The NBA is changing things up for next season

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I've burdened you with my infatuation as much as I would like. There is for that coming tomorrow night at about 10.15 a live special Adam Gold Show on YouTube with my friend Jay. We'll talk about week two and a little bit about week one of the Premier League.

That's my way of promoting that and getting into this. One of the good things about the Premier League and all the European leagues and actually we're seeing this now in Major League Soccer are the in-season competitions that are separate from league play. So in England they have the FA Cup or the EFL Cup. Here in MLS we have League's Cup. Lionel Messi has taken Inter Miami from the bottom of the MLS standings and they're horrible to the finals of the League's Cup on Saturday night in Nashville and I am here for that. I am here for these in-season events and the NBA is starting theirs.

It's called the League Cup. My friend Brendan Whitted, our NBA analyst, is joining us here at H.U. Cosell on Twitter. I'm sorry, on X.

It's not Twitter anymore. So your thoughts on, broad thoughts on what the NBA Cup is and maybe could be? It feels like a waste of time.

If I'm being honest, it feels like a huge waste of time. We're going to throw hands like Max Crosby and Cam Akers did in LA today. I will never understand. This is how I know I was not built for playing football. Somebody wearing a helmet is never going to entice me into balling my fist up and then repeatedly smashing me.

Even at my angriest, that wouldn't make any sense to me. At least hit them with a body shot or something. Anyway, that's beside the point. I've been getting on this soccer thing. I'm a lot earlier to my learning curve about soccer. I enjoy it. I'm still getting offsides and stuff like that.

I'm picking it up. From what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, the reason they have these in-season tournaments is because some of these teams wouldn't play each other otherwise. It's a nice opportunity to compare and contrast some of the talent level. Wouldn't it be cool if these teams played one another and that sort of a thing. NBA doesn't really work that way. Pretty much everybody plays everybody. I know some teams, I think a team might miss out on another squad or something like that.

But everybody plays everybody. There's 82 games. More games doesn't seem like the answer to the regular season for the NBA, for a sport that is excoriated for undervaluing what that regular season means.

Let me just step in here. These are not additional games. Actually, there might be three additional games for two teams. Because I do believe that when we get to the quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals, they will be outside of the actual 82 game schedule. But these four games in group play, they're cup games and they are regular season games that just act as cup games for a different set of standings. The reasoning behind an FA Cup or an EFL Cup, now it's got a sponsor called Carabao Cup. The reasoning behind that, frankly, I don't know.

I really don't. But I know the FA Cup has been around for more than 100 years. And I know EFL Cup has been around for a long time as well.

And those matches, which are all completely separate from the season, and actually screw up the regular season, they're not all well received early. But once these clubs get to a certain point in the knockout rounds of these, they matter. And by that point, we're pretty much all done with the lower division clubs.

We're done with Tier 4. The teams playing in League 1 or League 2 of the English football system, which is the fourth tier of soccer, League 2, they're pretty much all gone. And all the teams left are all playing each other anyway in Premier League matches. So we're just cutting right to the chase here with the NBA.

I think the biggest thing that they have to overcome is not the familiarity. It's the fact that people need to be patient and let this thing work. Because I do think that putting these games that don't have any, I'm not saying that the regular season game doesn't have meaning, but in an NBA season when you play 82, there are a lot of teams that don't give a rat's rear end about a game on November 17th. And this will add just a little meaning to games in the beginning of the season.

Notice they're all November into December, and it's not February into March. I think in time it will be good. So you said one thing, you want people to be patient. I genuinely don't know what about sports is making you more patient.

That's true, I get it. The second thing that they're obviously going to have to deal with, and this has been a larger issue for a while, is loan management stuff. Because you're talking about November early games, and those are the games a lot of times you'll have guys kind of back to backs and that sort of thing. Sydney, prophylactically, they've been doing that with Kawhi for a while. They've done it at times with Embiid. If you're coming off of an injury or have a rough injury history, they'll just do that before the season even starts. So I wonder how this will affect that as well.

I don't have a problem with it. I think that getting fans to buy in is one thing, but that's secondary. It's getting the players to buy in. And we've seen when there isn't a ton on line. I'm specifically thinking about the All-Star game, where people want to see you guys play.

Yeah, you don't have to play 94 feet, you don't have to strap up like that. But people do want to see a little bit more than they've seen the last few years. And the players, regardless of if they've added a financial incentive or not, have all been like, eh, this is my vacation. Right.

Right? I wonder if that will carry over into this. Because there isn't, I don't know how many people are going to be flashing, you know, you know how Clay had the four.

He was throwing up the four versus Devin Booker. I don't know if he's going to be flashing their end season cup rings at anybody. Like, haha, gotcha. You know what I mean? I don't know. To me, it's about, are you going to be able to get the players to buy in?

All right. Because the counter to that is this, if some of the Stars want to do load management, and if the teams want to treat those games with load management, and that might happen in group play, it could be randomly scheduled, or it could happen when we get to the quarterfinals, which will be the fourth and fifth of December, and the semifinals in Las Vegas, the seventh and the ninth of December. If we get to that point, and the Stars want to load manage, okay, I don't think Adam Silver would be very happy, but either way, so maybe Orlando wins.

And for teams that are not necessarily real contenders, to lift a trophy? I just think, I think it will be really good to have something like that, look, do I expect it to be enormous in year one? Probably will be bigger in year one than in year two, to be honest. But I think if we allow this to get to year ten, now I think we're talking about something that is a bigger deal, and maybe there will be more money involved in it for players.

