When the NBA Cup launched in 2023, it was far from a finished project.
Several players were ignorant of the tournament’s rules, the special courts were polarizing in both form and function, and it didn’t even have a proper name. It was called the NBA In-Season Tournament before the league renamed it the NBA Cup last year and added the Emirates airline as the title sponsor.
But there’s been virtually no change with the NBA Cup format between Years 2 and 3. While there are still sporadic issues with the NBA Cup court design, the tournament is here to stay. It looks like a permanent fixture on the NBA calendar, as Adam Silver’s vision is finally falling into place.
The Players
To its participants, the selling point of the NBA Cup has been clear since the tournament’s launch: money. The grand prize for each player on the winning team was $500,000 in 2023, and that’s up to $530,933 this year thanks to CBA rules around basketball-related income.
For the NBA’s top stars, a half-million dollars is a drop in the bucket. Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 2024 NBA Cup MVP, made nearly $49 million last year, so the grand prize was less than his per-game salary of close to $600,000.
But for players on minimum deals, the prize could be a significant portion of their yearly earnings. A minimum deal in the 2025–26 season is worth $1.27 million, so the grand prize would be a 42% earnings increase.
The same can be said for players on two-way contracts who are paid half of the NBA minimum deal ($636,435) and will receive half of the prize money, depending on how many group-play games in which they were active.
Even when teams don’t win the grand prize, they can still walk away with a decent chunk of money for qualifying for the NBA Cup postseason.
Here is the 2025 prize-money breakdown per player:
Champion: $530,933
Runner-up: $212,373
Semifinalist: $106,187
Quarterfinalist: $53,093
There’s another upside. For some teams and players, the games have turned into a dry run for the playoffs.
“It’s good prep for the postseason,” Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said last year ahead of the NBA Cup final in Las Vegas. “It’s obviously heightened stakes than a regular season, 82-game season, and it’s good to get reps in games that mean a little bit more and have stakes to it.”
Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder lost in the NBA Cup final, but he would eventually lead Oklahoma City to the 2025 NBA championship, securing regular-season and Finals MVP in the process.
“It definitely helped,” Gilgeous-Alexander told Andscape about the Cup loss earlier this month. “Losing in general helps all the time. It’s easy to learn from losing. It definitely just showed us the formula for losing. The way we played that night, we didn’t give what the game required, and it showed us that.”
Magic guard Desmond Bane, who was fined $35,000 earlier this week for unsportsmanlike conduct when he threw a ball at Knicks forward OG Anunoby, summed up the benefits of the NBA Cup on Wednesday after Orlando defeated the Heat to advance to the semis.
“That’s huge, man. I just lost $35,000. I gotta go get it back somehow,” Bane said. “But I’m excited. Great opportunity for us to play some meaningful basketball early in the season.”
The NBA and Amazon
The Cup is quietly important to the 11-year, $77 billion media-rights deal that is flooding the NBA with money. That deal is almost triple the previous one—despite plateauing viewership—in part because of the addition of Amazon Prime Video. And Amazon has most of the broadcast rights to the Cup, including exclusive rights to the knockout rounds.
The tournament is also meant to provide a jolt to the early part of the season when the NBA is still competing with the NFL for the attention of sports fans. But it hasn’t exactly proved to be a viewership juggernaut.
The tournament’s group-play viewership has been modest through the first three years and averaged 1.5 million viewers this year. That’s up 12% from last year, but about flat compared to the tournament’s inaugural season.
The NBA Cup championship did see significant attention, drawing 2.99 million viewers last year. While that was down 35% compared to the previous year (Lakers vs. Pacers), it was still one of the league’s most-watched games of the 2024–25 regular season.
Acquiring the NBA Cup rights also allows Amazon to continue its push to make Prime Video a sports streaming destination, including on Black Friday, when it aired two NBA Cup games after Bears-Eagles.
The Black Friday doubleheader delivered the two most-watched NBA games on Prime Video so far: 2.11 million for Bucks-Knicks and 2.06 million for Mavericks-Lakers.
The Fans
Fans are the NBA Cup stakeholders with no monetary benefit, though the NBA has faced scrutiny over whether its recent media-rights deal is in the best interest of its fans following the fragmentation of games under its new media deal. It costs fans nearly $1,000 to have access to all its games this season.
For fans, the Cup raises two questions. Is it easy to watch amid rampant fragmentation? And does it matter?
The latter is a constant topic in sports media. Bill Simmons opened his eponymous podcast Tuesday by asking guest Rob Mahoney: “Do you care about the NBA Cup?”
“I’ve chosen to care about the NBA Cup,” Mahoney responded. “Has it given me a reason to believe that the basketball will be above and beyond? Absolutely not. But I’d like to find something to care about in the regular season, even if it’s somewhat arbitrary.”
Fans often take their cues for caring about gimmicks from the players themselves. There’s perhaps no better example of this than the league’s dwindling All-Star Game viewership as players have continued to put little effort into the exhibition contest.
Stars like LeBron James, Damian Lillard, and Tyrese Haliburton have all played in the NBA Cup final in its first two years—despite it essentially being an exhibition game since the result is not considered in a team’s overall record. The NBA Cup championship game viewership numbers show that fans are paying attention to the final stage of the tournament.
“I like watching basketball where the players care,” Simmons said. “I don’t really care about the reason why they care, but as long as they care, I’m in.”
