Fans of chromatically bold hardwood courts rejoice: The NBA’s regular-season tournament, recently renamed the NBA Cup with a big fancy title sponsor, returned Tuesday night. From both a basketball and business perspective, last season’s first go-around was a success, though there’s no guarantee that will last. Even if it’s bad, it’ll still be interesting, because the tournament will only function as the league intended if teams and players take it seriously, which requires them to make a series of revealing choices from a handful of somewhat mutually exclusive options.

The NBA tipped its planning to the business ambitions of their FA Cup cosplay. The games will take place on Tuesdays and Fridays without football, in hopes that the relative novelty and theoretically higher stakes will attract a larger audience of curious, casual viewers during the part of the NBA schedule when the games typically matter least . Of course, the NBA wants people to watch the first eighth of the interminable regular season, and the NBA Cup is a significantly more management-friendly alternative to shortening the schedule by the dozens of games the league has occasionally called for. If you don’t want to create meaning through scarcity, simply enrich the existing offering.

For all the clamor about NBA ratings and their relationship to wokeness or whatever, audiences tend to be more likely to watch when the games are good, and the games will be good if they’re played with playoff intensity, and the matches are played with a playoff intensity when the teams are motivated. Every other link in the chain, aside from the last condition, is A) pretty well entrenched, and B) a business matter that is fundamentally downstream from basketball as such. Last year’s finalists provide two strangely similar case studies on the effectiveness of doing everything you can to win the cup.

After the Lakers and Pacers returned from Vegas, they both fell into a disturbing slump. Indiana dropped six of its next eight games, winning only against teams that were actively trying to lose. LA had a 14-9 record entering the season’s tournament finale, but the Lakers were 19-21 a month later; one of those losses was to a Spurs team that had lost 18 in a row. Both finalists looked completely exhausted throughout December, giving up tons of easy points in transition, failing to rotate and settling for easy shots time and time again. Tyrese Haliburton strained his hamstring within a month of the Finals and hasn’t been the same player since, while LeBron James’ January was by far the worst month of his season.

Traveling to play extra games in Vegas while the rest of the league got a few precious days off took its toll. Taking into account the immediate fortunes of both teams, the prestige of raising a banner and winning some nice bonus money for the guys at the end of the bench may not seem worth it. However, that effort created incredible hoops. The Pacers in particular were electric in the tournament, beating the Boston Celtics in a super-turbo transition-heavy Aaron Nesmith revenge game and smoking the Bucks so badly that Haliburton said wild things to Damian Lillard. The flashy courts were mostly ass, but along with the new uniforms that most teams played in, they certainly hit the mark of be new.

There’s reason for optimism that teams will treat the Cup seriously enough to provide a little more of that intensity, and that’s what happened to the Pacers and Lakers after they recovered from the extreme fatigue of December. Indiana made it all the way to the damn Conference Finals, while LA put together a very impressive end to the regular season, jumping from tenth to seventh place in a month and ultimately losing a competitive five-game first-round series. If the tournament’s success ruined these teams’ January window, it doesn’t appear to have hurt them otherwise.

By the way, teams could see the potential benefits of getting tired and hurt in the fortunes of the Pacers and Lakers last season. at the right time. Injuries and fatigue cannot be completely avoided, as we have already seen this season, with a lot of young stars already injured. Overall, it is probably preferable to tackle these types of crises in January and get back to health in May than the other way around. You could argue that the Warriors’ 2022 title was helped immensely by Steph Curry and Draymond Green getting hurt in the early spring and therefore being super fresh in April.

In that sense: why not give your best for the seasonal tournament? If this theory rests on logical beams that may be too thin to hold any real weight, its persuasiveness among players and coaches has yet to be proven. How they handle the games that matter in the NBA Cup will reveal a lot about how they feel about the grind of a regular season.

This week’s games won’t tell us too much, although Tuesday night’s Mavs-Warriors game definitely felt like a playoff game; Steph Curry said it himself! An arena full of people wearing silly captain hats — a tribute to Klay Thompson’s first game as a visitor — rose and fell to the rhythm of each possession, and late in a tense fourth quarter, Curry and Luka Doncic began chasing each other as if it was the Western all over again 2022 Conference Finals That kind of brutal min-maxing doesn’t happen often this early in the season, at least not to this extent.

Klay is only going to play his first game as a visitor in San Francisco once, which probably set the mood a lot more than the NBA Cup, but early November decided that two teams are desperately fighting for the win, and that’s all that matters. . After the win, Curry celebrated as if his team had won a game that mattered.

Alternatively, perhaps Erik Spoelstra’s inexplicable whoopsie at the end of a one-point loss to the Pistons was actually an example of advanced Vegas avoidance tactics. After all, it is only the second edition, everyone is still working on this.