Conference

A conference is a meeting of people who "confer" about a topic.

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) and National Basketball Association (NBA) are divided into the western (NHL, NBA) and eastern (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 leagues' postseason playoffs. In the NHL, division winners are guaranteed to qualify and are awarded the highest seeds, meaning they will have home-ice advantage in a given round against a non-division-winner. Starting with the 2015–16 season, NBA division winners are not guaranteed to qualify for the playoffs. The playoff spots instead go to the eight top teams in each conference by overall record, with home-court advantage in each playoff series based solely on record. Major League Soccer also divides itself into an Eastern and Western Conference, though it does not have divisions within them; it too allocates an equal number of teams from each conference to play for its MLS Cup Playoffs (since 2015, this has been six teams each).