlotte as the Hornets
Southwest	San Antonio Spurs	1976-77	None in the NBA; Dallas in the ABA

The Pacific

Four California and Arizona markets and five teams. The Lakers and Clippers shared one building in downtown Los Angeles for a quarter of a century until the Clippers opened their own arena in Inglewood in 2024. The Warriors play in San Francisco under a name, Golden State, that they adopted in 1971 and that refers to no city at all. Sacramento holds one of the league's two most traveled franchises: the Kings began as the Rochester Royals and, like the Hawks, have called four metropolitan areas home.

The Northwest and Southwest

The Northwest is the division that least deserves its name. Portland is in the Northwest. Denver and Salt Lake City are in the Rockies. Minneapolis is in the upper Midwest and Oklahoma City is on the southern plains, closer to Dallas than to any of its division rivals. The reason is historical, and the section on the map's oddities below explains it.

The Southwest is three Texas teams plus Memphis and New Orleans. It has been the strongest division in the league for long stretches of this century, largely because San Antonio, Dallas and Houston were all good at once.

Look at the "earlier homes" column across both tables and a pattern shows. The West is where franchises ended up. Nine of its 15 teams began in another city, against four in the East if the Nets' moves around the New York area are set aside. The country's population moved south and west after 1950 and its basketball teams followed it.

What conferences decide: playoff places, the bracket and the Finals

Nearly everything that matters.

A team's finishing position is its rank among the 15 teams in its conference, by winning percentage. The top six go straight into the playoffs. The teams placed seventh through tenth go into a short tournament for the last two places, described in our piece on how the play-in works. The bottom five are finished. At no point does the league compare an Eastern team's record with a Western team's to decide who gets in.

The bracket is then played entirely inside each conference for three rounds. First round, conference semifinals, conference finals. The East produces one champion and the West produces one, and those two meet in the NBA Finals. Our guide to the NBA playoff format follows the bracket round by round.

The consequence is simple and absolute: two teams from the same conference can never play each other for the title. The Celtics and Lakers have met in the Finals 12 times because one is in the East and the other in the West. The Lakers and Spurs, or the Celtics and 76ers, have played some of the best series in the sport's history, and every one of them ended a round or two short of the championship.

The schedule and the smaller things

Conferences also shape the regular season. A team plays 52 of its 82 games against its own conference and 30 against the other, so the standings in each half of the league are built mostly from games within that half. The formula is laid out in our guide to the 82-game schedule.

Several smaller pieces of league business are organized the same way. The NBA Cup draws its groups within conferences, as our explainer on the in-season tournament sets out. Monthly awards are given to one player and one coach in each conference. For most of its history the All-Star Game was East against West, though the league has changed that format more than once. Each conference champion receives its own trophy: the Bob Cousy Trophy in the East and the Oscar Robertson Trophy in the West.

What conferences do not decide is the draft, the major individual awards or the All-NBA teams. Those are league-wide. A Most Valuable Player ballot does not care which side of the Mississippi a candidate plays on.

Do divisions matter in the NBA? What they still decide

Less every decade. The honest list has three items on it.

Four games a year. A team plays each of its four division rivals four times, two at home and two away. That is 16 games out of 82. Six of the other ten conference opponents are also played four times, so a division rival is not even seen more often than half the rest of the conference. The scheduling privilege of a division is close to symbolic.

One step in the tiebreaker. When two teams finish with the same record and split their season series, a team that won its division is placed ahead of one that did not. When three or more are tied, the division-winner test is applied first of all. This is the only remaining way a division title can change a playoff seed. The whole procedure is in our guide to the tiebreaker rules.

A banner. Division championships are recorded and some teams hang them in the rafters. Others, with more important banners to display, do not bother.

That is all. A division winner is not guaranteed a playoff place, a home series or any particular seed.

How the guarantee was taken away

It used to be very different. For most of the league's history, finishing first in a division meant an automatic high seed. When the map went to three divisions per conference in 2004, the three winners were given the top three seeds regardless of record.

