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Winning the 2023 NBA Cup is not one of the career accomplishments listed at the top of LeBron James’ Basketball Reference page, but winning MVP of that year’s competition is. It’s a paradox that reflects the general uncertainty around the in-season tournament, which crowned its second champion this week. Players, fans and media are still feeling out how Cup glory fits in the broader NBA narrative. For now, the magic of the Cup is watching its meaning negotiated in real time.

The league, which introduced the tournament in response to TV ratings woes, regular season doldrums and a perceived lack of parity, has deployed various marketing tricks to signify meaning: a new trophy, special courts, a final four in Las Vegas. To convince the players, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver dangled the only carrot in his bag: money. A half-million in cash — $514,971 was this year’s exact sum — seemed at least to motivate the journeyman class. But the true measure of the Cup was always going to be the buy-in from the league’s corner lockers, which — as Silver has learned from his flagging All-Star game — either isn’t for sale or he can’t afford it.

To make his pet project matter, Silver needs narrative juice, which is something only history, or at least a sense of it, can provide. Fortunately, the Cup final between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Milwaukee Bucks — a cruel joke on advertisers who hoped it would feature larger markets — offered genuine intrigue. The Thunder are young but no longer precocious; they have expectations. Winning the in-season tournament would herald their arrival and anoint Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. On the Bucks side, the winner-take-all final gave Damian Lillard his first shot at hardware — who knows, maybe the only one he’d get. Giannis Antetokounmpo just turned 30, and his NBA future looks increasingly abstract, but he’s also hunting a third MVP. Doc Rivers could reverse a personal trend of infamous elimination-game defeat.

Under these circumstances, the Bucks turned in their best game of the season Tuesday night, and the Thunder their worst. Antetokounmpo battered the Thunder, the league’s toughest defense coming into the game, until they caved; Gilgeous-Alexander, on the other hand, started quietly, then faded. They were performances befitting a Game 7 — one hero rising to the occasion, the other shrinking from it.

In the stands, it was another story. No one inside T-Mobile Arena would have mistaken the atmosphere for an NBA Finals — or, for that matter, even a first-round playoff game. Celebrity row was headlined by Ray Allen (who starred for both teams) and Oscar Robertson, not Beyoncé and Spike Lee. The crowd, a declassé mix of casuals, traveling homers and Golden Knights season ticket-holders, was muted even when the game was close. There were commemorative towels on every seat; I didn’t see a single one waved.

And yet, if you knew where to look, something just as intense as a Finals game was unfolding. This is one thing I can report from my $75 seat in the nosebleeds: Before the start of the fourth quarter, Antetokounmpo dragged a folding chair in front of the bench and sat down facing his teammates, then implored them, gesturing intently in a 30-second speech, to seize the minutes ahead. It looked a lot like this.

Participants were still triangulating the Cup’s significance after the game. Antetokounmpo cavorted with the trophy, but made clear he saw it more as stepping-stone than infinity stone. “Job’s not finished,” he said. The Bucks didn’t pop champagne. Meanwhile, the Thunder’s Jalen Williams tried to downplay the defeat by framing it in the shallowest possible terms. “I mean, obviously, that’s a lot of money we’re playing for,” Williams said. “You also have to know in a sense, too, it doesn’t really count for our record, right?” Seated alongside him, Gilgeous-Alexander laughed, but it sounded like sour grapes.

Whether a Cup changes the story for any of these characters depends on what happens next. The Lakers hung a banner after winning last year’s in-season tournament. But they still fired Darvin Ham at season’s end. This year’s Cup likely did not redeem Doc Rivers from the trio of blown 3-1 leads that haunt his legacy — though it may ease some of the public maligning of his coaching. And Lillard’s first trophy notably did not elicit questions about what it means to finally…. Still: With a chance to win something, Dame brought it. So did Antetokounmpo, baring his teeth as James did last year against the happy-to-be-here Pelicans.

So far, the two teams who have won NBA Cup finals are the ones who saw most clearly what it is: An oddly conceived and highly contrived competition that nevertheless delivers, in the end, a winner. All the Cup criticisms, then — the garish courts, the tacky sponsor, the wonky format; “it doesn’t really count for our record” — only underscore its true worth. Who, the Cup asks, are the maniacs crazy enough to want to win this silly competition of dubious meaning — to take it off the other guy? That’s plenty reason to keep watching, until a sense of history sets in.