LAS VEGAS — The NBA will roll out its new in-season tournament this upcoming season, unveiling a championship it hopes will catch on among fans, players and teams. The league will hand out the NBA Cup for the first time on Dec. 9, christening the winner of the 30-team cup competition and handing out a tidy half-million dollars each to every player on the winning team.
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The tournament will play out in two stages, first group play involving each franchise and then a knockout stage when the field trickles down to just eight teams. The group stage games will be held on Tuesdays and Fridays in November as the NBA divides teams into six different groups of five teams apiece split up by conference. The winners of each group, along with the second-place team with the best record in each conference, will move on. The quarterfinals games will be on Dec. 4 and 5 in a team’s home arena, before the semifinals on Dec. 7 and the final on Dec. 9 are held at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
The format is akin to popular international soccer tournaments and is the league’s way of introducing a new title that it hopes will gain some import with all of its constituents.
“We think this is a really unique opportunity to create a second championship, create a tradition that serves as a legacy builder for teams and players,” Evan Wasch, the NBA’s EVP of basketball strategy and analytics, said. “Something that teams can chase early in the season. Something for fans to celebrate. When we look back at players’ careers and resumes over time we can build in their performance in the in-season tournament, along with all the other accolades that NBA players achieve.
“Of course, the hope is that this becomes a real tentpole in our season and drives significant value for the league in future years.”
The league will split up the 15 teams in each conference into three different groups, chosen by random drawing. The teams with the three best records in the conference during the 2022-23 season will be in one pot, the next three best teams in another and so on, and one team per pot will end up in each group. There will be four group play games.
The groups have already been revealed: Grizzlies, Suns, Lakers, Jazz, Blazers in Group A in the West; Nuggets, Clippers, Pelicans, Mavericks, Rockets in Group B; Kings, Warriors, Timberwolves, Thunder, Spurs in Group C; 76ers, Cavaliers, Hawks, Pacers, Pistons in Group A in the East; Bucks, Knicks, Heat, Wizards, Hornets in Group B; Celtics, Nets, Raptors, Bulls, Magic in Group C.
The new tournament will have some disruption on the status quo. Teams will only have 80 games accounted for in their schedules when they are released before the season; two other games will be marked TBD. The 22 teams that don’t qualify for the knockout stage will have those two other games scheduled on nights of the tournament group stage.
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The losing quarterfinalists will play each other on the Friday night between the semi-finals and the finals. All of those games will count as regular-season games, too. At least 24 teams are guaranteed to play the normal 41 home games, while two to four teams will only play 40 home games, and anywhere from zero to two teams could play 42 home games.
Aside from including another elimination game into the season and handing out a new trophy, Wasch said there will be new jerseys for each team specifically for the in-season tournament and a new setup inside the arena.
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The team that wins the tournament will be crowned with the NBA Cup. Each player on the winning team will take home $500,000; players on the second-place team will get $200,000 each; players on losing semi-finals teams will get $100,000 each; and the quarterfinalists will earn $50,000 per player. Those amounts will go up each season in proportion to the BRI growth each year.
The league tinkered with a slew of different ideas before landing on this format. It considered giving out automatic playoff berths or draft picks or cap exceptions to winning teams, Wasch said. It thought about putting the tournament outside of the regular season altogether and not having games count towards the standings and changing some of the rules like incorporating an Elam ending or 40-minute games. There was thought of making the group stage eight games long and constraining it to the division, but there was concern that would front-load half of the division games into just November.
“Ultimately, we decided that the tournament should stand alone,” Wasch said. “And the reason for that is because we want to maximize the ceiling here. Our view is that if the tournament truly stands alone from our traditional playoffs and finals, then it has the chance to rival that in importance and not be seen as a stepping stone to what is already an established tradition in the Larry O’Brien. And so that’s why the tournament stands alone. That of course creates some risk then because it means that it doesn’t have that instant credibility, it doesn’t have intrinsic value.”
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There has been some skepticism of the in-season tournament, already, and people across the league will want to see how it plays out in year one. The league is aware of that.
To avoid teams resting star players during tournament games, the NBA will try to avoid scheduling games back to back, and certainly on the second night of them, though some may come on the front end. The NBA is also in talks with the NBPA to update its player resting policy, which will dovetail with the tournament but not be limited to it. The NBA will monitor television viewership, attendance and social media to see how the tournament is being viewed, while also soliciting fan, player and team feedback.
Joe Dumars, the Pistons legend and now the NBA’s head of basketball operations, thinks it will take time for acceptance but that it will come.
“Everybody’s not going to buy in right away,” he said. “That can’t be the goal that everybody is going to buy in from day one. These things take time. As time goes on I think you can build this up and people can really get into it.”
When commissioner Adam Silver discussed the in-season tournament in April he compared his inspiration for it to Europe’s cup competitions, which run concurrently with each league’s season. Those, however, pit teams against others from different domestic leagues or, in the case of the Europa League and the prestigious Champions League, are made up of teams from across Europe.
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The NBA’s in-season will be the same 30 teams. Wasch believes that it is not the difference in competition that creates fan interest but the intensity of the games and the care of those involved that will draw fans in. He pointed to the 2020 All-Star Game as an example of an exhibition that became extraordinarily competitive and drew in viewers, but it is also an outlier.
“As we look outside our NBA world, let’s say even go beyond the four major professional sports, the idea of competing multiple championships is almost universal in sports,” he said. “It’s not just international soccer. International basketball has quite similar structures. Competitions here in the U.S. — individual competition, golf, tennis, racing, fighting.
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“The idea that a golf fan watches the season and roots for their favorite player to win the Masters and then win the U.S. Open and then win the PGA and then win the British and then win the FedEx Cup. There’s meaning to each of those individual championships just like in all those other sports. And the thing that creates that meaning is not a different group of competitors — it’s not the only thing that creates that meaning.”
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While the in-season tournament will debut this season, it is not guaranteed to stay as is in future years. The NBA is open to changes and tweaks. It considered including teams from outside the league as it workshopped this over the last few years, and it could look differently in future years.
“The one thing that we can be very confident in as we launch a new product like this is it is highly likely to change over time,” Wasch said.
He added, “We’re not going to be wedded to the first format that we happen to land on; we plan to learn and study and see if there’s a better way to do it.”
(Photo: Chuck Cook / USA Today)