Conference (sports)

An athletic conference is a collection of sports teams, playing competitively against each other at the professional, collegiate, or high school level. In many cases conferences are subdivided into smaller divisions, with the best teams competing at successively higher levels. Conferences often, but not always, include teams from a common geographic region.

United States and Canada
In the United States and Canada, the National Hockey League (NHL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) are divided into Eastern (NHL, NBA) and Western (NHL, NBA) Conferences, with multiple divisions within each conference (three in each NBA conference, two in each NHL conference). In both leagues, a total of sixteen teams (eight from each conference) qualify for the league's postseason playoffs. In the NHL, since the 2013–14 season, the top 3 in a division are guaranteed to qualify and division winners are awarded the highest seeds, meaning they will have home-ice advantage in a given round. In the NBA, starting with the 2015–16 season, the playoff spots go to the eight top teams in each conference by overall record, with home-court advantage in each playoff series based solely on record.

In all four sports, the champion of one conference (or league in MLB's case) plays the champion of the other conference for the final round championship, this is guaranteed to occur because the rules for the playoffs require play to be exclusively within the conference/league in all rounds before the final round, leaving only two teams for the finals (one from each conference/league) and the records of teams outside a conference/league are ignored, which can allow teams with inferior records to make the playoffs while teams in the other conference with better records do not get in. An extreme example of this has occurred twice in the NFL, when the 2010 Seattle Seahawks and 2014 Carolina Panthers reached the playoffs by winning their respective divisions despite losing records (7–9 for the Seahawks, 7–8–1 for the Panthers). These are the only two teams ever to qualify for the playoffs with losing records in seasons that were not shortened by strikes. In addition, a team's regular season schedule is weighted towards more games against other teams within their own division and to a lesser extent their own conference; NBA and NHL teams play at least two games (one at each home arena) against every other team in their league in a regular season, but in MLB and the NFL teams do not.

Russia
The Kontinental Hockey League has a Western Conference and an Eastern Conference. This is similar to the NHL's conferences in North America.