2024 NBA Cup Biggest Winners and Losers: Giannis Antetokounmpo, SGA and More

The 2024 NBA Cup is officially complete, and the Milwaukee Bucks are your in-season tournament champions.

Behind a stifling defensive effort, the Bucks won the title game on Tuesday, 97-81.

And now that the tournament is wrapped, we have plenty of winners and losers from this year’s affair to discuss.

The biggest on either side of that line can be found below.

As you’ll see, there are plenty of wins for the NBA, its teams and its players from the NBA Cup, but it’s certainly not perfect.

For one thing, intermingling the Cup’s schedule with the regular season is a little confusing. The in-season tournament games would feel a little bigger if they were all confined to one portion of the year.

The NBA could even have some nights (and days) with a March Madness-like schedule. Have 20-plus teams on the slate, stagger the start times and get some good studio analysis crews to shepherd us through the entire thing.

The courts could be toned down a bit, too. There’s nothing wrong with wanting unique floors to set these games apart from the regular season, but the deep reds, blues and greens pretty much write the memes for us.

Subtle tweaks like that, as well as a more concerted effort to address flopping and market lesser-known teams and stars (both inside and out of the tournament) could help the league better address an issue it was targeting when it conceived of the Cup in the first place.

The NBA has never had more skill and talent, but TV ratings aren’t reflecting that this season.

The casual fans haven’t totally bought into this new tournament yet, but it’s way too early to give up on it.

Whether or not you care about the NBA Cup individually, it would have been hard to watch this year’s games without seeing a little boost in intensity from the players.

Sure, there’s extra money on the line. And that has to feel even more tangible for the teams that made the knockout round.

But even during pool play, most of the Cup games felt a little more intense, at least relative to what we’ve grown used to from November and December contests in recent history.

To the extent that was one of the league’s goals for this event, I think it can cautiously check that box.

We’re only in the second year of what’s a pretty ambitious experiment, and the intensity is already growing. That bodes well for future Cups.

By now, almost everyone knows about the financial incentives that have come with this tournament.

Players who make it to the quarterfinals get an extra $50,000, semifinalists get $100,000, losers of the championship game get $200,000, and the champions get $500,000 each.

To players like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard, both of whom are making north of $48 million this season and are under contract for well over $100 million, that extra half-million isn’t life-changing.

But for players who are on the league’s fringes, may be out of it soon or are just playing on minimum contracts, that kind of money is huge.

In a very literal sense, the players on those smaller contracts lost out on some serious cash.

This is sort of a cousin of the last “winner,” but the use of point differential as a tie-breaker has helped keep Cup games competitive further into the fourth quarter.

In one group-play matchup between the Orlando Magic and New York Knicks, it added an entirely new layer of interest to what would’ve otherwise been a blowout.

The Magic were in danger of losing by a gargantuan number, but they knew they needed to keep it below 37 to advance to the knockout round. So, instead of folding, sending everyone to the bench and accepting a possible loss of 40-plus points, they fought on (and did indeed make the knockout round).

Heck, this wrinkle might even make sense outside the Cup. The Ringer’s Raheem Palmer explained, while offering some suggestions on how to “fix” the NBA:

“Point differential should determine home court advantage, not record,” he wrote. “Also home court in the playoffs gets 5 of the potential 7 games in a postseason series. You want to take off one night in December because it doesn’t matter, well it does now.”

It would be a smart and not-so-subtle way to boost the competitiveness in games throughout the season (and outside the Cup).

Just about a year ago, a pair of seemingly up-and-coming teams punched their tickets to Las Vegas for the inaugural in-season tournament semifinals.

The New Orleans Pelicans were there with Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram. The Indiana Pacers rode the hot hand of Tyrese Haliburton all the way to the championship game.

Neither won what is now called the Cup, but those early runs from New Orleans and Indiana felt like borderline arrivals.

Well, both teams are now on their way to the draft lottery (though the East is bad enough for the Pacers to get back into the play-in range). And they went a combined 1-7 in Cup games in 2024-25.

Perhaps it’s further evidence that just about anyone can get hot at the right time and earn a little extra money, but young teams such as the Houston Rockets and Atlanta Hawks are certainly hoping they don’t follow in the Pelicans’ and Pacers’ footsteps.

Speaking of which…

The Atlanta Hawks and Houston Rockets couldn’t win their respective semifinal matchups against the Milwaukee Bucks and Oklahoma City Thunder in Las Vegas, but they’re still winners for this exercise.

Both teams rely heavily on young cores that benefited from the experience of these high-pressure games.

Houston has Alperen Şengün, Jalen Green, Jabari Smith Jr., Amen Thompson, Tari Eason, Reed Sheppard and Cam Whitmore (when he’s healthy) in its rotation. All are 23 and under.

The Hawks, meanwhile, are playing Jalen Johnson, Dyson Daniels, rookie Zaccharie Risacher and Onyeka Okongwu big minutes. They’re all 24 or younger.

All of the above helped force the league to give them more national TV exposure. And if they keep their respective teams on this upward trajectory, they could be part of the solution to bring fans back to the league en masse.

Yeah, this is a bit of a stretch.

The Thunder made it all the way to the championship game and finished with a 5-2 record in Cup contests, but they laid an egg on national TV on Tuesday.

OKC and Milwaukee were the only teams on. They got the full-fledged ABC treatment, with plenty of advertising and buildup.

And with the Vegas lights shining on them, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had 21 points on 24 shots. Jalen Williams had 18 points on 20 shots. The entire team shot a woeful 33.7 percent from the field and 15.6 percent from deep.

They had almost as many turnovers (10) as assists (13). And their point total (81) was 18 shy of their previous season low.

On the bright side, the championship game doesn’t count toward their record. And they’ll surely be in the hunt for the West’s top seed the rest of this season. But they may not get another shot at a showcase like this until the playoffs.

When the Bucks started the season 2-8, NBA fandom’s collective hand was hovering over the panic button.

Now, after capping a 7-0 run through the Cup, the Bucks are 14-11. They annihilated the Thunder. Khris Middleton is slowly working his way back into the rotation, and Giannis Antetokounmpo has stormed back into MVP conversations.

Giannis had 26 points, 19 rebounds, 10 assists, three blocks and two steals to help end OKC’s Cup dreams. And even though those numbers won’t count toward his regular-season averages, the impression could last in the minds of fans and media members for months.

And for a team and players with eyes on a bigger prize, winning this tournament could generate enough confidence to bury that slow start altogether.