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.

I have spent most of this season bitching about Mitchell Robinson, the Knicks old school, sharp-elbowed center who is bad at free throwing shooting on a world historical scale. He is, I have said many times over the course of this early season, literally unplayable in the playoffs. He has a charming backstory (good), lots of cats (even better), but he loves the president (unforgivable). I could deal with a MAGA center if he hit 60 percent of his free throws, but not one shooting less than 20 percent from the line.

But when it mattered, Mitchell Robinson respected the Cup more than anyone. He willed this team to victory and made the case that he maybe can actually stay on the floor in a game that matters. The Knicks won the Cup because they scored 32 second-chance points against the Spurs in the final and many of those points were a direct result of Robinson doing what he does, which is grab the ball when it matters.

The Knicks’ supporting cast — which includes Robinson and also, among others, Tyler Kolek (who looks like the long lost son of Zach Lowe and Skyler Gisondo) and Jordan Clarkson — are the people who are supposed to care about the Cup because the money means more to them than it does to someone who takes home that much every few weeks. But they showed up and they respected the Cup and they also gave a glimmer of hope to those Knicks fans, myself very much included, who were desperate both for more depth and for a coach willing to take a chance on that depth. They have both now. And they have the Cup.

Photo credit Kirby Lee

The fact that the Lakers hung a Cup banner and the Knicks haven’t is silly for the same reason it makes sense. The Lakers have roughly one million NBA titles and won their last one in 2020 during the Mickey Mouse, decidedly un-Cup-like atmosphere of the Covid NBA Bubble. The Knicks have two and, again, haven’t won one since Americans were grooving to ”Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” and lining up outside theaters to watch The Poseidon Adventure. The Knicks aren’t hanging a banner because it’s been a long time since they’ve hung the one that really matters. One could argue that the Knicks aren’t hanging a banner out of respect — just for the NBA Championship, not for the Cup.

The idea of respecting the Cup is a joke to me and most of the people I know, and it’s a pretty good one. I respect the Cup when the Knicks win by chanting “cup” in the bar with my friends when they win. I respect the Cup because the Knicks won it. It would, of course, be a meaningless trophy if they hadn’t.

But as good as the Knicks played to win the Cup, they will most likely have to beat a nearly perfect Oklahoma City Thunder team four times to win the thing that really matters — if, indeed, they make it that far in the spring and early summer.

It occurred to me when they won it that the Cup was the first thing I had seen them win anything since I was 12, and the last thing didn’t really matter. That was the Eastern Conference Championship Trophy, a prize notable for the fact that its total absence of meaning. It only means you made the NBA Finals: It’s either a grace note to something much better or a glorified participation trophy. For the 2000 Knicks, it was the latter. The Cup is infinitely more meaningful and better. It may very well be the only meaningful trophy I see the Knicks win in my lifetime.

And I didn’t even see them win it. I was sick during the Cup final and fell asleep at the end of the third quarter. I woke up at 12:30am to dozens of texts, nearly all of which were variations of “CUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I thought I respected the Cup. The Knicks respected it more.