The players are buying in, but the NBA Cup is still going on

LAS VEGAS — Near the end of the second NBA Cup semifinal game here on Saturday, between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets, a brief brawl broke out on the court between the two upstart Western Conference foes.

It had been a physical game between two defenders who liked to crush each other, and the awkwardness eventually erupted into some jabbing, posturing and light shoving.

The NBA Cup “has a certain energy to it that makes it very competitive,” Thunder forward Jalen Williams said after the game. “It’s probably because of the money. But there’s like a very competitive aspect to it. Obviously, everybody wants free money.”

Now, the league would never quite admit to welcoming an on-court altercation between players, but NBA executives were probably quite pleased to see the vitriol between the teams and Williams’ comments. That’s because the whole push behind the nascent NBA Cup, now in its second season, is to add some excitement to the early season games. And in Year 2, various stakeholders — coaches, players, fans — seem to be buying in.

“It’s been fun,” Thunder star and MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said Monday, a day before his team was set to face the Milwaukee Bucks in the Cup final. “Obviously the extra effort in the game gives it a little bit of a different feel. It’s good preparation for the postseason. It’s obviously increased effort than in a regular season and it’s good to get reps in games that matter a little more and have stakes.

Part of the reason for the increased stakes Williams mentioned is prize money. Players on the tournament-winning team earn $514,971, compared to $205,988 for second place and $102,994 for losing in the semifinals.

“I like the tournament,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said before the semifinals. Rivers had been open all weekend about his desire for his team to be competitive and not afraid to win the Cup.

He added, “I think it’s a litmus test for the team. I look at last year and I thought, Indiana, are they going to make the Eastern Finals if they don’t have this tournament?”

Both players and coaches from all the teams involved seem to agree that the Cup has not reached the level of the NBA Playoffs, but there is a little more energy to the games than a typical regular season game. Even the scheduling of the games helps to add a bit of flair. For example, Rivers said the two days off between the semifinals and the finals allows his coaching staff to come up with a more detailed game plan than it could for most games.

Perhaps more importantly for the league, fans also seem to have noticed the increase in energy.

“I know they added the Cup to try to make it more competitive early in the season,” said Brandon Jones, a 36-year-old Los Angeles Lakers fan who drove to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. Jones bought tickets to the West semifinals before he knew which teams would show up, then bought tickets to the East as well when he saw how affordable the seats were. “As a fan, it’s cool because it kind of makes you care a little bit more.”

“I like that it’s added a little bit of intensity and there’s a difference, you know?” said Rishab Aida, a 24-year-old Golden State Warriors fan who lives in nearby Henderson, Nevada. “I like that they’ve encouraged all levels of the Cup so the players have something to play for. It’s great that the players have taken it a bit seriously.”

The league, while open to evolving and tinkering with the tournament, also seems pleased with the growth of the Cup in its second season. After the first Cup, NBA executives went on what they called a “listening tour” with players, coaches and front office members to get honest feedback about what worked and what didn’t.

One tweak the NBA made was to move the back-to-back semifinal games from a weekday to the weekend after the league admitted that the afternoon kickoff time on a Thursday last year may have reduced attendance. This year, both semifinals drew over 17,000 fans, according to the league.

No problem is too small for the NBA when it comes to fine-tuning the Cup. This year, the league adjusted e.g. The Cup’s scoring and point differential rules to not encourage teams to deliberately play in overtime to give themselves an extra five minutes to run up the score. (Point difference is an important tiebreaker in Cup group play.)

Evan Wasch, the NBA’s director of strategy and analytics, says the tournament will continue to evolve in the coming years. Two points of pride for the league this year, Wasch says, however, were the buy-in from the players, who seemed to have a much better understanding of the format in the Cup’s second season. And also the willingness of the teams to embrace the point difference tiebreaker and try to keep scoring at the end of the games.

Ultimately, the NBA realizes that the Cup still needs to grow quite a bit to reach its ultimate goal.

“These things take time, you don’t establish traditions overnight,” Wasch told NBC News on Monday. “I certainly wasn’t alive in the 1940s, but I would imagine the NBA Finals back then didn’t have the same gravitas. We had no illusions that in year one or year two, or maybe even year three, four or five, would this eventually reach the level that it could be in. And I don’t think anyone can say exactly when it will hit that peak or plateau that we hope they can reach.

Wasch said the hope is that the Cup will be “a true second championship, that the idea that there’s only one thing to win every year will be challenged over time by this Cup.”