The flaw showed up within two seasons. In 2005-06 Dallas won 60 games, the second-best record in the West, and was seeded fourth because San Antonio had won the Southwest. Denver won the Northwest with 44 victories and was seeded third. The two best teams in the conference met in the second round. The league changed the rule that summer: division winners were now guaranteed only a top-four seed, with the four teams ordered by record.

That patch lasted nine years. In 2014-15 Portland won the Northwest with 51 wins and took the fourth seed ahead of Memphis and San Antonio, who had each won 55. Before the next season the Board of Governors removed the guarantee entirely. Since 2015-16 the teams in each conference have been ranked strictly by record, and since 2021 the seventh and eighth seeds have been settled by the play-in.

Compare that with the NFL, where winning a four-team division still guarantees a home playoff game however poor the record. Basketball's owners decided that 82 games of evidence should outrank an accident of grouping. It was the right call, and it left the divisions with almost nothing to do.

The map's oddities: Memphis, New Orleans and Minnesota in the West

Memphis is a river city in Tennessee, a state most Americans file under the South. New Orleans is on the Gulf of Mexico. Minneapolis is a short drive from the Wisconsin border. All three play in the Western Conference, and every few years somebody asks why.

The first answer is that the line is tidier than it looks. Check the longitudes. Every Western Conference city lies west of every Eastern Conference city. Memphis and New Orleans, the easternmost teams in the West, sit almost exactly on the 90th meridian. Chicago and Milwaukee, the westernmost teams in the East, are between two and three degrees east of that. A ruler laid north to south on a map separates the conferences cleanly.

The awkwardness is in the time zones. Nine teams play on Central time, and the conference boundary runs straight through the middle of them: Chicago and Milwaukee on one side; Minnesota, Memphis, New Orleans, Oklahoma City and the three Texas teams on the other. A fan in Memphis watches a great many road games that tip off at 9:30 at night.

How each one got there

The causes are a sequence of expansions and moves, each sensible when it was made.

Minnesota entered the league in 1989 and was put in the Midwest Division of the Western Conference, alongside Denver, Utah and the Texas teams. When that division was split in 2004, the Timberwolves went with Denver and Utah into the new Northwest, where the other two members were Portland and Seattle. Then, in 2008, the SuperSonics moved to Oklahoma City and kept their place. That is how a team in Oklahoma came to play in a division named for a corner of the country about 1,500 miles away, and how Minnesota came to have no division rival in its own region.

Memphis got its team in 2001, when the Vancouver Grizzlies relocated. The franchise had been in the Midwest Division and it stayed there. Nobody saw a reason to move a club across conferences just because it had moved across a continent.

New Orleans is the one case where the league did act. The Hornets arrived from Charlotte in 2002 and played two seasons in the Eastern Conference, in the Central Division, because that is where the Charlotte club had been. When the Bobcats came in for 2004-05, the East would have had 16 teams and the West 14. New Orleans was shifted to the Southwest to even the count.

The expansion teams of the late 1980s produced stranger alignments than any of these. To spread the new clubs around, the league rotated them through divisions in their first seasons, and the Miami Heat spent 1988-89, their first year, in the Western Conference. A team from South Florida played its division games against Denver, Utah and Texas. It went 15-67.

NBA teams by state: shared cities, big states and markets left out

The 29 American teams are spread across 21 states and the District of Columbia. Twenty-nine states have none.

California4teams

Texas3teams

Florida2teams

New York2teams

Counted by where each team plays its home games. Seventeen other states, the District of Columbia and the province of Ontario have one team each.

Show the numbers

States with more than one NBA team

Item	Value
California	4teams
Texas	3teams
Florida	2teams
New York	2teams

State or district	Teams	Which
California	4	Lakers, Clippers, Warriors, Kings
Texas	3	Mavericks, Rockets, Spurs
Florida	2	Heat, Magic
New York	2	Knicks, Nets
17 other states	1 each	Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin
District of Columbia	1	Wizards

Two metropolitan areas have a pair of teams. New York has the Knicks at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan and the Nets in Brooklyn, where they arrived from New Jersey in 2012. Los Angeles has the Lakers and the Clippers. In both cities one team is plainly the senior partner, and in both the junior one moved in from elsewhere.

