Athletic conference

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) is divided into Eastern (NHL and Western (NHL, Conferences, with multiple divisions within each conference (two in each NHL conference). 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 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. NHL teams play at least two games (one at each home arena) against every other team in their league in a regular season.

In college sports, the terms "league," "conference" and (generally at lower levels) "athletic association" can be used interchangeably to refer to a group of teams (generally eight to twelve colleges and/or universities, occasionally as high as sixteen) that regularly play against each other within a national governing body, the most significant of which is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

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