NBA Rivals: Season Showdown

                                               NBA: In-Season Tournament 

The NBA will roll out in new in-season tournament this upcoming season. The league will hand out the NBA Cup for the first time on 9th December 2023.

The tournament will play out in two stages, first group play involving each franchise and then a knockout stage when the field trickles down to just eight teams. The group stages games will be held on Tuesdays and Fridays in November as the NBA divides teams into six different groups of five teams apiece split up by conference. The winner if each group along with the second-place team with the best record in each conference, will move on. The quarter-final games will be on Dec.4 and 5 in a team’s home arena, before the semi-finals on Dec.7 and the final on Dec.9 are held at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas

Each conference will split into three five-team groups. The groups were determined by the team's regular season record in 2022-23 in a draw from these five pots:

Pot 1: The team with the three best prior season records in a conference.

Pot 2: The team with the fourth- through-sixth best prior season records.

Pot 3: The team with the seventh through- ninth-best prior season records.

Pot 4: The teams with the 10th- through-12th best prior season records.

Pot 5: The team with the 13-through-15th best prior season records.

Each team will play four games against the other teams in its group- two at home and two on the road.

The winner of each group plus a wild card from each conference (the team with the best record that finishes second in its group) advances to the quarterfinals.

All games except for the semifinals and final will be played in the NBA market.

The winner will take home the NBA Cup, By creating that win-or-go-home energy, which we see in the other sports driving significant levels of competition, we think there is an element there that’s beneficial,” NBA, executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics Evan Wasch said.

“But it has also had to be a collaborative and collective conversation among teams and players, which it has been that if we want to buy into this and built it into something significant.”