LAS VEGAS — The Milwaukee Bucks and Oklahoma City Thunder will play in Las Vegas at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday for the NBA Cup championship, in what figures to be an emotional game with an extra $300,000 per player on the line.
And then they will scatter and rejoin the league’s endless hum of a regular season, with games flying at them in a rhythm that simply does not pay much respect to the physical and emotional toll playing in such a high-stakes game in Las Vegas has on the participants.
The Thunder’s season resumes Thursday in Orlando, followed by another game Friday in Miami. The Bucks don’t play until Friday, so they will at least get to go home for a day before they head to Cleveland for a game, followed by a home game Saturday against Washington.
This exact scenario is something the two head coaches involved in the NBA Cup finale would like to see change about the tournament in future years.
“We’re basically on a six-day West Coast road trip right now, and our next game coming out of this is three time zones away, four-hour flight to Orlando and then a back-to-back against Miami — which if you look that as a road trip, is an unprecedented road trip,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “The NBA would never schedule that. They would never put a team a on six-day West Coast road trip, and then fly them east for a back-to-back.”
Added Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers: “If I could tweak one thing, it would be after this to try to give the teams that are playing in the finals a cushion.
“But that would be the only tweak I guess I would make,” Rivers said. “I love the (NBA Cup). I love the format. I like that people want to win this thing, and it’s good.”
The NBA Cup is one of commissioner Adam Silver’s ongoing experiments that impact the on-court product, joining the Play-In Tournament and the ever-evolving All-Star Game with at least one potential major change coming: location. The league does not have an agreement in place with Las Vegas to bring the Cup final four here for a third season.
The Play-In, which could probably use a name change (The Emirates NBA Cup last year was just called the In-Season Tournament), creates a mini-tournament for the No. 7 through 10 seeds in each conference to make the playoffs. Outside of a sponsor, that format probably isn’t changing soon.
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The All-Star Game, well, Silver has already said the league would like to change the format, and reports by The Athletic and other outlets surfaced that said the new format would likely be a four-team, single-elimination tournament.
The five games played so far in Las Vegas as part of the Cup, spanning the last two seasons, have each drawn between 16,000 and 19,000 fans in a 21,000-seat venue. The league could ditch the neutral site for the Cup semis and finals and leave the games in home NBA markets, to maximize attendance and atmosphere for TV purposes. Abu Dhabi’s public investment fund, sources tied to the fund said, has made its interest known in bringing the Cup to the Middle East — which would create even greater scheduling challenges than the one Daigneault and Rivers cited Monday.
Also, Sports Business Journal reported that Mexico City, Tampa, Nashville and San Diego have made inquiries about hosting the Cup final four.
“As long as it’s a warm place, I’m good,” Rivers said. “Just no cold places, please. … I don’t even subscribe to the whole — that Vegas has to be the place, anyway. It’s just a convention city. It’s a neutral site, which is very difficult to find. If they want to move it around to other neutral, warm city sites, I think everybody would be fine with that.”
Scheduling, in a way, is the single biggest challenge for the NBA Cup because it affects fan travel to neutral sites. The quarterfinals are on a Tuesday and Wednesday; the two teams that won Wednesday had about 24 hours to get to Las Vegas to make practice Friday, and two days is not much time for fans to book travel arrangements once they realize their team advanced.
On the back end of that, it is impossible for NBA schedule makers to give the two Cup finalists a break in the schedule unless they moved the entire league’s slate of games back to, say, Saturday after the Cup championship game.
The Cup championship is the only game of the tournament that does not count toward the regular-season standings or even statistics kept for the season. What’s on the line is a trophy and cash. Both the Bucks and Thunder have already earned an extra $205,988 per player by making it to the Cup Finals; the winning team’s take increases to $514,971 per player.
“It’s an ongoing joke we have in our locker room, like we say we play for the young guys because this money will mean a lot to them — but it really means a lot to everybody because it’s a lot of money,” said Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who will earn $45.6 million this season.
Personally, I try not to think about the money,” Antetokounmpo said. “For the game, I love playing basketball. I don’t love playing basketball any more for the money and because I don’t like to lie, when I came to the league, obviously you want to take care of your family. You want to send your brothers to a better school than you went to. You want to create a better life for your parents, buy your mom a house, you know, all the stories about all the athletes.
“But at one point if that’s what motivates you, you won’t go far,” Antetokounmpo continued. “There’s got to be something within you that wakes you up every single day to go and put your body through this stress, you know that we put our bodies through, it’s just creating more art. It’s creating more moments that I can remember. Creating more legacy for myself or something that my kids can look back to and say, ‘Damn, my dad was a bad MF’er when he used to play.’”
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As the league’s front office and players try to figure out a remedy for the All-Star Game, one idea has been to put higher cash payouts on the line for the winner. All-Star weekend is still a huge money maker for the NBA from sponsors and has its popular Saturday night programming which includes a dunk and 3-point contests, but format changes for Sunday’s All-Star Game haven’t worked over the last few years as the players play less and less defense.
“With the elephant in the room being us competing, them trying to shake things up is expected and makes sense,” said Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a two-time All-Star who is likely headed for a third this season. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to whether the players wanting to go at it, and I would love to see that. Love to be a part of that for sure, and hopefully it happens.”
As for the Cup, Bucks star Damian Lillard missed practice Monday with a right calf bruise suffered in the second quarter of Milwaukee’s semifinal win over Atlanta. Khris Middleton missed practice because of an illness, and at least Lillard said he would play Tuesday.
The Bucks beat the Hawks, 110-102, in the Cup eastern final behind 32 points, 14 rebounds, nine assists, and four blocks by Antetokounmpo. The Thunder knocked off Houston 111-96 in the Western final with 32 points by Gilgeous-Alexander.
The NBA announced Monday that the technical assessed to the Thunder’s Luguentz Dort for taunting after a 3-pointer late in the fourth quarter was rescinded.
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(Photo: Kyle Terada / Imagn Images)