Group play in the Emirates NBA Cup opened on Friday, October 30 — the fourth edition of the in-season tournament the NBA folded into its calendar in 2023, and the first whose final will not be played in Las Vegas.
All 30 teams are in. They are drawn into six groups of five, three in each conference, and each team plays the other four in its group once. That is 60 games, spread across seven dates: October 30, then November 6, 13, 20, 24, 25 and 27.
How a team gets to Indianapolis
The six group winners advance, joined by one wild card per conference — the group runner-up with the best record. From there it is single elimination.
The quarterfinals, on Friday, December 4, and Saturday, December 5, are played in home markets, hosted by the higher seeds, with the wild card traveling. The semifinals, on December 8 and 9, also go to the higher seed's arena. The final is on Friday, December 11, streamed by Prime Video.
For the three previous editions, the last four teams all flew to Las Vegas for the semifinals and the final. The league has kept the group formula unchanged and moved only the ending — and it moved it somewhere far smaller.
The 22 teams that do not reach the knockout rounds each fill the gap with two additional regular-season games.
A 1928 gym with 9,100 seats
Hinkle Fieldhouse, on the Butler University campus in Indianapolis, opened in 1928 as the largest basketball arena in the country, with 15,000 seats. The first game there was played on March 7, 1928, before construction was finished; the building was dedicated that December.
A $36 million renovation in 2014 brought capacity down to 9,100 and added chairback seats, a video scoreboard and wider concourses, while repointing roughly 282,000 bricks and replacing more than 9,700 windowpanes. The fieldhouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987, and it is where the film "Hoosiers" staged its championship game.
Announcing the venue at the end of June, Kelly Flatow, the NBA's head of global events, said the building offered "a special setting to capture the excitement and drama" of the championship. The league said it wanted the Cup final on "distinctive stages that honor the sport's history."
What is at stake
The prize money is paid per player rather than per team, and it starts at the quarterfinals. Players on the winning roster earn $530,933 each and the runners-up $212,373, according to Yahoo Sports' tally of this year's pool; losing quarterfinalists take home $53,093 apiece.
The New York Knicks arrive as defending champions, having beaten the San Antonio Spurs in last season's final — the same matchup, with the same result, as that year's NBA Finals.
Reporting from NBA.com, Butler University Athletics, Yahoo Sports and the Associated Press.
