One To Remember
TITLE! I meant *title! The New York Knicks were going to win the title this year, and what I meant when I said “2026” was “2025,” and what I meant by “NBA championship” was, actually, the NBA Cup[1], by far the most exclusive and wonderful of the annual basketball trophies. Down twelve in the third against a Victor Wembanyama-led team that had already defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Knicks came back to win the Cup final 124-113.
In what amounted to a single-elimination tournament held far enough away from anything familiar to make it feel neutral in mid-December, New York beating San Antonio in Nevada seems like a warning shot. Along with the rest of the league, NBA commissioner Adam Silver continues to eye Las Vegas as a potential expansion site, if only they would seriously consider it.
I.
Not a secret: we’re looking at this market in Las Vegas. We are looking at Seattle. – Adam Silver, sounding as limitless and constrained as everyone else.
Expansion looms over all of this. When Silver stares upon the victimless criminals that are the people who bother to show up for the NBA Cup games, he sees more, if not better, engagement. Many of these are the same folks who buy sunglasses in various airports, many times over and sometimes during consecutive flights.
Word is that the Cup is going to explore new homes for its signature venture, which is definitely what the NBA Cup is. While Silver is wooing the investment class with the sights and sounds of (checking notes) Las Vegas in December, imminent expansion to the city makes its status as the exclusive home of the NBA’s Final Four tenuous.
Apparently, the league is exploring playing the country’s lauded college arenas, a curious move, at least for the time being, given the grandiosity the Cup is supposed to reflect. But then, maybe that’s the point: an NBA-led effort to go grassroots by featuring in places where many of its young stars would be anyway, but for the current status of pre-professional athletes in this country.
By taking ostensibly top-tier NBA teams to places like Cameron Indoor, Allen Fieldhouse and Rupp Arena, the league is completing its domestic campaign on pro-ish ‘growing the game’ basketball writ large: “If you enjoy Indiana basketball, here’s Kel’el Ware of the Miami Heat” (This is not a shot at Kel’el Ware, for the record, who is blossoming wonderfully this season).
Something this calculus doesn’t really account for, and something about which I worry, is that the regionalism that makes college sports what they are – and professional sports so different by extension – is impossible to grow at a college town-scale. It seems counterintuitive given how small the towns are, but the interests are so direct and specific that it doesn’t strike me as terribly likely that fans of, say, the Syracuse Orange are immediately going to hop on board with Wemby and the Spurs.
This has at least as much to do with xenophobia as it does with, like, the general nature of being a Syracuse basketball fan in the post-Boeheim 2025, but the point remains that fans like this will get exactly as much ball as they want. A fractured TV contract environment engenders that; that said, if you want to be watching the NBA Cup in the US right now, you still have options.
II.
After only a few months in charge, head coach Mike Brown has everyone looking at the Knicks’ depth, something Tom Thibodeau never would’ve allowed to happen. Is New York a more complete team this season, with Jordan Clarkson and Guerschon Yabusele? Or is it just that there are no Knicks in the top ten of minutes played per game this season after having three in the top six a year ago?
The frontcourt formula is distinct: Karl-Anthony Towns is the[2] ideal running mate for Jalen Brunson’s herking and jerking on offense, and when they need muscle, they turn to Mitchell Robinson, one of the smartest locators of missed shots in the league. Robinson had ten offensive rebounds alone, and he out-rebounded the entire Spurs team by himself. Cam Payne, Deuce McBride and (hello!) Tyler Kolek put in strong minutes in Vegas.
More than anything else, though, my takeaway from this edition of the NBA Cup, and this season so far more broadly for New York, was how much these guys genuinely seem to like each other[3]. It was evident through the tournament and then reiterated when Brunson led the Knicks to a win against the Pacers in the game immediately following the Cup Final.
Mendicant influence escapes my understanding, but the Nova Knicks thing seems contagious. However unlikely it is that a team whose best player is, at most, a whisker over six feet tall will win a seven-game series at the end of a tournament consisting of every team in the NBA, the feeling of geniality in the city whenever the team wins remains.
