Nobody knows if the NBA Cup will be there in 30 years.

Hell, no one knows what the world will look like in three decades, least of all the NBA.

Thirty years ago, who would have thought that a player would score 40,000 career points and play at an All-NBA level at almost 40 years old? And who knew, after the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, that more than three decades later, the league MVP would be won by a player born outside the United States for six consecutive seasons, from 2019 to 2024?

The league’s plans for the NBA Cup are long-term. He renamed the tournament the “tournament of the season,” designed a trophy and added a title sponsor for the event that began last season.

The NBA is invested – including a major promotional campaign featuring actors Michael Imperioli and Rosario Dawson and NBA stars including Steph Curry; NBA Cup courts designed specifically for each team (NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is admittedly a fan of colorful courts); and unique uniforms for home and road games.

MORE: The NBA Cup is here. We ranked the best matches of the group stage every night

The Emirates NBA Cup begins on Tuesday and the league is looking to build on a modicum of success from last season which ended with the Los Angeles Lakers beating the Indiana Pacers. Television audiences for the NBA Cup Finals averaged 4.58 million viewers and were the most-watched non-Christmas game since February 2018. It helped that it was the Lakers – with LeBron James and Anthony Davis – and an exciting Pacers team led by burgeoning star Tyrese. Haliburton.

As the 67-match event wrapped up the group stage and headed into the round of 16, quarterfinals, semifinals and final, teams wanted to win. And there is financial reward, including nearly $515,000 this season for each player on the NBA Cup championship team.

Refresher: The 15 Eastern teams were divided into three groups of five and the 15 Western teams were divided into three groups of five. Teams from the same group will play each other once – two home games, two away games on Tuesdays and Fridays, starting on Tuesday and ending on December 3.

Four teams from each conference advance to the quarterfinals – the winner of each group plus one wild card (a team that finished second in its group and won the tiebreaker) from each conference. The semifinals will take place on December 14 and the championship match (East winner vs. West winner) will take place on December 17 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. All games except the title game count toward a team’s overall win-loss record.

The league made minor changes to the NBA Cup, such as excluding overtime from point differential and tiebreakers from total points. And there are some intriguing groups: Denver, Dallas, New Orleans, Golden State and Memphis in Group C in the West, and New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Charlotte in Group A in the East.

The NBA is looking to create a meaningful early-season event that can generate interest after the World Series and before Christmas as the NFL and college football seasons unfold – and with games from the evenings when there are traditionally few high-level football matches.

Eleven months ago, during the NBA Cup Finals, Silver said: “I want to thank all the players in the league and the coaches, of course, the teams, for embracing this new concept. I know that “It doesn’t come without challenges. There’s no doubt we’re learning some things this time around.”

Traditions are not born overnight. Or over the course of two seasons. Now we can judge TV audiences, ticket sales, fan interest and competition between games in real time.

But the true measure of the success – or lack thereof – of the NBA Cup will be revealed in 10, 15, 20 or 30 years.

Follow Jeff Zillgitt on social media @JeffZillgitt

This article was originally published on USA TODAY: NBA hopes in-season Cup becomes treasured tradition