We believe that Season 3 is going to be another big leap forward for the PBL. Our overall season format isn’t changing much. There will still be three phases to the season. 1. Regular Season 2. Qualification Tournament and 3. North American Championship.
The PBL has four conferences, Eastern, Northern, Southern and Western. Now each conference has six teams. During the regular season, teams play each of their conference opponents twice. Conference matches are Best of Five. The team with the best conference record at the end of the regular season is the Conference Champion. The four Conference Champions go straight to the North American Championship. One change with our expansion to 24 teams is that the bottom 2 teams with the worst records in each conference are eliminated from the post season. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th place teams in all the conferences are placed in a seeded Qualification Bracket. The 2nd place teams earn a first-round bye. The teams that finish in the top four go on to meet the Conference Champs in the North American Championship. The Qualification Bracket matches are Best of Seven The Qualification Bracket seeding is heavily based on the performance of the teams in the regular season. In addition, there are mid-season matches between conferences. The matches against another conference do not count toward a team’s season record and are only used for later seeding in the Qualification Bracket and North American Championship Bracket The North American Championship bracket is seeded based on strength of the conference determined during the inter-conference matches and the results of the Qualification Bracket. North American Championship matches are Best of Seven.