LAS VEGAS — When it comes to the NBA Cup as a predictor of future success at a more important time of the season, perhaps the Los Angeles Lakers winning it last year was a bad example.
“I look at last year and I thought Indiana — do they make the Eastern finals if they don’t have this tournament,” Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers pondered Friday, on the eve of the 2024 NBA Cup final four in Las Vegas.
“It gives you kind of a free practice run on playoff situations,” Rivers added.
Last December when it was just called the In-Season Tournament, a motivated LeBron James saw in front of him an opportunity to do something never done before in the NBA when he (and of course the Lakers at large) won. But at the end of the season, they wound up having to go through the Play-In Tournament to reach the playoffs and were summarily dismissed in the first round.
The Indiana Pacers, meanwhile, were a surprise team early last season and reached the In-Season finale against the Lakers. They easily made the deepest playoff run of last year’s IST final four, reaching the Eastern finals. The Pelicans and the Bucks — last year’s other Vegas participants — were both bounced out of the playoffs in the first round and the Pels, like the Lakers, needed the Play-In to get there.
This year’s NBA Cup final four feels like any of the teams could be more like last year’s Pacers than Lakers — or better.
The field includes the top two teams (and defenses) in the Western Conference in Oklahoma City and Houston. And coming out of the East are the Bucks, with MVP front-running candidate and current league-leading scorer Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the Atlanta Hawks, who knocked off two of the league’s best teams to get here and have the league’s leading assists man in Trae Young.
There is way too much time left in the regular season to say, definitively, that Adam Silver’s tournament is a harbinger of what’s to come in April, May and June. Too much time for injuries, trades, general malaise.
But more of the league has a better understanding of the opportunities the NBA Cup final four presents and more teams were invested earlier in the tournament, and the Las Vegas field seems deeper because of it.
“Coming into this season, I think everybody understood better and everybody cared more, not just because of the opportunity to win money… you get an opportunity to come to Vegas and do something outside of the norm in the middle of our regular season,” Bucks star Damian Lillard said. “It’s an opportunity to win something. You know, it’s something that every team is competing for. And then you get here, there’s only a few teams that can win and it can energize and lift your team up.
“Even though it’s not the ultimate goal, I think it gives you an edge.”
The Hawks and Bucks play each other at 4:30 p.m. ET on Saturday; the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets play at 8 p.m. ET. The winners meet in the Cup finals Tuesday.
Now, you have gotten to this point of the story and are shouting “WAIT WAIT WAIT. Neither the Bucks nor the Hawks are anywhere near the top of the East.”
And you would be right. The Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics are the two best teams record-wise in the entire league, and neither are here in Sin City. Why? Because the Hawks beat them both.
Atlanta has won seven of its last eight, with victories over the Cavs (twice), the Celtics and the Knicks at Madison Square Garden to reach the final four, plus a regular-season win over the Bucks on Dec. 4. All of this after starting 7-11 and losing twice to the Washington Wizards, who are now the NBA’s worst team.
Young is not only leading the league with 12.2 assists per game, he is on pace to average more assists than any player in the last 30 years. The Hawks are causing tremendous problems with their perimeter defensive length through Jalen Johnson and Dyson Daniels, who leads the NBA with 3.04 steals per game and is the conference’s reigning Defensive Player of the Month. Their presence has made it tougher for opponents to exploit Young on defense.
Much of Atlanta’s roster has changed, but nevertheless, the organization is just 3 1/2 seasons removed from a surprise conference finals run with Young.
“We’re a group that’s trying to develop an identity and having some success can help that,” Hawks coach Quin Snyder said. “It can also create challenges. I think losing and failing, as much as none of us want to see that happen, can have the same impact. So I think for our group, that’s what we have to stay focused on. And I think you can do that without diminishing any one game or experience, whatever the team may be.”
Meanwhile, the Bucks are one of four teams with a roster so expensive that they are greatly restricted in what kind of trades they can make. A roster that costly comes with outsized expectations, and yet the Bucks started the year 2-8, looking like a major shakeup was possible.
Instead, Milwaukee has won 11 of its past 14. Antetokounmpo is leading the NBA with 32.7 points per game and has scored at least 20 points while shooting 50 percent or better in each of his 22 games — the longest such streak to begin a season in league history.
Antetokounmpo is one of just two players averaging at least 19 points, 10 rebounds, and five assists this season. The other is Johnson in Atlanta. The Bucks also have added Darvin Ham as an assistant coach and Taurean Prince to their starting lineup; Ham was the Lakers’ head coach and Prince a key player in their rotation last year when they won the tournament.
“We were playing very very bad basketball at the beginning of the year and we needed to win games,” Antetokounmpo said. “Our goal is to make it to the playoffs, make a deep run, and hopefully put ourselves in a position to win a championship. But, you know, by playing the right way, by playing team basketball, going out there competing, sometimes you put yourself in a position to be here. And that’s what I think we did.”
The Thunder (19-5) are a half-game behind Boston for the league’s second-best record overall and have done it despite missing Chet Holmgren for most of the season with a broken pelvis.
Last year, Oklahoma City was the youngest team in NBA history to finish first in a conference. The Thunder are again led by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who is fourth in the NBA at 30.2 points per game, and he is complemented by a tremendously deep roster with capable scorers and plus defenders.
On Friday, while players and coaches from all four Cup teams were practicing and meeting with reporters in Las Vegas, the NBA announced that two of the Thunder’s games in January — both against Cleveland — were picked up by national TV broadcasters. The Thunder up until then had been complaining about a lack of respect toward them from outsiders.
“We all as a team understand, just being a small market team — (being ignored by a national audience) is just something that comes with it,” said Jalen Williams, who is 23 and is averaging 21.8 points per game. “But we also embrace it a lot. It kind of adds like a chip to our shoulders to a certain extent. … All we can do is win games and, you know, kind of make it to a point where you need to see us on TV.”
Of the four teams entering the weekend, the Rockets would perhaps be the team most like Indiana last year in so far as most observers are surprised they are this good, this late in the year. Two years ago Houston was 22-60, tied for last in the West, and on a skid of three consecutive seasons with 22 wins.
The Rockets are now 17-8 (after improving to 41-41 last season), and don’t have a single player averaging at least 20 points. Jalen Green is the team’s leading scorer at 19.2 points per game and center Alperen Şengün, who like Green is just 22, is averaging 18.8 points and 10.6 rebounds and is a presence on defensive interior.
Houston’s Fred VanVleet is an NBA champion (with Toronto in 2019) and coach Ime Udoka coached the Celtics to the finals in 2022, but most of the Rockets roster has never experienced a playoff game. This weekend, however it shakes out, automatically provides an invaluable experience to them of learning to play for something.
“We want to win. We want to win the whole thing,” VanVleet said. “That was our goal from the beginning, was to come here and win the championship. Just getting here was not really our goal. But it’s new to everybody.
“I watched LeBron James pop champagne in December last year. I don’t know if anybody could’ve ever imagined that 20 years ago.”
Required reading
(Photo: William Purnell / Getty Images)
