[1][2] From the league's second season in 1998 through 2015, the WNBA operated separate playoff brackets for its Eastern and Western Conferences.
The top eight teams in the regular season, without regard to conference affiliation, advance to the playoffs, which are seeded based strictly on regular-season record (with tiebreakers as needed).
The first-round winners advance to the second round, where they play the 3 and 4 seeds in single-elimination games.
The winners of these games advance to the WNBA Semifinals, where they face the top two seeds in best-of-five series.
Conference championships were not awarded in the 1997 inaugural season, and they were again discontinued since the WNBA adopted its current single-table playoff format in 2016.