The biggest reason NBA commissioner Adam Silver wanted to institute the NBA Cup was to inject interest in a long, arduous 82-game season.
The common refrain was that many casual league observers didn’t start paying attention to it until after the All-Star Break in late February. That’s because many NBA teams and stars don’t take the early portions of the season all that seriously themselves. You should compare November to April basketball yourself someday soon when you get the time. The difference is night and day.
So, here’s a tournament like the NBA Cup with fancy, temporary courts and gaudy jerseys designed to add an extra competitive edge to the part of the year when many squads are still clearly easing their way into the action.
Sounds simple and straightforward, right?
As we enter the knockout rounds of the 2024 NBA Cup, Silver and his cronies failed to account for a significant loophole in the proceedings. As it stands, the 22 NBA teams who don’t qualify for the knockout rounds essentially get almost a week off, just about six weeks into the regular season.
In effect, this schedule loophole directly contradicts what the NBA Cup was trying to prevent.
Look at the below schedule. The next non-NBA Cup game isn’t until Thursday, December 12! The overwhelming majority of the league already eliminated from this year’s Cup play is getting three, four, or even five days off right before the holiday season. And because the NBA is trying to center the remaining Cup teams with a bigger spotlight, it can’t meaningfully shift around the schedule to mitigate this gap. It doesn’t want non-Cup teams playing when the quarterfinals are happening.
We cannot underestimate how valuable this is to NBA players who play games every other night, play back-to-backs, and travel cross-country all the time.
None of them were born yesterday because they can see how the schedule shakes out in advance:
This isn’t to say that NBA teams want to deliberately miss their chances at winning the Cup. I’m sure some measure of the cash prize motivates many squads, especially those with younger players who have yet to earn lucrative contracts. They’re not going to stop trying altogether.
But put yourself in the shoes of a head coach or superstar for a second.
If it’s mid-November and your team is nursing some light injuries before an NBA Cup group stage matchup, are you really gonna go all out there when you’re trying to play the long game and compete in the spring for the Larry O’Brien Trophy?
If it’s mid-November and your thin-depth hopeful title contender team (like, say, the Denver Nuggets) is trying to get off to a good start by playing everyone heavy early-season minutes, maybe you look at the NBA Cup schedule and realize you get a built-in break that makes that bold, development plan easier to institute if you miss out on the knockout rounds.
If you’re a reigning champion like the Boston Celtics, why not get more rest now as you plan to play two extra months of basketball later this season? There are bigger fish to fry.
If you’re a veteran team with older stars like the Los Angeles Lakers or Phoenix Suns, wouldn’t you want a week of rest instead? Remember that if you go all the way, you’re also playing an extra 83rd regular-season game, which doesn’t count in the standings, either.
Oof.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical. Maybe NBA players care a lot more about the NBA Cup than I realize. I’m willing to hear arguments to the contrary.
But I’ve seen enough patterns from league organizations already to suggest they understand there aren’t any real consequences for failing to advance to the knockout rounds. (Not that there should be; that would be silly, too.) If anything, they know that if they fall short of the Cup early, they get a massive benefit of rest that is extremely rare within the context of the entire season.
This Cup schedule gap is something the NBA will, unfortunately, never be able to account for. I don’t think players and coaches want the league to figure it out, either.
