The 73rd season of the NBA basketball championship begins on October 24 with the first games of a regular season which this year will be different from those played in the past. After the first week of matches, a parallel tournament called In-Season Tournament will begin on November 3rd which will still contribute to the championship ranking, but will be played in a different format; after about a month of games (scheduled every Tuesday and Friday) a final played in Las Vegas will decide a winning team.
The In-Season tournament was introduced to try to revive both the competition between teams and the interest of the public in a usually interlocutory period for the regular season, where the matches do not mean much and are still far from being spectacular or at least decisive to qualify for the playoffs. To compose it, the NBA also took inspiration from European football cups. The thirty teams in the championship will in fact be divided into six groups of five: at the end of the group stage, the first-placed teams in each group and the two best second-placed teams will qualify for the direct elimination phase, which will be played with single matches and from the semi-finals onwards. always in Las Vegas.
The quarter-finals and semi-finals will also be counted as regular season games, and this should be an incentive for the teams, given that those who play in them will have more opportunities to accumulate victories useful to qualify for the playoffs, compared to the teams eliminated in the groups. The winning team will also receive a half-million dollar prize, while its players will be distributed $7.5 million in individual prizes.
(NBA)
The tournament was announced in the summer and the first reactions from the fans but also from the players were not so enthusiastic. Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors had, for example, joked about the fact that the NBA had initially promised a prize of 1 million dollars to the winner, which was then halved. Green also spoke about the fact that many teams start the regular season without ambition and that therefore it doesn’t seem to make much sense to involve them in another competition parallel to the championship, where their commitment will have no reason to be different. But the tournament will also be something new for everyone, given that there has never been anything like it before, and it can be perfected in future editions.
As for the rest of the actual season, the NBA will officially begin on the Italian night between 24 and 25 October with the first match of the reigning champions, the Denver Nuggets of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, against the Los Angeles Lakers of LeBron James, who at 38 will play his twenty-first season in the NBA.
Meanwhile, the last preparation games are continuing this week, which as per tradition are played in the so-called “non-NBA markets”, i.e. North American and foreign cities that do not participate in the championship with a team. This year, games were played in Hawaii, Las Vegas, Seattle, Birmingham (Alabama), Tulsa (Oklahoma) and in Canada, Vancouver and Montreal, while abroad the NBA organized games in Abu Dhabi and Madrid. The championship will also return abroad during the current season, with matches scheduled in Mexico City and Paris between November and January.
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2023-10-19 08:07:22
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