4 Reasons Why The NBA Cup is Ruining The League

I spent Black Friday purchasing things I cannot afford thanks to discounts that aren’t nearly as discounted as they used to be when Black Friday first became a thing.

Friday night was spent flipping between NBA Cup games and I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the thought that this new thing is bad because it’s new.

All 30 teams are broken up into 6 groups of 5. They play round-robin games on Tuesday and Friday with special courts to indicate to the viewer that they’re watching a Cup game.

Then there’s a tournament, leading to the Finals in Las Vegas, and $500k to every player and coach on the team.

Sure, the games are close and genuinely fun to watch, or whatever, but the NBA Cup will ruin this league we all know and love.

Walk with me. Here are 4 reasons why the NBA Cup is destroying the game of basketball:

1. The courts are dangerous

As someone who’s suffered from seizures, I cannot allow the NBA to get away with this blatant ableism, forcing their employees to play on these epilepsy-inducing brightly colored courts.

I thought the NBA was an inclusive league but this NBA Cup makes it loud and clear Adam Silver doesn’t care if I die watching Julius Randle spin into triple coverage before side-arming a fastball 100 mph like Byung-Hyun Kim directly into the shins of an unexpected teammate, with like, 0.5 seconds left in the shot clock.

Wolves fans will come to realize that this is all apart of the Julius Randle experience pic.twitter.com/xye1He8tzf

— Big Knick Energy (@BigKnickEnergy_) November 27, 2024

I almost swallowed my tongue watching that.

2. Getting in bed with the United Arab Emirates

Last year, the league called this whole thing the ‘NBA In-Season Tournament” which I didn’t mind.

That was literally true. Great title.

But now it’s the Emirates NBA Cup. That means they negotiated and the NBA said “Okay, you can put your brand name in front of ours”.

We are complicit in the UAE’s sportswashing—where they sponsor major, must-see sporting events to normalize themselves in Western Culture—allowing them to get away with human rights violations back home like their zero-tolerance policy toward dissent, resulting in long prison sentences for simply criticizing the government.

The United Arab Emirates has been accused of funding a faction in Sudan that has committed bruuuuutal war crimes.

How am I supposed to watch Jaylen Brunson getting to the paint at will, scoring buckets whenever he so chooses, while also thinking about the migrant worker abuse?

So far the NBA is teaming up with dictators to kill the handicapped people watching.

Disgusting.

3. Players health

We’re not even 20 games into the season yet and teams like the New Orleans Pelicans and Philadelphia 76ers can’t find 5 healthy bodies to play basketball every night.

The Phoenix Suns and Memphis Grizzlies are doing this little. cute thing where their stars all play together for one month, then they all take the following month off.

Bold strategies but I like the innovative thinking.

Guys are already dropping like flies and the NBA is making them bust their asses for a trophy before they even get their legs underneath them.

Do we want guys to play harder or in more games? Because you can’t have both.

Not in the current state of the NBA where you have to run up and down a court 82 nights a year unlike back in the 60s when they had to run up and down a court 82 nights a year.

4. Change

My biggest complaint with the NBA Cup is that it is different so I must hate it. New things that I don’t already have built-in subconscious nostalgic feelings toward should not exist.

The NBA Cup is a direct attack on me and my quickly aging, soon-to-be corpse of a self. It’s also why I’m against changing anything about the 3-point line. The court has been painted the same way since I first watched in the 90s and anything outside of the norm is bad.

So end the NBA Cup because it’s different.

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