The NBA Cup is hoping to avoid becoming Las Vegas’ latest shallow cover act

The NBA Cup is good, but the league’s next challenge will be getting fans to care as much as its participants.

LAS VEGAS — Many things in Las Vegas are fake, or replicas of a better thing. No one would confuse The Strip’s versions of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building for the real items. Its inauthenticity is a part of the charm. The city works as one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world because there’s real substance behind the contrived facade it presents.

In many ways, Vegas perfectly embodies what the NBA Cup hopes to be.

The NBA Cup is a made-up and arbitrary event, created out of thin air to help the league generate even more money from Amazon on its next television rights deal. And unlike other fabricated sporting events, like college football bowl games or the European soccer tournaments it’s trying to replicate, we don’t have years of context behind what it actually is, which makes it difficult to sell to the public at large. This is why this event is a distant second to the NFL the weekend it’s being played, and was at best the third biggest event running in Vegas behind the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo and the Raiders’ and Falcons’ Monday Night Football game. People in cowboy hats or Bijan Robinson jerseys were everywhere walking around The Strip. Thunder or Bucks gear was nowhere to be found.

Las Vegas is a destination city, but the NBA Cup is to this point a destination event in name only.

“The issue with it, like attendance, is five days ago no one from Milwaukee knew we were going to be here,” said Milwaukee Bucks head coach Doc Rivers. “No one from Oklahoma knew they were going to be here. It’s tough.”

That was felt in the arena during the semifinals. A year after Lakers fans took over the building to cheer on their favorite team just a few hours away from Los Angeles, year two of The Cup featured crowd lights that were dimmed when the arena opened to cover up any worried-about attendance issues.

But the seats were mostly full — attendance was in fact officially higher than the year prior, even if the 17-18,000 fans the Sports Business Journal reported attended still didn’t fill the approximately 20,000-seat T-Mobile arena. The issue was that the fans who were there didn’t seem all that invested in the outcome, but were more there to view the spectacle as neutral observers. The locals yelling “knight” during the national anthem all but confirmed they’d rather be watching the Golden Knights, but were just forced to sit in the same arena their local hockey team normally plays in. This left little sound in the gym during games other than the squeaks of sneakers that were easily heard even in the upper bowl.

The stadium reacted to Giannis Antetokounmpo’s game-saving block to defeat the Atlanta Hawks as a regular home crowd does to a first-quarter three from their team as fans are still finding their seat. That neutrality takes away from the incredible basketball being played.

Photo by David Dow/NBAE via Getty Images

The on-court product has been great throughout the entire tournament. The cash incentive hasn’t hurt — “everyone wants free money,” as Thunder wing Jalen Williams succinctly put it after his team defeated the Houston Rockets — but the cash prize isn’t the only reason why the event has worked.

Not every good basketball game ever played had money tied to the outcome. The love of competition and the desire to prove you’re better than your opponent is what every great game has in common, whether played in a driveway or in front of thousands. As we’ve seen in recent iterations of the All-Star game, money alone doesn’t buy that.

The Bucks are an example of this. Their four highest-paid players have combined for over a billion dollars in career earnings. What is an extra $500k going to do? Having a trophy on the line is a different story.

“If [money] is all that motivates you, you won’t go far,” Antetokounmpo said. “For me, it’s creating more art, creating more moments that I can remember, creating more legacy for myself and something my kids can look back to and say, ‘Damn, my dad was a bad MFer.’”

The Bucks (14-11), like the other three teams that made it to Vegas, had something different to prove. They got off to a horrible 2-8 start, but have turned it completely around and are poised to be a top team in the conference after being left for dead.

“I just wanted to win The Cup,” Rivers said. “Outside Milwaukee, a lot of people thought, ‘What’s going on [with the Bucks]?’ I don’t think one person inside thought that at all. We just believed it was going to click. It was going to happen.”

The Thunder (20-5) are on the other end of the spectrum. They’ve shown to be an inner circle title contender all season, are running away with the Western Conference, and the young upstarts are using this tournament as a dress rehearsal for what they have reason to hope will be their first of many extended playoff runs as a group. They are proving to the league — and maybe more importantly, to themselves — that they belong in this environment.

“It’s a great test and a great challenge to kind of figure out where we are and how we play in this type of situation,” said Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault. “We’re going to learn from it one way or another.”

This has all made for great competition, which can’t be said for either of the NBA’s other two midseason tentpoles. The Christmas Day games are being overshadowed by the NFL, and feature more teams and players that are known for who they used to be and not who they are now. Relying on past stars and not pushing new teams or markets continues to be an issue for the league. Meanwhile, there’s no motivation for players in the All-Star Game to put their best foot forward knowing that the playoffs are right around the corner. The league has circumvented both of those problems with the NBA Cup. The games and outcomes matter to those participating in a way the All-Star and Christmas Day showcases usually do not.

But while the NBA has figured out how to get its stakeholders to care more and compete harder, which has almost inarguably created a better product than your average Tuesday night regular season game, the issue is that the outside world hasn’t gotten invested yet. Not even in the city it’s being played in, where a cab driver was shocked that any sportswriter had traveled all the way from Cleveland for this.

There’s also an issue with getting the target audience that this event was made for to care. Several of my colleagues across the SB Nation NBA network were more than happy that their team didn’t advance. Even our Bucks site published an editorial simply hoping that none of their players get hurt in a “meaningless” 83rd game that won’t count toward the regular season standings. If the league hasn’t gotten my fellow basketball blog boys to care about this, they probably have a ways to go with the casual observer. And for evidence the NBA knows as much, look no further than their efforts to turn a fairly anodyne quote Rivers gave in response to my question about what The Cup meant for his team into an advertisement that the league’s showcase had turned his would-be contender’s season around:

There’s no easy solution to fan apathy other than to just keep playing competitive games and hoping the public will catch on as they are continually exposed to them. The NBA Cup will always be made up and convoluted, even if it eventually catches on more than it has in year two. It’s some hybrid of the NBA Playoffs and March Madness without the real, historical stakes that make either of those things as good as they are.

But as the very existence of Las Vegas proves, sometimes a hollow replica is good enough to get people to come as long as there is a fun atmosphere around it. The NBA has succeeded in creating at least that with The Cup. The next challenge will be finding ways to get fans as invested as the players and coaches participating, and avoid looking like the NBA is just the latest mostly washed-up star to seek one last cash grab with a residency in the Nevada desert.