The second-annual NBA Cup Final will take place on Tuesday night. The Milwaukee Bucks will represent the Eastern Conference in Las Vegas on the heels of a 110-102 win over the upstart Atlanta Hawks in the semis, while the Oklahoma City Thunder are the representatives of the West, an honor they earned after taking down the Houston Rockets in their semifinal matchup, 111-96.
For all the jokes about how the final won’t include a major market team like the Knicks or the Lakers, this matchup is the sort of final the league probably dreamed of when it came up with the idea for an in-season cup competition. Both the Bucks and the Thunder feature plenty of star power — Giannis Antetokounmpo is a former league MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is going to be an MVP sometime soon, Damian Lillard has been one of the most exciting players in the NBA for more than a decade – and perhaps more importantly, both could really use a win on Tuesday night, albeit for very different reasons.
Today, we wanted to look at both teams ahead of tipoff and dive into why that’s the case.
Milwaukee Bucks
Things have been pretty strange in Milwaukee ever since they won a championship in 2021. At the time, it seemed like they had a core of players — Jrue Holiday, Khris Middleton, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Brook Lopez — that fit perfectly around one another, along with a coach in Mike Budenholzer who is among the NBA’s very best.
Since then, the team has only moved farther away from winning another ring. That’s both in a metaphorical sense and in a literal sense — they made the conference semis in 2022, then got dumped out of the playoffs in the first round in 2023 and 2024. Holiday was turned into Damian Lillard last offseason, and while Dame has been good in Milwaukee, the seemingly unstoppable duo of himself and Giannis has never totally blossomed, while Holiday was flipped to Boston and has been a perfect fit, a key cog in their dominant 2023-24 campaign that saw the Celtics win a ring. Middleton’s spent a ton of time dealing with injuries. Lopez, while still good, keeps getting older. They hired a first-time coach ahead of last year, fired him when he was 30-13 because it just wasn’t working regardless of the record, then went 17-19 with his replacement, a veteran coach who attracts more criticism than just about any coach in the league.
And then, this year happened. The Bucks stunk out loud at the beginning of the season, going 2-8 over their first 10 games. They were, along with the Sixers, the punchline of the league, and the all too common questions about what was next for Antetokounmpo popped up again … well, before he went supernova and started playing the most dominant basketball of his career.
The Bucks are now 12-3 over their last 15 games and flat out look like a team that can make some noise in the East — while they’re in fifth right now, they’re only 1.5 games back of the Knicks and the Magic, which hold the 3 and 4-seeds as of this writing. Yes, regular season success has never really been the problem for the Bucks, but considering how they were compared to the Sixers as recently as a paragraph ago, being able to find success in the regular season right now is a huge win.
The idea behind the NBA Cup is that it can give teams a chance to get on a big stage and win something. For a Milwaukee team that hasn’t been able to do that over the last few years, this is a gigantic opportunity to announce that they haven’t gone anywhere — that’s especially the case considering their opponent, because while they’re a very different team from last year’s Indiana Pacers, well, the Pacers owned the Bucks in 2023-24 (in both the NBA Cup and the playoffs) thanks in large part to the fact that they were younger, hungrier, and all on the same page, while Milwaukee looked old, slow, and disjointed.
The Thunder this year are much better than last year’s Pacers squad, of course, but being able to knock off one of the league’s elite and announce that they’re a team everyone else has to worry about is an opportunity Milwaukee has not been able to take advantage of recently, and we’re excited to see how Giannis, Dame, and co. respond to that. And as an added bonus, this will be the first real test in a situation with high stakes for the unproven guys around Milwaukee’s core — we know how guys like Middleton, Lopez, and Bobby Portis can rise to big occasions when they’re healthy, but how does a guy like A.J. Green or Gary Trent Jr. respond to this challenge? Oklahoma City’s biggest strength is in its ability to throw a ton of guys at you, and if the Bucks can’t get good performances from the guys farther down their bench, it’s going to be awfully hard for them to win, both on Tuesday and when the playoffs roll around.
Oklahoma City Thunder
Unlike the Bucks, the Thunder don’t have a championship in their recent history (or ever in their time in Oklahoma City). Last year, much of this current squad got their first real taste of postseason basketball and learned the hard way what steps they still need to take to fulfill their championship potential. Coming into this season, their goal was to prove they had learned those lessons and took the necessary actions to be better prepared for the challenges of playing in that pressure environment. That is why they paid Isaiah Hartenstein big money in free agency and traded Josh Giddey to Chicago to bring in Alex Caruso — two players that have played key roles in their run to the Cup Final — and face a red-hot Bucks team gives them a chance to prove their mettle early in the year.
We saw a year ago with the Pacers how a deep Cup run from a young team can breed confidence that can carry over into the postseason, as Indiana went from the Cup Final to the Eastern Conference Finals. The Thunder are certainly in a different situation than last year’s Pacers team, as Oklahoma City came into this season with the expectations to be a title contender, whereas Indiana was not considered a real threat in the East. Even so, the one thing this young OKC team lacks is experience, and every opportunity to gain some is extremely valuable for them to prove to themselves, more than anyone else, that they belong in those situations.
Facing the Bucks in the Cup Final will present an excellent benchmark for this Thunder team. As noted above, few teams in the NBA are playing better than Milwaukee over the last month. Whether the Bucks still look this good by the time the playoffs roll around is inconsequential. What matters is, right now, Oklahoma City couldn’t ask for a much better opponent to test themselves against in a game with some elevated stakes. The Thunder have been the league’s most dominant defense to start this season, and will get a tremendous test in the form of the NBA’s leading scorer, Giannis Antetokounmpo, who has imposed his will on just about every opponent this season, and Damian Lillard, who is looking more and more like the version of Dame we grew accustomed to seeing in Portland all those years.
On the other end of the floor, we will get another chance to see how the Thunder have evolved offensively after they were taken out by Dallas after they struggled to provide support for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as a collective. All year, the Thunder excelled because of their shooting as a team, but under playoff pressure, the three-point shooting from the role players went cold and OKC could never fully adjust. This year, they’re winning at an incredible rate in spite of mediocre shooting as a team (35.1 percent), thanks in part to the continued evolution of their offense. Gilgeous-Alexander is a full-on superstar, nipping at the heels of Antetokounmpo for the league’s scoring title early in the year, and while he was spectacular last year in the playoffs, the support structure of this team has changed around him for the better.
Hartenstein gives them a different dynamic than they had a year ago, not only as a rim-runner and lob threat, but as a tremendous playmaker with the ball in his hands in the middle of the floor. Whether that’s on the short roll or in the high post, his passing ability allows for more successful cuts to the rim by the Thunder’s rangy, athletic wings and guards. Jalen Williams has likewise taken more strides as a playmaker, which was shown to be his biggest need in last year’s postseason if the Thunder were going to rely on him as their No. 2 option offensively. Taking some of that playmaking load off of SGA’s shoulders makes the OKC offense more dynamic, and while they can still get bogged down for stretches (like the first half against Houston), they are more capable of making adjustments than they were a year ago to get themselves out of funks.
Winning the NBA Cup would give the Thunder something to point to as proof of concept for the changes they made and the work they put in this summer. For a young team navigating the grind of the regular season that learned the hard way last year that the 1-seed isn’t a guarantee for playoff success, lifting a trophy in Vegas could bolster their confidence — and, for a team with a lot of young guys, that $500,000 would be a big additional check.
