j4remi wrote:Chanel Bomber wrote:You add a trophy for the exact same pool of competitors (not the case for the FA cup), it will take away from the value of the NBA championship. It will be a consolation prize that NBA franchises can sell their fans on, besides for the consistently or recently successful.
If the Knicks ever win this tournament, James Dolan and MSG will sell it as a meaningful achievement and - if fans go along with it - it will inevitably release some of the pressure on winning a championship.
If the cup turns out to be meaningless, interest in the tournament will wane with time, and all this rollout will have proven unnecessary, and a damaging diversion from the league's actual problems.
The analogy to European soccer doesn't work because the leagues are structurally different. The NBA doesn't have the different tiers or the relegation system to make it make sense conceptually in the way that the FA Cup does.
A trophy isn't changing anything. Nobody's confusing an IST win for a NBA Championship. There's a vocal segment of fans that won't even count the Bubble Championship as a meaningfully equivalent accolade. The IST doesn't disrupt or hide any of the other issues with the league.
At worst, it's a contrived attempt to mimic stuff that works overseas and doesn't catch on. At best, it gives fans one more thing to be invested in during a long NBA season.
The European soccer analogy works for the simple concept of "no one is gullible enough to mistake a midseason tournament win for a NBA Championship equivalent." The devaluing NBA Titles thing just doesn't have much support IMO. Is there an actual comparison in some sporting event that you can point to where a championship meant less because of midseason prizes?
I don't think any fans are really going to be going wild about a cup win. Like J4remi said, a lot of fans don't even count the bubble championship as a real championship win, are they really going to be boasting a the IST cup? We don't even care about conference finals winners, a much harder feat.
Its just a fun tournament where players are playing a little harder to get their buddies at the end of the bench some extra money. If anything, I hope the players over time don't take it as seriously and it turns into the all-star game. But being that it counts towards regular season W/L, I don't think that will happen.
I think the prize for winning should have a little more impact too since the teams playing in it are going to be facing harder opponents and since it affects regular season W/L, it could potentially impact playoff implications. Maybe the winner should get a higher seeding in the play-in tournament, like they are automatically the 7th seed or something (if they are the 7-10 seed).