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Biggest reason NBA commissioner Adam Silver wanted to create the NBA Cup was to inject interest into a long, arduous 82-game season.
The common refrain was that many casual league observers didn’t start paying attention until after the All-Star break in late February. That’s because many NBA teams and stars don’t take the early parts of the season that seriously. You should compare November and April basketball for yourself sometime soon when you have the time. The difference is night and day.
So there you go tournament like the NBA Cup with fancy, temporary courts and lavish jerseys designed to add an extra competitive edge to the part of the year when many teams are still clearly making 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 have failed to explain a significant procedural loophole. As it stands now, the 22 NBA teams that don’t qualify for the playoffs essentially get almost a week off, just about six weeks into the regular season.
In effect, this scheduling loophole directly contradicts what the NBA Cup was trying to prevent.
See the graph below. The next non-NBA Cup game isn’t until Thursday, December 12th! The vast majority of the league, already eliminated from this year’s Cup play, gets three, four or even five days off right before the holiday season. And as the NBA tries to center the rest of the Cup teams with more of a spotlight, it can’t meaningfully shift the schedule to mitigate that gap. He doesn’t want non-Cup teams playing when the quarter-finals take place.
We can’t understate how valuable this is to NBA players who play games every night, back-to-back games and travel across the country all the time.
None of them were born yesterday because they see how the schedule shakes out in advance:
This does not mean that NBA teams want to intentionally miss out on their chances to win the Cup. I’m sure some of the prize money motivates many teams, especially those with younger players who have yet to earn lucrative contracts. They won’t stop trying completely.
But for a second, put yourself in the shoes of a head coach or a superstar.
If it’s mid-November and your team is dealing with minor injuries before a group stage game in the NBA Cup, are you really going to give it your all when you’re trying to play a long game and compete in the spring for the Larry O’Brien Trophy?
If it’s mid-November and your strong title contender team (like, say, the Denver Nuggets) is trying to get off to a good start by playing all the heavy minutes early in the season, you might look at the NBA Cup schedule and realize, that you get a built-in rest that makes this bold development plan easier to implement if you miss the knockout rounds.
If you’re a defending champion like the Boston Celtics, why not rest more now that 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 off instead? Remember, if you make it all the way, you also play an additional 83rd game of the regular season, which also doesn’t count toward the standings.
Of.
Maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe NBA players care a lot more about the NBA Cup than I realize. I am willing to hear arguments to the contrary.
But I’ve already seen enough patterns from league organizations to assume they understand there are no real consequences for failing to advance to the playoffs. (Not that there should be; that would also be stupid.) If nothing else, they know that if they don’t reach the bowl early, they get a huge benefit from the break, ie. extremely rare in the context of the entire season.
This gap in the Cup schedule is something the NBA will unfortunately never be able to account for. I don’t think the players and coaches want the league to understand it either.