With all the talk of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s discontent in Milwaukee, as well as his noted interest in the tristate, it becomes tough not to consider the possibilities had New York not traded the vast majority of its draft capital for Mikal Bridges last summer. On the other hand: Bridges is yet again an all-defense candidate shooting 52/41/80 splits. His secondary ballhandling has enabled much of the fluidity between New York’s first and second units, some of the more visually-appealing basketball that this area has seen in a minute.,
Speaking of which: have you seen the American football that “this city” has to offer? Yikes. Everybody will get excited about the Winter Olympics and other reasons to ignore their own evictions, or the impending demise of the MetroCard. Horrendously-designed emergency exits and turnstiles meant to evoke Jaws are coming for us. The Knicks are the one shot this town’s got going into 2026, aside from the obvious. As Jalen Brunson goes, so go the Knicks. As the Knicks go, so will go New York.
III.
In three years, the NBA Cup has gone from an annoying novelty – a cynical cash-grab or forced company fun during a lull in the regular season, depending on who you ask – to something like an occasion. Saturday night’s Spurs-Thunder clash felt and played like it mattered, though the belaboring of its final half-minute over the course of 11+ minutes in real time reminded those who bought ad time of what it was that they were up against.
That the league’s fractured broadcast landscape led the NBA Cup’s main events to Jeff Bezos is reflective of its existence and our broader circumstances to begin with; to the limited credit it deserves given its overwhelming budget and influence, Amazon’s broadcasting team did a solid job turning the Vegas portion of the tournament into something closer to a college basketball weekend, seemingly the league’s ultimate aspiration for the mid-season tournament.
I want to be clear that, despite it being the most prestigious professional basketball tournament on the planet, I do not care about the NBA Cup and think its added 83rd game is a burden on any team’s regular season schedule. Injuries are already mounting, and giving teams a reason to care early on keeps players in lineups against teams that, eh, might otherwise see a questionable turn into a doubtful turn into an OUT.
Those players are, of course, trying to protect their bodies, the literal way they make their livelihoods; team governors are trying to protect their fans and the interests of corporate entities who buy increasingly large boxes in arenas only for those boxes to go unattended when the preferred workers who receive a “FREE KNICKS TIX 2NITE!!” email have to work later than even the West Coast tipoffs.
Reducing the league’s schedule from 82 games per team to 72 is one of the more logical routes to scaling down the leaguewide injury epidemic[4], so we make the early season games count for more, with incentives mostly for the bench players and clout for the ones already making top-tier dosh. There will eventually be more teams, and more games; talk of intercontinental tournaments will overwhelm anyone who can still afford a TV subscription by the end of the decade.
This should work. It will continue to work, no matter how, and no matter what any of us actually think of it. Congratulations to the 2025 NBA Cup champions, the New York Knicks. Don’t bother hanging that banner when nobody else is serious about it, starting with those pushing it.
[1] Recently someone on another blog and/or newsletter suggested that you don’t need to refer to the NBA Cup by its full, sponsored (…government?) name unless you are actually beholden to them, and this site agrees with and maintains that stance.
[2] *an, respectfully, but taking this version of this team at its face value: Karl is point B in the offense and by no means a secondary option.
[3] Parasocial relationships, yadda yadda, if OG Anunoby sets off an international scandal by waking up in Anne H*th*way’s pied-à-terre when she’s allegedly not in the country, whatever: they give out a Defensive Player Of The Game award for every win, complete with a hardhat and Timberlands. If they don’t care about each other, they at least care about the shared goal much more than most Knicks teams of the last quarter-century. They buy in.
[4] Gigantic of that particular Post to post about any of this; mighty Christian of them. The NBA is going to be the Premier League soon, though, and if and when the Knicks win a title in Man City circa-2012 fashion (how much do you think Saudi- and Emirates-adjacent people care about Oklahoma? We might be on the precipice of finding out!), it will be a depressing show of Messi at the 2022 World Cup, but in the Garden. I can’t imagine what something like that would look like in Madison Square Garden, despite having been to a PBA event there.
Tuesdays With Horry 