In the conference playoffs, home court advantage went to the higher-seeded team (number one being the highest).
They would go on to outscore Golden State 72–37 en route to overcoming a 31-point deficit, the largest comeback in NBA playoff history.
[11] Damian Lillard scored 50 points in Game 5 and finished off the series by hitting a 37-foot three at the buzzer to break a 115–115 tie, sending the Blazers through to the conference semifinals.
This was the fifth playoff meeting between the SuperSonics/Thunder and the Blazers, but the first since the Seattle SuperSonics relocated to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder in 2008.
[14] As Game 7 came down to the final seconds, Joel Embiid cut a three-point Raptors lead to one with two free throws, then after Kawhi Leonard split his free throws, Jimmy Butler led the fast break and made a layup with 4.2 seconds left to tie the game.
After a Toronto timeout, Leonard was given the ball, dribbled around the perimeter and shot it from the baseline, just inside the three-point arc.
It was the first buzzer-beater to win a Game 7 in NBA history, and only the second such shot in a winner-take-all playoff game, after Michael Jordan's shot to win the Chicago Bulls' 1989 first-round series against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
[21] ESPN, TNT, ABC, and NBA TV broadcast the playoffs nationally in the United States.
ABC had exclusive television rights to the 2019 NBA Finals, which was the 17th consecutive year for the network.
[22] In Canada, the home market of the Toronto Raptors, national broadcast rights were split approximately equally between the Sportsnet and TSN groups of channels, with some conflicting non-Raptors games airing on NBA TV Canada.
One TSN telecast of a conference semifinal game involving the Raptors was simulcast over the co-owned CTV broadcast network.