It couldn’t have been scripted better. The first ever NBA Cup final in Las Vegas on Saturday night: budding star Tyrese Haliburton and his Cinderella story of an Indiana Pacers team against face-of-the-league, battling-father-time-with-a-machete LeBron James and his physically imposing Los Angeles Lakers. The new and exciting v the iconic and tenured. Frenetic and kinetic v gritty and tough. A perfect balance, something for everyone. The teams in the final stage of the NBA’s maiden in-season tournament represented the latest “what went right” in an increasingly long list of favorable breaks for Adam Silver and Co in their bid to make the slog of the regular season between October and Christmas a little more interesting.
As the extended NBA universe touched down in Vegas over weekend, it found itself in a culture clash, as a rodeo convention hit the city at the same time as the league landed on The Strip. Middle-aged guys in cowboy hats, arm and arm with bleach blondes in bedazzled denim, dominated much of Vegas, and almost every bar and casino was blaring country music to accommodate them. But as evidenced by the number of Kobe Bryant jerseys in their midst, and the noise levels at the arena for the Cup final, there were plenty of basketball fans (especially of the Lakers persuasion) as well: the city is, after all, only a four-hour drive from LA. And there was an air of excitement surrounding the arena – and the event’s extended footprint at neighboring Park MGM – that can only be attributed to the thrill of attending something brand new.
It was an ideal scenario for the league that the two teams who seemed to take the tournament games most seriously – both entered Saturday with identical 6-0 records – made it to the final. There’s a longstanding sports cliche, that is usually relatively off base, that the team who “wants it more” succeeds, but in this case, it did seemingly shake out that way. Haliburton told NBA colleague Paul George on his podcast recently that he’s “just tired of losing”, and that winning the tournament would rank as the No 1 achievement in his career, above his All-Star selection. And Lakers coach Darvin Ham told reporters that, in the earliest days of the tournament, James made it clear to his team that this trophy was worth fighting for.
But even the teams that didn’t make it as far provided some of the most exciting NBA regular-season games ever seen in November and December. Heading into the experiment, there was doubt throughout the league, and among fans, too, that a contest created out of thin air and shoehorned into the middle of the doldrums of the NBA season could galvanize players and become something weighty. But as it turns out, professional athletes are highly competitive, a trait that is only stoked by heightened stakes. The games proved riveting and those doubts were, it turned out, unfounded.
Not everything went off without a hitch. For starters, there were the polarizing special courts meant to make abundantly clear which games counted towards the tournament and which were ho-hum regular-season contests. But some of the courts were an assault on the eyes (looking at you, Chicago Bulls), and many were simply not an ideal backdrop for charting the course of a basketball. The point differential tie-breaker in group play, too, was met with some controversy (Silver said in his pre-game press conference Saturday night that he plans to address those concerns). And on a more somber note, a mass shooting at nearby UNLV killed three people and injured one other on Wednesday, just a day before the tournament kicked off. A moment of silence was held before both Thursday semi-finals, and James used his introductory press conference to express frustration about the lack of movement on gun laws to fix the quintessentially American issue.
It was fitting, on multiple levels, that James ended up being the player to lift the MVP trophy after the Lakers beat the Pacers in the final. He put up some of the most scintillating performances of the tournament, clearly getting up for all of the games, including in the group stage. But beyond that, for most of his 21-year-and-counting NBA tenure, he’s been the face of the league, its most high-profile ambassador. He clearly doesn’t take that role lightly, and knew as well as anyone what it could mean for the NBA to have a more engaged audience early in the season, especially on the horizon of negotiations for a potentially very lucrative new television rights deal.
For all Adam Silver’s faults as commissioner (and his recent predisposition to questionable comments on television programs hosted by the sleeve-challenged), he’s been unafraid to take big swings. Most of those swings have been met with a healthy amount of pushback, and several of them have gone on to become bona fide hits.
His latest gambit, the in-season tournament, accomplished everything it set out to do and then some: engage the big stars (like James, Anthony Davis, and semi-finalists Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard), bring new ones to a larger audience (the weekend doubled as Haliburton’s coming-out party, and marked only his third and fourth nationally televised games), inject some excitement into an otherwise quiet stretch of season, and, even, see how official NBA games go in Vegas, which has long been rumored as the future home of an expansion team. After an unequivocally successful first rodeo, it’s a solid Vegas bet that this tournament, too, is here to stay.
