The 2014 NBA Playoffs are set to begin tomorrow, Friday, April 18. Sixteen teams including the OKC Thunder, Indiana Pacers, and the San Antonio Spurs will try to unseat the defending NBA champions Miami Heat.

I’ve been following the NBA playoffs for over 20 years now and one thing I wasn’t aware of that was a thing were fans printing out NBA Playoff Brackets. Are these being downloaded and printed for friendly bets, office pools, or are just NBA diehards having fun predicting the potential outcomes?

Whatever the reason, there’s certainly a need for them. Though nothing compared to the office pools that go on during March Madness, I’m really interested to know why NBA fans want downloadable NBA playoff brackets.

Take a second to answer the following poll and then scroll down more to see which basketball sites actually offer up them up.

[polldaddy poll=7979221]

NBA.com Doesn’t Have a Printable Bracket? What?!

Hey NBA.com, if you want to engage with your fans even more, you may want to offer a printable bracket for your fans that come to your site. You had one in 2002, but not 2014? Running a large site myself, I am sympathetic to other websites because I know we all could use more resources, but you’re NBA.com, so it’s kind of unforgivable that the official site of the NBA doesn’t offer a PDF version of the 2014 playoffs. In any case, this is what NBA.com is offering in ways of their Playoff bracket:

ESPN’s NBA Playoff Bracket

It’s odd that a huge sports site like ESPN doesn’t offer more of a printer-friendly NBA playoff bracket. Not only does ESPN not provide a PDF version to be printed out, but the format they provide is also very unfriendly, with one side of the bracket above the other.

Instead of the typical format with the Eastern Conference on the left side and the West on the right, the Eastern conference side of the bracket sits on top, while the Western Conference side sits at the bottom.

SBNation’s NBA Bracket

SBNation also provides a unique, blank NBA playoff bracket. It’s well-designed and a really creative bracket, but the fan site also doesn’t provide a viable print option for visitors to download and print out. The bracket is set up with the correct seedings, but the team logos are replaced by SBNation’s team-specific blog network logos (Blazers Edge, Mavs Money Ball, etc.), so this bracket may be more a fan engagement play than a resource for an NBA Playoff bracket that is printer-friendly. In any case here it is:

RealGM’s Somewhat Printer-Friendly Version

So far, two huge basketball sites that don’t provide printable versions for the 2014 NBA playoffs, so it’s nice to run across RealGM’s bracket, which is. It’s great that RealGM provides an empty, printable bracket, but for what it provides in a very basic bracket, it severely lacks in design. Here’s their snore-worthy, but somewhat (non-PDF) printer-friendly NBA bracket:

CBS Sports Not About NBA

Another big sports site, another HTML only NBA playoff Bracket. Clearly, CBS cares more about March Madness brackets than they do about the ABC-friendly NBA Playoffs. Is there a competitive thing here or just out-of-sight, out-of-mind? Here’s the bracket that CBS Sports provides their users:

How disappointing. I would have loved to have provided you all with a better list of printable resources for the 2014 NBA Playoffs, but clearly, the bigger sites don’t believe that many NBA fans are interested in downloading their own blank NBA playoff brackets.

Fortunately, there are other options if you’re looking to have your own NBA bracketology challenge. Check out these smaller sites that are offering NBA playoff brackets you can print out. Maybe next year, Interbasket will see this as an opportunity to offer up our own custom-designed, NBA playoff brackets — printable in PDF format, of course.

Good luck with whatever you are using your brackets for (and go Houston Rockets!).