Josh Hart believes he has an idea that will drive up the stakes and interest in the NBA Cup: give the winner a half-game edge in the regular-season standings.
Intrigued? You should be. It’s one of the more well-thought, and quite frankly better, ideas floating around. Here is Hart laying out his NBA Cup idea in full, via Stefan Bondy of the New York Post:
“I think what would be really cool is if they solidify it a little bit more, whoever is the winner gets a half-game [extra in the regular-season win column]. You get to the championship game, you get a half-game if you win. If you lose the championship, it doesn’t go against your record. Now you have that half game so you have the tiebreaker and it legitimizes that NBA Cup a little bit more..”
Before even digging into the merit and logistics, Hart gets an A-plus for effort here. Though the $500,000 in prize money is substantial, especially to end-of-the-roster players, it is entirely disconnected from on-court fallout.
The fact that the championship game doesn’t count toward the standings—or a player’s statistics—is just weird. It’s this self-containing exhibition in which nothing beyond bank-account statements and bragging rights for winning a tournament in its infancy is at stake.
Hart’s idea gives teams even more of an incentive to pursue the NBA Cup. If anything, his suggestion may not be ambitious enough.
Let’s take Josh Hart’s NBA Cup solution one step further
As Hart himself notes, having a team finish with an extra half-victory in the standings would look weird. A 60.5-22.0 record, for example, just doesn’t hit the same way.
So why not just give the winner of the NBA Cup an extra whole victory? It would still help determine tiebreakers down the line, and gives the champion some extra cushioning in the event a wrench gets thrown into the rest of their season.
Don’t you think the Knicks would welcome an extra win knowing they face extended stretches of life without OG Anunoby, not to mention Landry Shamet? And when they are attempting to meticulously manage Mitchell Robinson’s workload?
If you don’t think the additional W matters, well, think again. Three teams in the Western Conference last season had 50 wins. Another three had 48 or 49. The Knicks themselves claimed the East’s third-best record by a one-win edge over the Indiana Pacers. The margins are thin enough for the extra victory to mean a great deal.
Josh Hart might be on to something…
To be fair, Hart’s idea is not without potential downsides. A team that wins the NBA Cup but finishes outside the playoffs at the end of the regular season might bemoan the additional victory messing with their draft-lottery odds.
This is a wrinkle that can be ironed out. Perhaps the win can count toward seeding tiebreakers but not the lottery. Or maybe we just shouldn’t care. Organizations with the absolute-best lottery odds have not been winning the No. 1 pick left and right under the new format anyway.
Plus, do we think could-be lottery teams winning the NBA Cup will be a trend? The first two champions have been the Los Angeles Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks, both of whom were veteran teams.
It just so happens both the Lakers and Bucks ended up flaming out in the postseason that year. Banking an extra win may have allowed them to recalibrate their 11th-hour approach to close the year, and maybe get guys some rest. Or perhaps it wouldn’t have changed anything about their record.
That’s the beauty of Hart’s idea. We cannot be sure of its implications. But it would certainly have an impact somehow, in some way.
At the very least, it seems to be worth a shot. If Hart ever has some time to kill while reestablishing himself as New York’s ultimate x-factor, he should give Adam Silver a call.