The group stage in the second annual NBA Cup, formerly known as the In-Season Tournament, came to an end last week. We now know which eight team — the Atlanta Hawks, Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Milwaukee Bucks, New York Knicks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic — are going to try to join the Los Angeles Lakers as winners of the league’s nascent cup competition, which Adam Silver has clearly made a hallmark of his tenure as the league’s commissioner.
I love the concept of the NBA Cup. Having another thing that players can try to win is really cool, and just because it is not the Larry O’Brien trophy, that doesn’t mean there can’t be some gravitas behind getting to win this as the years go on. We’re just in that awkward stage that inherently comes with new things where it’s trial and error — all the ideas that sound great in meeting rooms and look sharp on drawing boards, for example, can totally fall apart once they are put into practice.
The good news for the league is that the NBA Cup, broadly, is not one of those ideas. Having said that, last year, we went through some of the stuff the league should keep, tweak, and scrap from the group stage of the tournament, and there were tons of things we thought the league needed to just slightly alter after one year.
With a second year of the NBA Cup under its belt, we have a pretty significant sample size to identify the sorts of big, sweeping changes to the format that can help this go from something fun to a legitimately big part of the league’s calendar. One thing that sticks out among the rest: The schedule for this has to be better.
Right now, the NBA tries its best to shoehorn the Cup into specific days in November and December — a noble idea, to be sure, as it’s a way to get people engaged with the league during the early portion of the calendar. The issue is that, with the way the Cup’s schedule exists now, there’s basically no way to build up momentum around the whole thing. The group stage is only four games, happening on Tuesday and Friday nights over the course of a month — aka the evenings the league doesn’t have to worry about the NFL.
It’s way too short and way too choppy, and having these games interspersed throughout regular season games makes it feel more like a sideshow and less like a major competition. With how small the groups are, how quickly the tournament is wrapped up, and how the league has tied Cup games to regular season records, all of this is pretty understandable — again, there’s a feeling out process for the early stages of a new thing. While the obvious inspiration for this is something like the FA Cup in English soccer, that has a 150-plus year head start on what the NBA is trying to do, it doesn’t have a group stage, and it at least is capable of providing new and interesting matchups between teams in different leagues. The highest-profile club competition with a group stage concept, the Champions League, actually just went through some high-profile reforms to make its group stage bigger.
But just because those inspired the concept doesn’t mean they have to be the models. Basically, if the NBA wants the NBA Cup to be a big deal, it has to act like it is a big deal by absolutely blowing it up and making it something the entire calendar is built around, and as year three rolls around in 2025-26, the NBA can do just that. How? That’s easy: Dedicate the month of January to NBA Cup competition. Easy is maybe not the right word, as it would be a gigantic undertaking from the league that would require changing up its scheduling process and the general format of the NBA Cup, but it’s an endeavor that would be worthwhile. To make this happen, the league needs to change up the group format and make the whole thing bigger. Teams usually play 15 or so games in a given month, so running back the current group format just doesn’t make a lot of sense if it were to try to expand the competition — even if everyone plays a home and home, that’s only eight group games.
But what if the groups go cross-conference and we get six teams in a group, with five groups in all? If every team plays a home-and-home, that is 10 games right there, and if you take the top team from each group with the top-three second-place finishers, you would end up in the same place we do now, with an 8-team knockout tournament. Plus, while I think the concept of making point differential a bigger deal, it’s pretty clear that players and coaches are still getting on board with the concept of running up the score as a strategic thing. More games would, in theory, lessen the importance of point differential, as you shouldn’t need to go to tiebreakers as frequently when the sample size is larger.
With the quarters and the semifinals — or the corresponding games that get scheduled for teams that do not make it — you’re up to 12, which is on the lower end of what teams play in a given month but is certainly not a shockingly low number of games. And from there, things can play out like they currently do, with games scheduled on the fly for eliminated teams. The league has a blueprint for how it can handle this part, so it wouldn’t be a huge undertaking.
Doing this would accomplish two things. For one, it’d mean the discourse around the league for a month revolves entirely around the NBA Cup, which helps it build momentum with the public and gives people a way to understand that these games are happening beyond flipping their TV to TNT on a Tuesday night and being caught off guard by how wild the courts look. Right now, the league flips back and forth between Cup games and normal regular season games, and when you’re building up something new, getting to focus all your time and attention on that new thing is really beneficial. You have to make the NBA Cup feel like a big deal, and dedicating an entire month to it would be a statement of intent.
The league would also have the opportunity to build its schedule for Cup games in January around the NFL’s playoff schedule, which it would know in advance. The Wild Card happens from a Saturday to a Monday, the Divisional Round happens on a Saturday and a Sunday, while the AFC and NFC Championship Games are on a Sunday. There’s a wide open week and a half between that and the Super Bowl where the NFL has nothing going on except for the Pro Bowl (who cares) and Super Bowl Media Day. That is a void that the NBA can fill with its shiny new competition that starts right after Christmas and ends right before All-Star.
None of this is about maximizing television ratings, as I am not one of the, like, 100-150 or so people who work for the NBA, ESPN, TNT, NBC, or Amazon and have to care about the NBA’s television ratings. All of this is about the NBA having this cool, new thing, and trying to figure out the best way to package it and make it feel like a bigger deal than it currently is. Right now, the NBA Cup is still trying to find its foothold, and that’s really hard when it’s not the singular focus of the basketball watching world. That’s just not tenable right now, but letting it have an entire month dedicated to it — during what is usually a pretty dreary time in the NBA’s calendar because nothing especially compelling is happening, mind you — would be a chance for this to turn into the must-watch event that it has the potential to be.
