The Emirates Cup Might Ruin Suns, NBA Playoffs

The Emirates NBA Cup might ruin the playoffs. The reason? It’s all professional soccer’s fault. 

I don’t hate the NBA‘s in-season tournament. In fact, the Emirates Cup and the courts and the basketball and the trophy and the fact that some of these teams hang banners (OK, maybe not the banner thing) but all of it actually is an attempt to make basketball in November and December more exciting. And I am all for that. 

In fact, I actually think it’s something that basketball has needed to do for decades. 

But there is one major flaw to it, and that flaw comes from professional soccer. 

Let me explain. 

How Soccer Could Ruin Emirates Cup

The group play portion of the Emirates Cup is actually a carbon copy of what professional soccer leagues do with their in-season tournaments. And group play makes sense. You can’t have all 30 teams play in a fair way to wind up moving into a knockout round, semifinal and a final of a tournament without a format like this. And the six groups of five teams makes total sense for the 30-team league. 

Round-robin play isn’t the issue. It’s in point differential, something that soccer uses called goal differential, to determine tiebreakers in their group play.

Soccer doesn’t have this problem, but in the NBA, the game is fast and physical. And one minute at the end of a game, trying to go back and forth, trying to make a lead bigger or smaller, can actually have terrible longterm implications for your basketball team. 

In theory, point differential shouldn’t be a problem. But in practice, it really is. 

Take a game late in the 4th quarter where a team is down 20 points in. Starters remain in because the team with the lead wants to expand their point differential. The team that’s losing keeps their starters in because they want to decrease their point differential. 

The problem occurs with starters playing minutes they typically wouldn’t with a game in hand. Additional injuries can happen to stars of these teams, and that’s problematic in a league that’s already suffering from a magnitude of injuries that has hurt the play already. Kevin Durant, Chet Holmgren, Paolo Banchero, are among the names in the league out for major periods of time. 

The league can’t afford to have this fun little in-season tournament cost them stars throughout the regular season and potentially, in a worst case scenario, into the playoffs. 

Why would you risk it on something that is fairly meaningless outside of a little extra money and a banner that nobody wants you to hang? 

When You Try too Hard in Emirates Cup

Take Tuesday’s Suns Jazz game, for example. 

The Suns were leading by 11 points with about 1:15 to go. In most cases, you would remove your starters. In fact, the Suns had removed their starters until the Jazz cut the lead within that eleven range. 

Devin Booker checked back in late in the 4th and hit knees with Jordan Clarkson, and both look like they could potentially be seriously injured. It was a play that looked immensely dangerous for a Suns team that is already missing Durant. If Booker had missed serious time because of that, the Phoenix Suns would be in a world of hurt. 

Is that what the NBA wants? Stars missing additional time? 

In fact, it wasn’t just Booker that wound up falling prey to this in the final minutes of that Suns-Jazz game. Bradley Beal also hurt his calf in the final minutes.

In the end, the Suns still won by eight. The Jazz didn’t accomplish much in that 1:15 other than five additional fouls and the Suns having to take two additional timeouts. 

Not only does the point differential tie breaker put players at risk, it makes the basketball worse in a game that is already over, slowing down the inevitable and turning it into a bad free throw and three-point shooting contest. 

The risk isn’t worth the reward. 

Remove the point differential. Come up with a different tiebreaker that makes more sense, that doesn’t cause a situation that is unnatural in a professional basketball game. 

I don’t want to see a team try to cut a lead from 25 to 18 just to sneak into the next round of the NBA cup when it could cost a team a star. I don’t want to see bad basketball in the final two minutes of a basketball game

Find a better solution and this Emirates Cup could actually be something that fans get behind with less risk to the future of their team and the ability to win in the playoffs. 

Thanks, soccer, for making this possible and putting NBA players in a worse position and NBA fans caught in between.