The NBA mid-season cup is back with a new name and is surrounded by more excitement than ever.
Ha. Right.
It’s been a year since the inaugural event and my opinion still has not changed.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver decided to add this event last year in order to give teams incentive to compete harder earlier in the season.
The Lakers defeated the Indiana Pacers for the first cup title, but they fizzled out in the actual playoffs. This is a key point of the mid-season cup, which has been renamed Emirates Cup.
This event won’t really affect a team’s chances of winning the NBA Finals, the season’s real prize. It just demonstrates which team is the best in the middle of the season. Who cares?
Better teams may not be ready to compete so early in the season and have yet to hit their stride. Teams want to win the NBA Finals not a mid-season tournament.
The event could be cool if it helped a team qualify for the playoffs in April. But that doesn’t happen.
Teams just get a meaningless trophy and players make a little more money. How again does this help teams qualify or prepare for the playoffs?
The risk of injury increases, which could affect a team’s deep playoff run in the spring.
Players such as Draymond Green, Trae Young, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and other superstars don’t like the cup and would fully support it going away immediately. Ironically, Young and Gilgeous-Alexander’s teams are headed to Las Vegas on Saturday for the semifinals. The winners of the semis between the Atlanta Hawks and Milwaukee Bucks, and Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets will square off for this meaningless title on Tuesday night.
There are many other players that don’t get the idea about the in season tournament. Memphis Grizzlies’ point guard Marcus Smart doesn’t believe in the idea of an in season tournament. He thinks the fans want to see the real tournament after the regular season.
It all depends on the prize of the tournament, but the prize has not changed. If the prize changes then maybe it could be an important tournament to play for. Yet nothing has changed.
This event is still just a big money grab for the NBA. The NBA makes a lot of money, and one of the ideas behind the cup was definitely to capitalize on advertisements and television revenue.
After all, when a large airline gets their own NBA trophy, it’s bound to be lucrative for the league.
The league might view this event as providing better competition, but the tournament starts within two weeks of the beginning of the season. Players just aren’t able to get in the heat of real playoff-level competition so early in the season, and fans just aren’t that interested when they know the league’s real trophy is awarded in June.