Four teams carry a state's name instead of a city's: Indiana, Minnesota, Utah and, by way of a nickname, Golden State. It usually signals a club that wanted to claim a whole region, which in Utah's and Indiana's cases it has.

The cities without a team

The list of large American markets with no NBA team is short and most of it is made of places that used to have one. Seattle lost the SuperSonics in 2008 after 41 seasons and is generally counted as the largest. San Diego has had two franchises and kept neither. St. Louis had the Hawks, Kansas City had the Kings, Baltimore had the Bullets, Cincinnati had the Royals, Buffalo had the Braves. Vancouver had the Grizzlies for six years.

Las Vegas has never had a team and has spent two decades behaving like a city that expects one, hosting the Summer League every July and the final stages of the NBA Cup. Pittsburgh, Tampa, Nashville and Columbus are among the other large metropolitan areas with major-league teams in other sports and none in this one.

Being the only major professional team in town is its own kind of market. Oklahoma City, Memphis, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Portland, Orlando and San Antonio have at various times had an NBA club as their only team from the four biggest leagues, and those clubs tend to matter more to their cities than a fourth team does to a large one.

The imbalance argument: losing teams in, winning teams out

Because playoff places are awarded by conference, the league sometimes admits a team with a losing record and sends home a better one. It has happened often enough to be a standing complaint.

Season	Last Eastern team in	Record	Western team left out	Record
2003-04	Boston Celtics	36-46	Utah Jazz	42-40
2007-08	Atlanta Hawks	37-45	Golden State Warriors	48-34
2010-11	Indiana Pacers	37-45	Houston Rockets	43-39
2013-14	Atlanta Hawks	38-44	Phoenix Suns	48-34
2014-15	Brooklyn Nets	38-44	Oklahoma City Thunder	45-37

The 2007-08 and 2013-14 rows are the ones critics reach for. A 48-win team, good enough for a top-four seed in the East in each of those seasons, watched the playoffs from home so that a team ten or eleven games worse could take the last place on the other side. Both of those Atlanta teams, it should be said, then pushed a top seed to seven games.

The direction of the imbalance is not fixed. It ran toward the West for most of the 25 years after 1999, and the East was the deeper conference for stretches before that. But the mechanism is permanent. Whenever one conference is deeper, the eighth-best team on the weak side will be worse than the ninth-best on the strong side.

Seeding 1 through 16

The proposed cure is to ignore conferences in the postseason: take the 16 best records in the league and seed them one to sixteen. Commissioner Adam Silver said more than once in the middle of the last decade that the league was looking at it. The WNBA made the switch in 2016, as our guide to the WNBA playoff format explains.

The NBA has not, for two reasons that are harder to dismiss than they first appear.

Travel is one. A first-round series between Boston and Portland means cross-country flights between games, four of them if the series goes seven, in a round that currently pairs teams a short hop apart. The league would have to lengthen the playoff calendar or accept more tired teams.

The schedule is the other, and it is the stronger objection. Records are only comparable if teams play similar opponents. Under the present formula an Eastern team plays 52 games against the East. Its 45 wins and a Western team's 45 wins were earned against different fields. Seeding all 16 on a single list would be fair only if every team played a balanced schedule, and a balanced schedule means more travel all season long.

The play-in tournament, introduced in its present form for the 2020-21 season, took some heat out of the argument without touching the cause. A ninth-place or tenth-place team now has a route in, so a good Western team is less likely to be shut out by a single game in the standings. It can still be shut out by the conference it plays in.

How the league got to 30: from 11 clubs in 1946 to the Bobcats in 2004

The league that opened in 1946 was the Basketball Association of America, and it had 11 teams: Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, St. Louis, Toronto and Washington. Four folded after one season. Three of the original 11 survive: the Celtics, the Knicks and the Warriors, who were then in Philadelphia.

