Over the past few years, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has been scheming new ways to increase the NBA’s revenue, and the NBA Cup is only the latest example. During his tenure, it was first the NBA play-in Tournament that was implemented to make the end of the regular season more entertaining, and to prevent teams from purposefully doing badly to end up with higher draft picks (and better players) for the next season. Despite initial negative reception from fans during the 2019–2020 season in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the following three seasons proved the play-in tournament to be a success. The NBA is more fun to watch than ever, as proven by Patrick Beverley and this year’s historic run from the Miami Heat.

Now Silver has introduced the NBA Cup, which will start as a round-robin tournament with six groups of five teams. Each team plays four games, two at-home and two on-road. The top seed from each group will then move on to the single-elimination stage with one wildcard team from each conference, until the finals decides the winner.  All games count towards the regular season, except the Championship.

Inspired by soccer’s minor domestic trophies such as England’s FA (Football Association) Cup, the NBA Cup in basketball’s most elite league is being brought in not only to increase competition during the regular season, but to make the regular season games more meaningful and entertaining to watch as well. Players will also have financial and career-boosting incentives to play harder both on offense and defense, like most NBA players in the postseason. ESPN’s Tim Bontemps reports that players on the winning NBA Cup team will get a whopping $500,000 each, while the players on the runner-up team will get $200,000 each. 

Most NBA stars will likely see the Cup as a bonus incentive, as their main target will always be the Championship. However, NBA players on minimum contracts or two-way deals who haven’t yet made 8 figures from their basketball careers will certainly give everything to win the most possible money from the NBA Cup. Furthermore, demonstrating excellent in-game performance will allow them to bargain for bigger contracts, land them bigger roles within the NBA, and prolong their careers. This will be all the more relevant in the coming years because, with the new NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) deal, by 2030, there will be more minimum contract players with only a few elite stars that will make most of the money. 

So, will the NBA Cup be a success? Like the play-in tournament, the Cup will take some time for most fans to get used to. However, after a few years of implementation, it has potential to become a vital part of the NBA competition structure and will likely increase the competitiveness and enjoyability of the sport. The only concerns would be the health of the most important star players across the league, and whether they and their teams would see the Cup as a time for player load management.