The NBA Cup is back for another year of in-season tournament action.
Like pumpkin spice lattes or Christmas decorations, it feels like the start of the NBA Cup creeps up a bit earlier every year. But like with pumpkin spice and Christmas lights, that is a good thing, because the NBA Cup, like pumpkin spice and Christmas lights, absolutely rules.
The group stage tips off this Halloween night with plenty of action across the league. Here’s what you need to know heading into the mid-season showdown.The NBA Cup is the league’s semi-recent invention of an in-season tournament, with the goal of adding greater stakes to some early season matchups. You can think of it as akin to the FA Cup or Carabao Cup in English soccer—a tournament that helps break up the long campaign of the regular season with a few twists and turns and the potential for upsets. The format of the tournament also takes its cues from the world of soccer, with the league’s 30 teams split into six groups of five. In the group stage of the tournament, each team will play the four other teams in their group once, with the team with the best record advancing to the knockout round. Two wild-card teams will also reach the knockout round, creating a bracket of eight teams that will ultimately contend for the NBA Cup this December.The term “Group of Death” might sound a bit overdramatic for the NBA Cup, but in any such tournament that begins with a group stage, there is seemingly always at least one group that winds up facing an uphill battle before the games even begin. In this year’s NBA Cup, the Group of Death feels like it’s pretty clearly West Group C, featuring the Nuggets, Warriors, Rockets and Spurs. The Nuggets are championship contenders, the Rockets are freshly reloaded with Kevin Durant leading the charge, the Warriors can win on any given night, and the Spurs arebehind what looks like the first of, I don’t know, maybe 10 straight MVP seasons coming from Victor Wembanyama. Of those four teams, just one will be guaranteed a spot in the knockout round, while a second could sneak in as a wild card.Which teams have won the NBA Cup in the past? The Lakers won the inaugural NBA Cup in 2023, defeating the Pacers in the final. Last year, it was the Bucks that lifted the cup, taking down the Thunder in the championship game.The group stage tips off in earnest on Halloween night. From there, group stage games will be played mostly on Friday nights—it’s easy to tell when you’re watching an NBA Cup game because they will The group stage will conclude on Nov. 28, with the quarterfinals taking place on Dec. 8 and 9 at the home court of the team with the higher seed. From there, the final four of the knockout round will head to Las Vegas, where the semifinals and final will be contested on Dec. 13 and 16.In addition to the pride of being an NBA Cup champion and the joys of lifting a trophy in the NBA dog days of December? Some pretty good cash.That might not seem like much for the guys on supermax deals, but for the end of the roster players, that’s one heck of a payday.Probably! But the best way to learn is by watching. Be ready for some extremely bright basketball courts, and for unlikely heroes to emerge. It’s NBA Cup season baby there is simply nothing like it.Tyler Lauletta is a staff writer for the Breaking and Trending News Team/team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI, he covered sports for nearly a decade at Business Insider, and helped design and launch the OffBall newsletter. He is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, and remains an Eagles and Phillies sicko. When not watching or blogging about sports, Tyler can be found scratching his dog behind the ears.
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