Teams that completed the season beginning in the year shown. The league took the name NBA in 1949 after absorbing clubs from the National Basketball League.

Show the numbers

Number of teams in the BAA and NBA

Item	Teams
1946	11
1947	8
1949	17
1955	8
1967	12
1970	17
1976	22
1980	23
1989	27
1995	29
2004	30

The chart's early spike is the 1949 merger. The BAA took in the remaining clubs of the older National Basketball League, renamed itself the National Basketball Association and found itself with 17 teams, several of them in places like Sheboygan, Waterloo and Anderson, Indiana. Most of the small-town clubs were gone within a year.

By the 1954-55 season the league was down to eight. Those eight are worth naming, because every one of them still exists: the Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, Philadelphia Warriors, Syracuse Nationals, Fort Wayne Pistons, Minneapolis Lakers, Milwaukee Hawks and Rochester Royals. Six have since changed cities at least once. For seven seasons that was the entire NBA.

Growth after that came in waves.

Period	Teams added	League size afterward
1961	Chicago Packers, now the Washington Wizards	9
1966 to 1970	Chicago Bulls; Seattle and San Diego; Milwaukee and Phoenix; Buffalo, Cleveland and Portland	17
1974	New Orleans Jazz	18
1976	Denver, Indiana, the New York Nets and San Antonio, from the ABA	22
1980	Dallas Mavericks	23
1988 and 1989	Charlotte and Miami; then Minnesota and Orlando	27
1995	Toronto and Vancouver	29
2004	Charlotte Bobcats	30

The 1966-70 wave was a response to a competitor. The American Basketball Association launched in 1967, and the NBA grew from 10 teams to 17 in four years partly to occupy cities before the new league could. The rivalry ended in 1976 when four ABA teams were admitted, on terms set out in our account of the ABA-NBA merger. Those four are not expansion teams in the usual sense. They arrived with rosters, fans and, in the Nets' and Pacers' cases, championships.

The 1995 pair took the league into Canada for the first time since the Huskies. The 2004 addition was a repair job, replacing the team Charlotte had lost two years earlier. Since then, nothing. More than two decades without a new franchise is the longest pause in the league's history.

The realignments: two divisions, then four, then six

The word "conference" did not appear in the standings until 1970. For its first quarter century the league was split into an Eastern Division and a Western Division, with a single season in 1949-50 when 17 teams required a third. The two division winners were, in effect, what conference champions are now.

Geography was applied loosely in those years. The Hawks spent 13 seasons in St. Louis as a Western Division team, moved to Atlanta in 1968 and stayed in the West for two more seasons. A club in Georgia won the Western Division in 1969-70.

By 1970 there were 17 teams again and two groups were too few. The league created two conferences and put two divisions in each: the Atlantic and Central in the East, the Midwest and Pacific in the West. Boston, Buffalo, New York and Philadelphia formed the first Atlantic. Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati and Cleveland formed the first Central, a group that stretched from Lake Erie to Georgia. That four-division map lasted 34 seasons.

Its membership did not stand still. The original Midwest Division of 1970 was Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and Phoenix, which tells you how loosely the labels were applied. Detroit moved to the East in 1978. In 1980, when Dallas joined, the league made its biggest single correction: Chicago and Milwaukee went east to the Central, and Houston and San Antonio went west to the Midwest. For the first time the conference line ran roughly where it runs today.

The six-division map arrived with the Bobcats in 2004. Thirty teams in four divisions would have meant groups of seven and eight, so the league split each conference into three groups of five and retired the name Midwest. The Atlantic lost its three southern teams. The Pacific lost Portland and Seattle. The Northwest, Southwest and Southeast were new. Fifteen of the 29 existing teams opened that season in a division with a different name from the one they had finished the previous spring in.

Nothing has changed since, apart from Seattle becoming Oklahoma City inside the same division. Two decades of stability is the reason the present map feels permanent. It is a compromise drawn for 30 teams in 2004, and it will not survive the 31st.

