The variations were spitballed in conference rooms at the NBA’s offices in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower for more than a decade. Ideas that for a variety of reasons—disputes with the union, prioritization of the play-in, a global pandemic that for a while put everything on hold—never made it out of the competition committee. Different formats. Different prizes. Different times of year. A single elimination, 30-team knockout tournament. A tournament that included teams from outside the NBA. A tournament that was stretched over several months, culminating with a knockout round at the end of the season.
“We boiled the ocean on each one of those,” says Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics. “And for a while we were all over the map.”
Last summer, league execs settled on a format they believe in: The NBA In-Season Tournament (they’ll need to work on that name) will be a 30-team, 67-game tourney for the NBA Cup (ditto on this name). The tournament begins with group play (sets of five teams that have been randomly drawn from within conferences) and runs from Nov. 3 to Nov. 28. Some of the matchups are intriguing; one group will culminate with a rematch of last year’s epic Kings-Warriors series, which Golden State iced when Steph Curry dropped 50 in Game 7.
