The NBA Cup is back, and the league hopes to build on ‘intense competition’ and a better understanding

About eight minutes into Nick Nurse’s news conference ahead of Joel Embiid’s return game against the New York Knicks, a question about the 76ers’ blue court offered a dash of levity.

“Oh, man, that’s a really tough one,” the coach said last Tuesday, when asked if he preferred this color design to last year’s red version. “Just trying to figure out how to say it. I like the blue court a lot better. But boy, that’s not saying a whole lot.”

The new hardwood also signaled that the In-Season Tournament, now branded as the Emirates NBA Cup, is back for its second year. Its purpose is still to inject some spice — and prize money for players — into the early season, and to mirror international sports such as soccer and basketball that play for multiple trophies throughout each year. And after its debut last season, Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics, hopes Cup play “will be a lot more understood” as those games pepper the next month.

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“We saw really insanely intense competition for November last year, relative to what we had seen in prior years,” Wasch told The Inquirer earlier this month. “Players all understood that something different was going on. They understood the Cup and the prizing. But I don’t think they had, maybe, as deep an understanding of the implications of each individual game, how important each game is when you’re only playing four in a group stage. …

“So in a second year of this, when it’s much more established, we think we’ll just be able to build on that even more.”

As a refresher, Tuesday’s loss to the Knicks was the first of the Sixers’ four group-play games, which also count in the regular-season standings. Friday’s 98-86 loss at the Orlando Magic was the second, followed by this Friday’s home game against the Brooklyn Nets and a Dec. 3 visit to the Charlotte Hornets.

After that, the six group winners, plus two wild-card teams, will advance to a single-elimination “knockout” quarterfinal round held at NBA arenas. The semifinals and final will take place in Las Vegas, where last year the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Indiana Pacers to win the first in-season tournament championship. The teams that do not advance to the knockout phase will get two regular-season games added to the schedule between Dec. 12 and 16.

Though the NBA spent time last season educating teams about this new scheduling and competition wrinkle, Wasch knew it would take at least one iteration to “really crystalize for people, in terms of what we were doing.” Following last year’s tournament, he and colleagues went on a “listening tour” with stakeholders ranging from players and coaches to fans and media.

They made tweaks to the schedule, this year avoiding an afternoon semifinal tipoff in Las Vegas and competing with Monday Night Football. They decided to keep the November/December timing, to counter the outside belief that the NBA season does not actually begin until Christmas. They also considered some teams’ argument that not advancing to the knockout stage was actually more beneficial, because the added games would (likely) be against weaker opponents. The league responded with that, in order for that scenario to unfold, a team would have already picked up at least one loss during group play.

One of the most polarizing elements, Wasch said, was that point differential was used as a group-play tiebreaker. That encouraged teams to keep starters on the floor, even in blowouts. The league’s data illustrated that quirk significantly bumped the minute-by-minute television viewership and social media activity for such games, Wasch said. But some criticized the lack of sportsmanship and integrity it fostered, along with the potential for injury during meaningless minutes.

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Ultimately, the league decided to keep the point differential with one caveat: Overtime points no longer count toward that total. Last season, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr floated a hypothetical: In order to chase the 13-point win required to move on to the knockout rounds, should his team intentionally surrender a two-point regulation lead to send its final group-play game to overtime? And during an Olympic qualifying game against the Philippines last summer, Georgia’s Goga Bitadze attempted to score in his own basket with his team up by two to add extra time, because his team needed a 19-point victory to advance.

“It felt like a 50/50 issue,” Wasch said of the point-differential topic. “There were those who felt very strongly on both sides, and because of that — because of the fan response — we felt it was something that was worth keeping in place for at least one more year, before perhaps reassessing.”

The idea of an in-season tournament predates Wasch’s 13-year tenure at the league office. It was long viewed as an “untapped opportunity” that not only exists in international play but also with college basketball teams that play early-season holiday tournaments in desirable locales such as the Bahamas or Hawaii.

The COVID-19 pandemic then forced innovative thinking to create the 2020 return-to-play bubble and play-in tournament, which has remained and “made people a little more amenable” to competition structure tweaks, Wasch said. The timing of new media rights deals — Amazon will air knockout games beginning next year — and the league’s collective bargaining agreement helped push the concept over the finish line, he added.

It has also been a prominent career endeavor for Wasch, whose journey to the league office runs through the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which was cofounded by Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey.

Wasch went to MIT in hopes of someday applying strategic quantitative principles to sports. He “mostly devoted the entirety of my two years” at the school to helping plan the annual event, as it exploded from a small gathering inside a classroom into a behemoth attended by thousands. There, Wasch met NBA connections that helped him land an internship with the marketing and business operations group at the league office, which turned into a full-time job that now comes with overseeing strategy, data, and analytics for areas including player and officiating performance, rule changes, and integrity monitoring.

He has remained involved with Sloan ever since and, in the 15 years he has known Morey, has appreciated how the Sixers executive thinks multiple steps ahead and adjusts his scenario planning to changing environments.

“You have to have as many chips at the table to play at as many different moments as possible,” Wasch said. “Not just having one plan or one vision of how to execute things, but really trying to think as many moves ahead. … I think I just took that away, to say not just solving the problem at hand, but trying to be a few steps ahead when thinking about where something might go.

“Skating to where the puck will be kind of stuff is something I’ve always noticed about the way he approaches his job, and I’ve tried to apply to my role, as well.”

That is a useful approach when rolling out a significant new element to an NBA season. Wasch pushes back at the cynical observers who call the NBA Cup gimmicky, saying “everything we know as sports fans tells us that what we want to see is competition of consequence.”

Nurse and Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau were a bit indifferent to questions about the ramifications of last Tuesday’s group play matchup. But that was likely a product of leading two teams that entered the season as contenders but are navigating clunky starts while trying to implement new star players. Last year, Nurse said he appreciated the addition to the schedule, partially because of his own experience in such tournaments while coaching internationally.

“I love the Cup,” the coach reiterated Tuesday.

Now, Wasch hopes everybody has a greater understanding of this tournament inside the regular season’s footprint. And he is optimistic this year’s version will again accomplish the desired goal.

“These are the most competitive people on the planet,” he said. “And we want to see them incentivized to compete at their best, for as many games as possible, in pursuit of an individual or team goal. …

“To elevate that even further and create these truly exciting highlight moments at this point of the season, in November/December, is just unique. I think it’s really changed our calendar.”