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The third annual Emirates NBA Cup, the league’s in-season tournament, returns Friday with a few changes—including an increased monetary incentive.
Each player on the NBA Cup championship team will receive $530,933, up 3% from $514,971 last year, won by Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks. The prize money in the 2023–24 inaugural tournament, won by LeBron James and the Lakers, was $500,000 per player.
This year’s prize is bumped up for all winners, starting with the quarterfinalists, which include eight teams that advance past the knockout stage.
Here is the prize-money breakdown:
- Champion: $530,933 (up from $514,971)
- Runner-up: $212,373 (up from $205,988)
- Semifinalist: $106,187 (up from $102,994)
- Quarterfinalist: $53,093 (up from $51,497)
The price increases are written into the 2023 NBA CBA, so they were expected.
According to Article IV, Section 6 of the CBA—on “additional benefits” for players—the prize money increases based on a multiplier called a Basketball-Related Income (BRI) Growth Factor. The multiplier is calculated by dividing the BRI of the “immediately preceding salary cap year” divided by the BRI of the 2022–23 season. (Several factors come into the calculation of BRI, including the NBA’s media-rights deal, which made up about a quarter of BRI for the 2024–25 season.)
This year’s BRI Growth Factor is 1.031, a tick above the 1.030 last year.
However, not all players receive the full prize money.
The CBA states players on two-way or 10-day contracts will receive a fraction of the money based on the number of games they play on their team’s active or inactive roster during the knockout stages. There are four knockout-stage games, and each knockout-stage game is considered a half-game for these players.
For example, if a player is on the team’s roster for all four knockout-stage games and his team wins the title, he’ll receive one-half of the championship prize ($265,466). While that’s a lot lower than what a regular player would win, the reduced amount is nearly 42% higher than contracts of two-way players ($636,435 for the 2025–26 season, according to Sports Business Classroom).
Other Changes
The other major change in the 2025 NBA Cup is that the national games will be streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime Video for the first time. Amazon took over the rights to the tournament—which were split between ESPN and TNT for the first two years—in the NBA’s new 11-year, $77 billion media deal that kicked in this season.
Coverage on Prime Video got off to a strong start last Friday with two exclusively streamed games (Knicks vs. Celtics and Timberwolves vs. Lakers) that averaged 1.25 million viewers, up 13% compared to the same games last year, which aired on ESPN.
The flow of the tournament will be the same this year: Eight teams will advance from the knockout stages, with higher-seeded teams hosting quarterfinal games. The final four teams will head to Las Vegas, where the semifinals and finals will be played at the T-Mobile Arena, a neutral site, on Dec. 13 and Dec. 16, respectively.
The NBA announced in the summer that starting in the 2026–27 season, only the finals will be played at a neutral site, with the semifinals following the quarterfinals as games hosted by higher-seeded teams.
The league has not confirmed whether it will return to Las Vegas for the 2026 NBA Cup championship game.
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