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USA Today Sports Media Group
USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Cory Woodroof

The new NBA In-Season Tournament could be fun but has some fans totally confused

NBA Adam Silver Richard Jefferson ESPN NFL

On Saturday night, the NBA unveiled its new In-Season Tournament, and the fan response was … decidedly mixed and featured a lot of confusion!

The new In-Season Tournament will take place in November and December and will basically make the beginning of the season matter more… if teams buy into the idea that the brand-new NBA Cup is something that they’d actually want to win.

Yes, the NBA Cup is now a thing. It’s not the hallowed Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy that a team gets if they win the NBA Finals, rather a smaller trophy that a team can win in December in Las Vegas apparently… and then go right back to playing in the regular season. 

We’ll let NBA veteran Richard Jefferson take it from here. Don’t worry if all of this goes over your head; you’re not alone on that.

Here are how all the groups break down for the tournament.

At the least, it’s not Jefferson’s fault that his explanation video got NBA fans so confused as to how this all works and what the ultimate goal of this tournament is. He deserves credit for trying to make this format seem exciting.

Will this make the earliest games in the NBA season just a bit more interesting? Probably. Does this format make a ton of sense right now? Not…not really? Are the players and fans going to embrace this? Maybe?

Is there really a point to any of this in the grand scheme of things? We genuinely have no idea. Will it at least be fun? Golly, we hope so.

Maybe this will work, and you’ll find NBA fans out there who are excited for what’s coming. However, there is some stark confusion out there right now that’s probably not going away anytime soon.

Feature image courtesy of ESPN.

The internet had some thoughts.

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