LAS VEGAS — Even Christmas took more than three years to develop. But the NBA Cup, in its third edition, is already being reviewed.
The NBA is not under contract with T-Mobile Arena, at the south end of the Vegas Strip, to host its championship season next year, league sources said, and the league is disappointed by the enthusiasm on the court for the event.
Commissioner Adam Silver created the NBA Cup in 2023 to generate more interest earlier in the schedule among both fans and players, and it has largely worked. Viewers are up and attendance for the Cup semi-finals and finals in Las Vegas appears stable, given that there is no predictable change in two key dynamics. The final four teams are only known a few days before, and the league wants the championship to take place at a neutral site.
In September, the league announced that starting next year, the semi-finals would be held at home. Its new media partner for the NBA Cup, Amazon Prime Video, wants a more compelling broadcast, which it says is generated by larger, more partisan national crowds. But the NBA and Prime Video are still committed to holding the championship game at a neutral site, and they are discussing whether arenas might be fuller and louder if the venue was somewhere other than Las Vegas.
Silver is expected to speak to the media ahead of Tuesday’s NBA Cup Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks, and the topic is sure to come up.
For the past three years, the league has signed one-year contracts with T-Mobile Arena to host the NBA Cup. No signed contracts are in place for next season, but that just means the venue of the event is uncertain, not the Cup itself.
A big part of Prime Video’s media rights package with the NBA is the Cup. An in-season tournament is also included in the collective agreement between players and owners. The cost to the league of making Prime Video intact without a Cup, not to mention the headache of reopening the CBA early to cancel the Cup, would be enormous. In other words, the tournament will last at least 10 years.
By the time teams reach the semifinals, players and coaches usually genuinely enjoy the experience. Players love the prize money — $530,000 per player for the tournament winner — and coaches appreciate getting in more meaningful games earlier in the year to prepare for the playoffs. Organizations use the trip to Vegas to celebrate their successes there; Corporate sponsors and players’ families are often guests of the participating teams.
“You have to give credit to the NBA,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said last week, echoing virtually every coach who has stood on an NBA Cup podium in Las Vegas. “Everyone naturally struggles with change or wants to say something against change. I was one of those guys when they came up with the idea for the Cup, I was like, ‘Oh, man, for what? In the middle of the season? We’re trying to do this and that, practice and blah, blah, blah.” And over time, you have to give — starting with Adam, you have to give him a lot of credit for his innovation when it comes to things that are happening in the NBA, and this is one of them.
“It’s a really, really interesting thing.”
Spurs star guard De’Aaron Fox said players love the Cup because “people love money.”
“People want to play for something,” Fox said Monday. “In our locker room, with the back and forth and everything, people want to win. You can go into any locker room, if someone says they don’t want to win, they’re lying.
“It’s fun to be able to be in an environment like this and try to win a prize like this.”
The NBA isn’t the only major basketball entity to watch outside of Las Vegas. Although on a much smaller scale, USA Basketball has for years held its training camps for major international competitions in Sin City, but sources within the program suggest that could change for the 2027 FIBA World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
There is also an ongoing sports betting scandal within the NBA, and some of the alleged crimes involving current and former players and coaches took place during rigged poker games in Las Vegas. If the league were considering leaving the Strip to separate itself from illegal gambling, that would be understandable, but the Las Vegas Summer League isn’t going anywhere. The same perception problem would therefore still exist.
The NBA’s growing disappointment with Las Vegas as the Cup host site spilled over during and after Game 1 of the semifinals Saturday, when the smallest crowd announced for a Cup Finals game, 16,697, saw the Knicks beat the Orlando Magic. There were visibly vacant rows of seats on the upper deck, and more than a few empty chairs in the lower bowl.
The Knicks are one of the most popular teams in the world, with fans spread far and wide and a New York-based support system that travels well. It was perhaps a little surprising to see so many empty seats for Saturday’s game, but most people who attend Cup games probably live in greater Las Vegas. (One indicator: the crowd chants “KNIGHTS” at the time of the national anthem when the song comes on “proved it all night”…as the home crowd does for Las Vegas Golden Knights NHL games.)
During the second match on Saturday, between the Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder, there was a full house (18,519 fans – same crowd for last year’s Cup final between Oklahoma City and Milwaukee). This matchup featured reigning NBA champions and league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander against perhaps the next face of the league, Victor Wembanyama, in a tense and noisy environment.
Saturday was the final night of the National Finals Rodeo, another annual event in Las Vegas, and San Antonio and Oklahoma City are certainly two teams from rodeo country, but there weren’t too many gallon hats in the audience. It was much more likely that the home fans would be more excited about Gilgeous-Alexander and Wemby, and 6 p.m. is a better time of day to go out for a game.
The first Cup semifinals, in 2023, took place on a Thursday night and involved the Los Angeles Lakers, who dominate the Las Vegas market. The Lakers’ Cup semifinal and their Cup championship game were both sold out.
The NBA hands out free tickets to local schools every year. And there have been empty seats and muted applause in recent years (except for Laker games), even on nights when ticket sellers count as sellouts. But it’s unclear how much moving the championship outside of Las Vegas would change that.
If there’s a city or venue that wants to invest money in the NBA and market the Cup championship in a way that Vegas hasn’t, the league might do well to consider its options. But simply changing venues in reaction to reception, just three years into an otherwise successful experiment, might not do much to increase the popularity of a tournament that is, in any case, growing.
The league says TV viewership for Cup group stage matches increased 90% this year, the tournament’s first year on Prime Video, and that group stage matches in all three years of the Cup’s existence attracted more viewers than matches in October and November in 2022 – the last season there was no Cup.
The tournament had never been commercialized like this year with the entry of Prime Video. But at the start of each of the last three seasons, the concept of the Cup and the action on the field have been explained and promoted to fans. They’re starting to get into it.
Remind them, no matter where they live, over and over again, that the championship is in Las Vegas and that enthusiasm on the field will likely grow – much like it did a few years later. the NBA Summer League was created …in Las Vegas.
Christmas, literally Christmaswas, according to accounts published by National Geographic and many other historical sites, a sordid, drunken celebration that was often forbidden in Puritan-controlled communities in America in the 1600s and 1700s. When Germans emigrated to the United States in the 1830s, they took their Christmas trees and children’s gifts with them. In the 1840s, Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” which exploded and, after the Civil War Congress, established Christmas as the nation’s first federal holiday to promote unity between the North and South.
Some things – sometimes even the most popular concepts – take time to catch on.
Perhaps then, we are expecting too much from the NBA Cup in Las Vegas, too soon?
