Emirates NBA Cup: Players and Teams Shift into High Gear

There's a short game in play again, adding some urgency and excitement to tonight's eight-game lineup. The second Emirates NBA Cup in-season tournament kicks off with Group Play tonight, bringing a fresh and competitive edge to the games.

It’s a sprint within the 2024-25 marathon, a pop quiz that could inform a team and its fans in advance of the final exam. It might be the closest thing to a reset button for a team unhappy with its early-season performance. In short, the NBA Cup tourney is a terrific opportunity for players and coaches seeking quick gratification, gut checks and growing up.

“The Indiana Pacers is the one I use as an example,” Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers said. “Young team that literally got ‘playoff experience’ at the beginning of the year, then they ended up in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Rivers was on the broadcast side for the inaugural NBA Cup, not being hired by the Bucks until deep into January. Like many, he said he was skeptical of new wrinkle that was intended to boost interest in the regular season.

Indiana made it to Las Vegas, where the Pacers knocked out Milwaukee, guard Tyrese Haliburton took a little “Dame Time” watch-check jab at the Bucks’ Damian Lillard, only to fall to the Lakers in the title game.

“You talk to Rick Carlisle, he said he didn’t know if that would have happened if they didn’t have the in-season tournament,” Rivers said. “That experience, being on stage in a big game, even though they laid an egg in that game, taught them a life lesson. You can’t teach that to a team.”

There is a trip to Vegas at stake for the four teams that come out of Group Play and survive the Knockout Round, and both bragging rights and a $500,000 pot for the winning team. But the biggest benefit might be internal.

Being chosen as one of the teams to play on Christmas Day used to be a highlight in the season’s first three months. Now there actually is something to be won, calling for an early shift in gears.

NBA Cup games ‘feel bigger’

“I think it’s fun,” Boston guard Jrue Holiday said Sunday. “We push for something else in the middle of the season. … Obviously we’re trying to win every single game. But knowing this is another tournament and another milestone we’re trying to get, go for it.”

Said Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch: “What surprised me was that the players really treated every game in the tournament like it was an elimination game, even if it was a group game. Because groups were so small and you play very few group games.”

The league’s 30 teams were divided, by conference, into six groups of five teams. Those teams will play on selected Tuesdays and Fridays in the coming weeks.

Then the six group winners plus one Wild-Card team in each conference — determined by records, then tie-breakers — participate in single-elimination quarterfinal games Dec. 10 and Dec. 11, while the other 22 resume regular games. The Vegas action begins with two semifinal games Dec. 14 and the title game on Dec. 17.

Said Finch: “It’s also set within the context of the early season when everybody’s hopeful, everybody still thinks they’re really good, and people are still trying to figure out who they really are. So there’s a lot of things going on when those games come. They for sure feel bigger than just any other regular-season game.”

Nothing is guaranteed, of course. The Bucks, the Pelicans and the Lakers — despite hotly pursuing that first Cup — all got dispatched in the playoffs’ first round. By a composite 3-12 record.

In the moment, though, there was a piñata dangled in front of fiercely competitive NBA players and coaches who were handed sticks. Of course they were going to whack.

“The big part of it to me is, if you get to a place where you’re going to Vegas,” Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan said Monday. “That’s where it really gets magnified. We do talk about it.”

Unique focus for Cup games

For a team such as the Celtics, the Emirates NBA Cup is a chance to clean up something left unwon by the defending champions. For quick-starting Cleveland, it would be a bright new stage and a taste of things to come.

“It registers,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said. “There’s a title in play. We have a competitive group and we want to win every title available.”

For those less than thrilled with the way 2024-25 has gone so far, this is a defined chance to correct their course. Winning group games is a needed first step.

“It says something,” conceded Rivers, whose Bucks have started 2-8. “[Our] people will take it way more serious.

“It absolutely brought interest to our league. … There were teams attacked it, and there were teams that just kind of played in. I think more teams will attack it this year to win it.”

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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.

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