Starting Nov. 3, all 30 teams will compete for the NBA Cup with 8 teams advancing into the knockout rounds! The tournament semis and championship game will be held in Las Vegas, Dec. 7 and 9!
Why is everyone so actively negative about this? I get not caring at all, but there's clearly more than that. If you don't like this tournament...just pretend they're regular season games and nothing changes. If you already don't watch regular season games... keep not watching regular season games and nothing changes.
It's just bizarre. Seems like there are a lot of things the NBA should address and improve on, to dedicate some much time, energy, and emphasis on something no one was asking for is puzzling. The negative reactions are pretty fair imo.
I would disagree with that. It's not really bizarre given leagues around the world do this to great success. Also I don't think the NBA is so single minded that they only worked on this in season tournament and nothing else to improve the game. I'm also not sure that very much time even needed to be spent on this idea given how it's already in place in other leagues and at the top level it's not very complex.
At the end of the day it was a pretty minor change to the existing infrastructure with respect to how much improvement it could impose. I see it as no negative with possible positive.
I just don't get it. Who was asking for this lol. Just bring back the divisions and give us more divisional games so that they actually matter and rivalries can develop.
Fine. I’ll get excited. That video certainly helped clarify it. Reading about it, it wasn’t quite clear in my mind how it would work. Somehow I missed the part about the wildcard.
Our cup competitions span large parts of the season instead of a single month. Even the truncated format of the FA for Premier league sides who enter at the 3rd Round is 5 months. The league cup again even in shortened format for teams in European competition is 4 months.
Plus the group stage puts the format much closer to the Champions, Europa and conference league formats.
The reason midseason tournaments of any kind won't take hold is due to cultural differences.
In Europe & the UK these divisional leagues and tourneys make sense because they evoke the literal thousands of years of bitter struggle and conquest different groups had over each other. London by itself is made of up an amalgamation of different groups who were all trying to conquer each other or fend off being conquered.
So there's an ingrained rivalry between states and cities from way back.
In the United States the culture is of one primary colonizing group (Europe/The White Man), and then one group overthrowing the UK to become the U.S.
It's a culture of "Win the whole thing, and all at once." Which is why we're very championship focused.
I'm literally in the states on vacation and visiting friends the first two weeks in November so any games I can attend would be cup matches.
Provisional plan is to visit DC, New York and Boston just not sure on order yet but does hopefully give me a decent shot at going to a game with 4 teams to work with.