But look, I don't think it can hurt. How did you feel about the play-in tournament when it started? I liked it. I thought, I maybe foolishly thought after the Dallas Mavericks did what they did at the end of last season, that it would prevent people from wanting to tank. Like if you had an opportunity, I thought it brought more teams into the fold for the playoffs, and I liked that. Like to me, that made a lot more sense when you're talking about, hey, we don't want to see the last two weeks of the season just be dreadful. Hey, if we can include more teams into being able to get to that play-in situation, maybe that'll keep a few more teams to the fold.

I think they did a pretty good job with that. I hope you're right. As a Hornets fan, it'd be nice to raise a banner. If it's an end-season tournament, I'll take anything at this point.

So that would be really nice. And maybe we're talking about, because here's the Hornets group, by the way, for what it's worth. Washington, Miami, Milwaukee, and the Knicks. Their first cup game, it's also a regular season game, November 10th at Washington. Later that week, the 14th, they're home against Miami. The 17th, they're home against Milwaukee. And then the 28th, they're at the Knicks. Six groups, winners of each group advance to the quarterfinals.

Next two best teams also advance to the quarterfinals for eight. Who knows? Maybe the Hornets, maybe they treat those games seriously. And maybe we're looking at all also Rams that play for this, but I think it's cool. It's certainly different. So I like a little different.

I'm down for it. I think I just have seen all of the issues and the hurdles as opposed to how well it can go, which is indicative of my general outlook on life. And generally speaking, you make some fantastic points. My thing is always about player motivation.

And if they're not motivated behind it, it's going to fall grossly on its face. You said the first Hornets game in the cup is November 10th at Washington. Tell you what, I'm going to try to make that game just to see what the atmosphere is like, and I'll let you know what the shake is. It's going to be, well, all right, I'm writing it down. Maybe we'll do a live cut-in.

Look, I'm all for something that is a little bit new and different, and I don't think it detracts from the season. Let me ask you one quick, I mean, I don't know how quick this is going to be, but so James Harden, for whatever reason in Shanghai at a camp that had his name on the court. I don't know why he brought it up, but he decided that Daryl Morey is a liar and he doesn't trust him and he'll never be part of an organization that Daryl Morey is a part of again. All right, again, I don't know why it came up at this camp with a bunch of kids in Shanghai, but my question is, why did you opt in to the final year of your contract with Philadelphia and Daryl Morey is running the team?

So I'm assuming that these are kind of, that this is unraveled, that this is, you know, we're way far down in where this whole timeline is. I'll tell you back just a little bit really quickly when he, and I think we were, me and BG were on the show when he opted out of his deal. He was due, I think about $40 million for last year, opted out and then signed a one-in-one deal where he has one year under contract with another year of player option at around $65 million. So at the time it was, this is kind of weird because if he was going to opt out, the general thinking was he'd be opting out for a long term deal, not a two year deal, particularly given his injury history and how old he is. What ended up happening was it kind of, then the reporting is, hey, he took less money so that PJ Tucker could get there.

It's like, okay. And I read that and I think I even said that as, hey, this guy's serious about winning. A guy who's commitment to winning, commitment to conditioning and commitment to all things that were not specifically James Harden has no question. This is the year he came in shape, had a phenomenal regular season by the way, led the league in assists, 20 and 10, was the point guard, did everything they needed. Sure, they came up short in the playoffs, but he got them two wins.

And if your number two gets you two wins in the playoffs, in the playoff series, that's pretty good. But they failed again. And so now we're seeing this come out that, hey, maybe he thought he was going to get made whole about that money that he kind of gave back on whether or not it was going to be circumvented through like to get around the salary cap.

I don't know. There's been reports about that or whether it was, hey, I was going to sign this long term deal now and now they're kind of reneging on it. Or whether or not it was, hey, you said you'd trade me to the place that I wanted to go if this didn't work out, whatever one of those probably three scenarios had occurred. And now he's salty. And now camp is about to open up and you've got to rev up how discontent you are because you need to make a fuss. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and he needs to make a fuss so that he can get to presumably the Clippers. That's been kind of the team that's been tossed out, but he can't just lay low and just chill. He's not doing the Dave Lillard route.

Lillard was kind of like hinting at it, like, hey, if I did go, here's where I'd want to go. Harden is very much like, get me up out of here, which I mean, honestly, the guy I keep thinking about is Joel Embiid, right? You had Ben Simmons first and then that just turned into a dumpster fire.

You replace with Harden, who plays well, and now immediately jettisons himself out. You had to play through the process, by the way, off jump and with a lot of losing and the best teammates you had, Jimmy Butler, they chose to buy his hair. So I'm telling you right now, start the clock for him being saying, hey, it's been real feeling. It's been super real.

I got I got to get by and go. Was the process a success? I think it's a little bit difficult to tell because they kind of stopped it halfway through. You know, I mean, like they started it and then they're like now they also had a lot of misses. They had a lot of misses. Markelle Fultz was a really tough miss.

You get Tatum there instead who goes later in that draft. Maybe this entire thing opens up completely differently. So there was a lot of missing. Their whole premise was we're going to get to the top of the draft a whole bunch. The only problem is you have to hit on on more of those than they did. They hit on one. They hit on one. Ben Simmons was also a miss.

You and I disagree about that, too. We'll talk again very soon. Brennan Whitted at H.U. Cosell on Twitter, our NBA analyst. Thank you so much, sir. Appreciate it, man. Always.

You got it. Yeah. He and I agree. Disagree on Ben Simmons. Simmons is a miss.

Sorry. He was a miss twice. Ben Simmons was a miss when they drafted somebody who refused to shoot, who had the ball. And he was a miss when they still insisted on paying him that contract. Two misses. Two misses. Those were bad.