December is a month stocked with tradition. We all have them. The way you hang your lights around the house for the holidays. The sentimental ornaments that cling to branches on the tree. The long list
of rituals that pull the past into the present and remind us where we came from.
I feel myself forming a new holiday tradition, and it is one I do not exactly enjoy. I swore I would not complain this year about the NBA Cup. Sure, the jabs have been there, but I had not written a full piece tearing into the senseless money grab that the league has decided to parade around. Yet here I am again. I apologize in advance.
Maybe I am a little ornery. Notre Dame got cornholed out of the College Football Playoff, and yeah, I’ve been spitting nails all week. Fucking humbug. So hell, I might as well lean into it.
Sidenote: Notre Dame should be in that playoff. You can throw strength-of-schedule arguments or head-to-head debates at me until your throat dries out. I am talking pure eye test. Notre Dame was a better team than Alabama. I have never seen a team hold its seed after getting demolished in a championship game. But here we are with good old Alabama, because we cannot have the ESECPN machine without its golden boy.
Going back to my frustration with the NBA Cup.
The Suns slipped into the NBA Cup through the back door, and then got backdoored themselves by drawing two of the top four seeds in the West. As zenzino said in The Feed, “The Suns really didn’t belong in the Cup. Aside from OKC, they were in arguably the easiest grouping. The Jazz and Kings are a joke. Minnesota is a sheep in wolves’ clothing (only 1 or 2 wins against above .500 teams). The Suns just had the bad luck of being in the same grouping as OKC and be matched up against them to start.” Can’t rec this enough because it is undeniably true.
The rage…it’s building…
What is the actual point of the NBA Cup? I understand what Adam Silver is chasing. The man loves a tournament. He saw an opening at the front end of the season and said, “Let’s manufacture some urgency”. I see the pitch deck. I get the engagement math. None of that makes it useful.
What does it actually do? It wrecks the schedule in late November and early December. Because of this NBA Cup circus, the Suns ended up playing seven games in eleven nights, then rolled straight into five games over sixteen nights. That makes no sense in any world that claims to care about player health or competitive balance.
There is the group play reward, which is secretly a punishment. The wins and losses in the quarterfinals and semifinals count. You win, you advance, you earn the right to play tougher opponents, and all of those games go straight onto your real-season ledger. The championship game does not. So the prize is an 83rd game against a good team that does nothing for your record? That is the definition of stupidity.
If you are a middle-of-the-pack team like the Suns, the best-case scenario is what happened last year. Play well enough to go 3-1, then bow out before the bracket tightens. Every win matters when you live in the standings mud. You do not need bonus boss fights for fun.
Then there is the money. The NBA Cup champs get about $530k, runners-up around $212k, semifinalists $106k, and quarterfinalists $53k per player. For two-way guys and veterans on minimum deals, that is meaningful money. I respect that part. But that’s about all I respect.
It still does not outweigh what a clean postseason runway can mean for careers. Take a guy like Gillespie in a hypothetical. He has a great year, but what if the Suns miss the playoffs by a slim margin after dropping a couple of NBA Cup games? Now he loses national exposure, loses the stage, loses leverage, and loses money long term. It is a specific example, sure, but it is a real risk.
The courts look ridiculous. The scheduling is a mess. The concept solves nothing. It creates noise, fatigue, and fake stakes.
I guess the NBA gets what it wants, right? They want everyone talking about the NBA Cup, and here I am again, pouring more frustration into the void about why I fucking hate the thing. Maybe that is the entire plan. Create something so absurd that we cannot help but rant about it deep into December, shaking our heads at the futility of its existence. So yes, in that sense, they win again.
Who does not win? The Phoenix Suns. Because when we hit April and start tracking the standings with a magnifying glass, one truth will hover over everything. The Suns had the hardest schedule in the league this season. The Cup fed right into it.
I do not have a clean fix for this. Maybe you carve out two weeks at the start of December and run a true knockout tournament, basing seeding on pre-tournament records. Make it self-contained. Do not poison the regular season standings with it. Add incentives, such as player paychecks and team lottery picks, if you want players to go all out. I do not know. What I do know is that whatever this current model is supposed to be, it is not working.
I will look back at these couple of December games because we know how seeding works in the West. Think back two seasons ago. The Suns lost their Cup game, then lost to the Kings, and that team missed the five seed by one game and the four seed by two. So they faced the Timberwolves, who wiped them across the floor. These things stack.
So here we are again, left staring at this glitter-coated shit carnival the league keeps calling innovation, while the Suns eat the bill for it. That is the punchline. The NBA Cup marches on, the broadcasts glow, Adam Silver smiles, and somewhere in a conference room a marketing intern gets a gold star for engagement. Meanwhile, the Suns limp back into their schedule with two extra heavyweight fights stapled to their record.
Maybe that is the real tradition we are building here. Deck the halls, light the tree, and prepare for the NBA to gift wrap another unnecessary obstacle for a team that already lives in survival mode. If I sound bitter, it is because I am. But I feel better because I got it off my chest. Thanks for reading.
