Candice Ward-USA TODAY Sports
For starters, we could change up the teams who participate in the NBA Cup to make things more interesting and give the event a more global flair.
What we’re proposing is all 30 NBA teams compete for the NBA Cup… along with two wild-card teams. One of those wild-card spots can go to whoever is leading the G League standings at the cut-off date, and the other can go to the reigning champion of an overseas competition, like Euroleague, China’s CBA or Australia’s NBL.
Ideally, we’d go with the reigning Euroleague champion, which might actually be the NBA Europe champ eventually (if rumors about the NBA starting a European league to compete with Euroleague are to be believed).
That would set up more exciting matchups that we wouldn’t get to see on a regular basis. Would anyone be interested in a Real Madrid vs. Boston Celtics game, for example? Or how about Panathinaikos vs. Boston? The Greek club is the reigning Euroleague champion, after all, and currently boasts a squad of known former NBA players like Cedi Osman, Kendrick Nunn, Juancho Hernangomez, Omer Yurtseven and Jerian Grant, as well as Olympic basketball tournament breakout star Mathias Lessort.
Now that would be an exciting matchup, and it would take place early on in the NBA Cup in our suggested format, giving fans something to tune into in the early portion of the tournament, which is currently an uninteresting group stage.