Expansion to 32: the 2026 vote on Seattle and Las Vegas

In 2026 the Board of Governors voted to authorize the league office to explore expansion in two cities, Seattle and Las Vegas. It was the first formal step toward new teams in more than 20 years, and it is worth being exact about what it did and did not do.

It did not award a franchise. It allowed the league to receive and examine bids from prospective ownership groups in those two markets. A second vote of the owners is required to approve expansion itself, and league rules set a high bar for it: three-quarters of the governors, 23 of the 30. No first season for a new team is fixed until that approval vote has been held. This page describes the position after the 2026 exploratory vote and nothing later.

1. 1Exploratory voteThe Board of Governors authorizes the league office to study specific markets and take bids.
2. 2Bids and reviewProspective owners submit proposals. The league examines the ownership group, the arena and the market.
3. 3Approval voteThe owners vote on admitting the new franchise. Three-quarters must agree.
4. 4Expansion feeThe new owners pay a fee, which is divided among the existing teams.
5. 5Expansion draftExisting teams protect part of their rosters and the new club selects from the players left exposed.
6. 6First seasonThe new team joins a conference and a division and enters the schedule formula.

The general sequence of NBA expansion. The first step was taken in 2026; the later steps had not been completed when this page was written.

The expansion draft is the least familiar step because the league has held so few. In 2004 each existing team could protect eight players, and Charlotte chose from the rest, taking no more than one from any club. A new team also enters the regular draft, on terms the league sets as part of the expansion agreement.

What two Western teams would do to the map

Both candidate cities are in the West. Add them and the Western Conference has 17 teams and the East 15. One current Western team would have to move east to make it 16 and 16.

The candidates are the same three clubs from the oddities section. Minnesota, Memphis and New Orleans are the Western teams closest to the conference line, and each has a case. Minnesota would gain Milwaukee and Chicago as natural rivals. Memphis and New Orleans would join a region whose college loyalties they already share. Which of them goes has not been decided, and anyone who claims to know is guessing.

The divisions would have to be redrawn too. Sixteen teams do not split into three equal groups. The obvious answers are four divisions of four in each conference, which is the NFL's structure, or two divisions of eight, which is the NHL's. Either would end the six-division map. Given how little divisions now decide, the league could also choose to drop them altogether, though a schedule formula needs some way of deciding who plays whom four times.

How the NBA's structure compares with the NFL, MLB and NHL

All four of the largest American leagues use the same two-layer idea, and each has made the layers mean something different.

League	Teams	Top-level split	Divisions	What a division title earns
NBA	30	2 conferences of 15	6 of 5 teams	A tiebreaker edge only
NFL	32	2 conferences of 16	8 of 4 teams	A playoff place and a home game
MLB	30	2 leagues of 15	6 of 5 teams	A playoff place
NHL	32	2 conferences of 16	4 of 8 teams	The division's top three all qualify

Baseball and basketball have the same skeleton, 30 teams in six groups of five, and opposite attitudes to it. In MLB the division race is the main event of the regular season and winning one puts a team in the postseason. In the NBA it is a line in the media guide.

Football sits at the far end. Our guide to the NFL's divisions and conferences explains a system in which six of a team's 17 games are against three division rivals and the division winner hosts a playoff game regardless of record. Divisions matter in the NFL because the season is short and head-to-head games are a large share of it.

That is the underlying logic. The fewer games a league plays, the more it needs small groups to manufacture meaningful matchups and settle ties. The NBA plays 82, enough for overall record to be trusted, so it has been able to strip its divisions of power without anyone much missing them. Conferences survive because of geography and travel. Divisions survive mostly out of habit.

The NBA is also the only one of the four that has stood at the same size for more than 20 years. The NFL reached 32 in 2002, the NHL in 2021, and baseball has been at 30 since 1998 with expansion talk of its own. If Seattle and Las Vegas are admitted, three of the four leagues will have 32 teams, and the answer at the top of this page will change for the first time since George W. Bush's first term. More of our American coverage is collected on the United States hub.