NBA
Do NBA In-Season Tournament Final Four games count for the regular season?
They do! According to the NBA, every game in the in-season tournament counts for the regular-season standings except for the Championship Game.
All 67 games played in both stages of the In-Season Tournament will count towards the regular-season standings, except for the Championship game. The 2023-24 season will still consist of 82 regular-season games, including the games played in the Group Play and Knockout Rounds.
The Knockout Rounds will be single-elimination games for the top eight teams that advance from Group Play. The Quarterfinals will be held on Dec. 4-5, and the winners will advance to the neutral-site Semifinals on Dec. 7. The Championship game will be held on Dec. 9.
The Quarterfinals and Semifinals will be counted as Regular Season games for all purposes, but the Championship game will not. This means that the Championship game will not count towards a team’s Regular Season record or a player’s or team’s performance in the Regular Season statistics.
The two teams with the best record in Group Play games will host the Quarterfinal games in each conference. The team with the best record in Group Play games will host the wild card team. If two or more teams are tied for the higher seed in a conference, the tie among the teams will be broken using the same tiebreaker protocol as described above.
On days when In-Season Tournament games are not scheduled (Wednesday, Dec. 6 and Friday, Dec. 8), the 22 teams that do not qualify for the Knockout Rounds will each play two regular-season games.