What Nuggets fans should know about NBA’s newest competition

The NBA regular season can be a drag, with many fans of basketball actually calling for fewer games and a shortened slate.

This coming regular season will feel like a grind for Denver Nuggets fans, who will go from 20 amazing playoff games back to the doldrums of Tuesday nights against the Atlanta Hawks and such. But the 2023-24 season may come with a touch of more excitement or a bit more slog, depending on who you ask. That is because the NBA is kind of expanding the regular season to add an in-season tournament that takes place in November and will wrap before Christmas with a championship game in Las Vegas. Expand might be a big word but they’re definitely placing more attention on early NBA season action.

Here’s former Nuggets forward Richard Jefferson explaining it for the NBA’s social channels.

NBA IN-SEASON TOURNAMENT EXPLAINED 🎥

Starting Nov. 3, all 30 teams will compete for the NBA Cup with 8 teams advancing into the knockout rounds! The tournament semis and championship game will be held in Las Vegas, Dec. 7 and 9! pic.twitter.com/NZdURUa3XR

— NBA (@NBA) July 8, 2023

The competition kicks off on Nov. 3, and teams will play group stage games on Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the month. The 15 teams in each conference are split into three groups with the winner of each advancing and the fourth-best record in each conference getting a nod to move on. These group stage games will be regular season games as will every game in the tournament up until the championship of the NBA Cup which will not count toward the regular season.

The Nuggets are in a group with Dallas, New Orleans, Houston and the Clippers.

So a lot is going on here and what the NBA is trying to do is spice up the regular season and cut back on load management. Picking a soccer-style tournament as the method for those issues is odd because in those footie in-season competitions the pool is comprised of a different group than your normal league foes. For example when the Colorado Rapids play in Leagues Cup later in July, included in their group are teams from Mexico and when the Burgundy Boys play in the US Open Cup they could play opponents such as the Colorado Springs Switchbacks from the USL or Northern Colorado Hailstorm from an even lower division. Not only will the Nuggets be facing their normal foes, it’s the same group of teams they’ll be fighting with for playoff positioning.

Who knows what the legacy of NBA Cup will be or what its meaning could be down the line but for now even the NBA seems to know it could be meaningless for a large chunk of players, teams and fans. Each player on the NBA Cup-winning will get a $500k check, but in the NBA’s documents they note, it’s “money for players on teams who choose to play.” That seemingly is enough of a hint that a veteran team like the Nuggets, coming off a championship, may just tank this competition altogether so they don’t have to make extra trips during the knockout stages.

NBA Cup may be fun for younger teams and franchises without many accomplishments, a bucket the Nuggets fell into very recently. But don’t be surprised if these weekday games in November feature Denver’s rookies and deeper rotation players.

So how will this impact the Nuggets regular season slate next season? Well, it’s confusing:

Games played in the first and second rounds of the Knockout Rounds (i.e., Quarterfinals and Semifinals, respectively) will count as Regular Season games for all purposes.  The Championship will not be counted as a Regular Season game (e.g., such game would not count toward a team’s Regular Season record and a player’s or team’s performance in such game would not count towards Regular Season statistics).

During the Knockout Rounds on days when In-Season Tournament games are not scheduled (Wednesday, Dec. 6 and Friday, Dec. 8), the 22 teams that do not qualify for the Knockout Rounds will each play two regular-season games.

A formulaic approach will determine the matchups for these games using the Group Play standings in each conference (5th-15th).  Two of the 22 games will be scheduled cross-conference since there will be an odd number of teams in each conference that do not advance to the Quarterfinals.  These cross-conference games will be scheduled between bottom-finishing teams in the Group Play stage subject to travel constraints, and no team will play more than one of its two games cross-conference.  The other 20 games will be scheduled within conference featuring teams that are otherwise scheduled to play each other three times throughout the season wherever possible.

The four teams that lose in the Quarterfinals will each play a regular-season game on Friday, Dec. 8, against the opponent in their same conference.

When the Nuggets schedule for their title defense comes out later this summer it will have some grey area around Thanksgiving. For most fans of basketball, NBA Cup takes place before the quarter point of the slate which comes around the unofficial start of the NBA season on Christmas Day.

Will it spice up the regular season? Probably. Should the Denver Nuggets care? Maybe. They are offering an MVP for NBA Cup and Nikola Jokic tends to win those, so who knows we could be talking about the Nuggets taking home more hardware and sooner than we originally thought.

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