Who respects the NBA Cup?

Do the league's players, or its winners, the New York Knicks? Do you?

Editor’s note: The BASKETBALL FEELINGS guest essay usually comes out on Wednesdays, but both myself and the author of this week’s feature were sick and confined to our miserable beds. Forgive us.

I’m happy to report we’ve both turned a corner, even happier that Alex still wrote this considering how badly he was feeling. I won’t give away the ending, but the same thing happened to me during this week’s NBA Cup Final. The flu does not respect the Cup.

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The NBA Cup is ridiculous. It can only be ridiculous. Although it is ostensibly modeled off of other in-season competitions in European soccer — namely the FA Cup, once the most storied prize in English soccer, now a thing that kind of sort of sometimes matters — those tournaments, though diminished, still carry a sense of history. They also have an element of chaos that any closed league cannot. The NBA Cup can only be won by teams playing in the NBA, but any of the 700-odd teams in the “Football Association” could theoretically win the FA Cup, though they almost never do.

Still, there is — to use a phrase we’ve borrowed from abroad — something magic in the cup.

Two months ago, Grimsby Town beat Manchester United in the second round of the English Football League Cup, a smaller and less prestigious FA Cup that has recently been sponsored by a Thai energy drink and that is actually the closest analogue to the NBA Cup. It really was magic. As Grimsby’s ecstatic fans waved inflatable fish in celebration — the town, I learned searching Wikipedia during the penalty shootout that decided the game, once boasted the largest fishing port in the world, until it was dethroned during something called the “Cod Wars” — you could not help but be reminded that there is history and passion over there that we don’t quite have over here. It would be great to imagine a tournament where, I don’t know, the Spokane Loggers could defeat the Los Angeles Lakers. That’s not the tournament we have.

The tournament we have is one that was not designed for magic. It was created to solve a simple problem, which is that a lot of people don’t think that the NBA regular season matters and even more don’t care about lick about it until Christmas.

There’s little jeopardy, and little ratings, in the early months of the NBA season, so they made a Cup. Most of the Cup games are just regular season games, so they made the teams create garish — and ridiculous — courts that remind the viewer that they are watching a Cup game. Otherwise, everything is pretty much the same. There was no history in the Cup, so the league’s minders traveled, hat in hand, to Abu Dhabi and came back with something better: Millions of dollars. All for the low, low cost of providing some positive PR to a notorious human rights abusing nation. Still, it’s clear that the players care about the Cup, because they can make a million if they win it. Do they respect the Cup, though? Does anyone?

The New York Knicks do not respect the Cup. They became just the third team to win it earlier this week, but they will be the first not to hang a banner in the rafters of Madison Square Garden celebrating their victory. There is, at this moment, a banner flying in those rafters celebrating Billy Joel’s string of sold out shows. At various times, banners have hung trumpeting Phish and the Grateful Dead. But there will not be one celebrating the first trophy that the New York Knicks have won since their last real NBA title, which was won the same year the Senate voted 77-0 to establish the Watergate Select Committee.

One of the funny things about the NBA Cup, though, is that it actually works. Maybe it works in spite of its ridiculousness and stupidity or maybe because of those things. The money means that the players care and when it becomes a single-elimination knockout tournament — something the NBA, with its love of endless seven game series does not have — it is often electric. In the moment, the players respect the Cup. And whoever respects the Cup more in the moment wins.