Basketball

Boys and girls basketball playoff projections for the 2022 postseason

Each year, HighSchoolOT provides extensive playoff projections for all seeded playoffs. This winter, we are providing those projections for the boys and girls basketball state playoffs in all classifications.

Posted 2022-02-09T06:37:08+00:00 - Updated 2022-02-11T18:19:22+00:00

Josh Laney (3) of Enloe. Enloe and Apex Friendship battle at the Garner Showcase on Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022. (Photo By: Nick Stevens/HighSchoolOT)

J. Mike Blake

, HighSchoolOT Contributor

Each year, HighSchoolOT provides extensive playoff projections for all seeded playoffs. This winter, we are providing those projections for the boys and girls basketball playoffs in all classifications.

Projections are dependent on the new RPI system, which is updated in real-time rather than once a week. With the brackets set to be released on Feb. 19, will continue updating these projections at least twice each week.

Download the HighSchoolOT.com app on your phone or tablet to get updates on playoff projections as soon as they are released. The app will also alert you when the final brackets are released by the NCHSAA.

For a quick playoff overview...

Automatic bids: Each league gets a certain number of automatic berths based on the number of schools participating in a particular sport. 1-5 teams = 1 automatic bid. 6-8 teams = 2 automatic bids.

Split conferences: Both halves of the split are treated like their own conferences when it comes to automatic bids (see above), with one caveat — to be treated like a 1-seed, the team must have either finished with a .500 record or better OR finished in the top three of the overall standings. If it is neither of those things, then it still receives an automatic bid, but will be seeded like a wild-card.

Conference tournament RPI: Conference tournament games will be factored into the RPI.

Conference tournament champs: The conference tournament champ is not necessarily rewarded an automatic spot in the playoffs — that is up to each conference. The league's number of automatic bids are set in stone, so a conference would have to approve Team A bumping Team B out of the automatic berth.

Conference basketball tournament schedules from across the state

Breaking ties in the conference tournament: The conference tournament can be used to break ties with teams who are tied for the same bid. Example: If Team A and Team B are tied for the conference title and they split in the regular-season, but only one makes it to the conference championship, then that team gets the higher seed going into the playoffs. Same goes for say, two teams who tied for fourth and split head-to-head but played each other in the first round of the conference tournament — the winner gets the higher seed. There are many other scenarios too, like using the conference tournament to break apart a three-way tie.

RPI used as tiebreaker: There is no random draw tiebreaker anymore now that RPI is being used. If two teams tied for third place in a conference, split head-to-head, and both lost in the same round of the conference tournament to different teams, yet they didn't want to play a tiebreaker game on Friday, they can simply use RPI to break the tie. In many cases, if both teams are not tied for first, it makes more sense to use the RPI tiebreaker instead of playing an extra tiebreaker game as it 1) gives the conference the best shot of getting as many teams into the postseason and 2) has no effect on seeding if and only if there are no 1-seeds involved.

Getting into the playoffs: Conferences are either East or West to begin with. Each East/West side gets 32 teams. The bracket is filled with conference champs and other 1-seeds first, then automatic bids second, then wild-cards in order of their RPI. However, Team A cannot "leapfrog" Team B into the playoffs as a wild-card if Team A finished behind Team B in the conference standings. But once both teams are in the playoffs, Team A might be seeded higher. This is done to ensure that a fourth-place team from a league is left at home while the fifth-place team makes the playoffs.

Seeding the playoffs: The 1-seeds are all seeded first and ordered by RPI. Next comes all the 2-seeds and wild-cards, who are thrown together and ordered by RPI. It's possible for, say, a second-place team to be seeded behind the third-place team from the same league.