The success or failure of the NBA Cup, as a whole, is a matter of debate. It's only two years old. Now isn't the time for sweeping conclusions about things like TV ratings or overall fan support. The NBA is still tinkering with the format. If nothing else, the event was a success for the handful of younger teams that went on meaningful runs. Hopefully, the NBA Cup helped introduce casual fans to teams like the Thunder, Rockets and Hawks, who figure to be prominent parts of the league's immediate future. Whether that makes the tournament successful is ultimately a matter of opinion.
Here's what isn't: we all watched the championship game between the Thunder and Bucks live, and the crowd was mostly quiet. And, well, we shouldn't be surprised by that. Oklahoma City is more than 1,100 miles away from Las Vegas. Milwaukee is nearly 1,800 miles away. Fans in both cities didn't know if their team would be playing on Tuesday until three days ago. It's been less than a week since the quarterfinals even ended. Sure, Las Vegas works when the nearby Los Angeles Lakers are involved, but it was a dud of a host for the second go-round of this tournament under more typical circumstances. The teams seem to have noticed.
"There has been some interest expressed by teams in playing in the home markets," NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday. "It's complicated enough scheduling a neutral site. I'm not against playing in our markets."
Purely as a matter of convenience, yes, home markets would be easier. Is easy the goal here? Nothing else about the tournament suggests that it should be. The league inflicts colorful eyesores of courts onto its fans for home-market NBA Cup games purely to create a distinction between them and their regular-season counterparts. Vegas is meant to amplify that separation. This tournament is meant to be glamorous, a spectacle. It's harder to generate spectacle in Oklahoma City or Milwaukee.
But if the NBA Cup is going to stay in Las Vegas, there have to be changes to the tournament that make fan travel logistically reasonable. Specifically, they shouldn't play a championship game on a Tuesday in mid-December. Just think realistically about what that means for a fan. At a bare minimum, assuming that fan wasn't already in Las Vegas for the semifinals, that means missing multiple days of work in the middle of the week only to return home as the holidays begin... when many of them will be hitting the road again. The only way to make Las Vegas work for a common fan would be to hold the semifinals on a Friday and the finals on a Sunday.
Here's the problem with that: the NBA has made it plain over the last several years that it is afraid to schedule against the NFL. You can argue the wisdom of that approach, but the NFL is undeniably the superior television draw among the two. If the NBA put the Cup championship up against any Sunday Night Football game, it would lose a substantial number of viewers. That, obviously, is not tenable.
Therefore, for a Friday/Sunday schedule to work, it would have to come after football season. At best, that means late January or early February, during the bye week before the Super Bowl. Keep in mind, the NBA has quite a bit going on itself in that window. The NBA trade deadline is almost always during the first week of February. All-Star Weekend comes soon after. If the NBA put the Cup in that window as well, it would bloat one portion of the calendar and leave the others barren. All-Star Weekend can't move because voters need a reasonable sample to pick teams. The trade deadline can't move because teams need time to figure out what trades they want to make.
For now, that means there is no perfect answer. A neutral site is bad for fans who need to travel and television audiences who want an exciting atmosphere. Home markets rob the NBA Cup of distinction from the rest of the regular season. There's no easy way to schedule around these obstacles. That means that the NBA is almost certainly going to spend the next few seasons experimenting. That will be true of almost every element of the tournament, especially with the possibility of expansion creating an easier path to a more traditional, single-elimination bracket.
What we can say with relative certainty, though, is that something here needs to change. That might mean the entire event. It might simply be the way that it is staged, because nobody wants to watch another hushed championship game.
