How the 2026 NBA Cup works, and which group games decide it
You turn on a Tuesday-night game in late November and the court looks different. The broadcast says "NBA Cup," and people keep bringing up point differential in a game that's already decided. It's a regular-season game. It also counts for something else.
Here's how the 2026 Emirates NBA Cup works, and which of its group games are worth your evening. Everything below comes from the NBA's published Cup rules, checked on November 11, 2026.
The short version
The NBA Cup is a tournament played inside the regular season. All 30 teams are split into six groups of five, three groups per conference. Each team plays the other four teams in its group once, two at home and two on the road. Eight teams advance to a single-elimination bracket, and the final is played on Friday, December 11, at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The final moves there from Las Vegas this year.
Group games aren't extra games. They're regular-season games that count in the standings like any other. The championship game is the one exception: it doesn't count toward the standings or anyone's season stats.
How teams land in a group
The groups were drawn on June 30. Within each conference, the 15 teams were sorted into five pots based on their 2025-26 records (the top three teams, the next three, and so on), and each group got one team from each pot. That's why every group has a mix of good and bad teams from last season, and why there's no group stacked with three contenders.
The dates
Group play runs on "Cup Nights": every Friday from October 30 through November 27, plus a Tuesday and Wednesday during Thanksgiving week.
| Stage | Dates | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Group play | Fri Oct 30; Fri Nov 6, 13, 20; Tue Nov 24; Wed Nov 25; Fri Nov 27 | Team arenas |
| Quarterfinals | Fri Dec 4 and Sat Dec 5 | Higher seed's arena |
| Semifinals | Tue Dec 8 and/or Wed Dec 9 | Higher seed's arena |
| Championship | Fri Dec 11 | Hinkle Fieldhouse, Indianapolis |
The NBA's prize pool goes to players on the eight knockout teams, and the share grows the further a team goes. The league hasn't published 2026 dollar amounts on its rules page, so I won't guess at them.
Who advances
Eight teams make the knockout rounds:
- Six group winners, the team with the best group record in each group.
- Two wild cards, one per conference: the second-place team with the best group record.
In each conference, the two group winners with the best records host the quarterfinals, and the best of them plays the wild card. Every knockout game before the final is in a team's home arena.
The tiebreakers, in order
With only four games each, ties are everywhere. A 3-1 record often isn't enough on its own. When teams finish level, the NBA breaks the tie in this order:
- Head-to-head record in group play
- Point differential in group play
- Total points scored in group play
- Record from the 2025-26 regular season
- Random drawing
Two details matter more than they look. First, head-to-head is skipped when comparing teams for a wild card, since those teams come from different groups and mostly haven't played each other. That race goes straight to point differential. Second, overtime doesn't count. A group game that goes to overtime is scored as a point differential of zero for both teams, and points scored in overtime are left out of the total points tiebreaker.
The part most fans miss: the margin is the game
In a normal regular-season game, a 20-point lead with four minutes left is over. Starters sit, the bench plays it out, and nobody cares whether it ends 118-98 or 118-110. In a Cup game, those eight points can be the difference between advancing and going home, because point differential is the second tiebreaker and the first one for wild cards.
That changes how teams play. A coach chasing a wild card has a reason to keep starters in and keep pressing late. The trailing team has a reason to keep fighting, because cutting a 25-point loss to 12 protects its own differential. What looks like garbage time on a Cup Night often isn't.
The overtime rule adds a strange wrinkle. A team that blew a lead and won in overtime gets nothing for the margin. A team that's well behind on differential would, in theory, rather win by 15 in regulation than win in overtime. Close regulation games that tie late are fine for the record and useless for the tiebreaker.
Why the last group night is the one to watch
Early Cup Nights matter, but they're mostly about record. By the final night, Friday, November 27, most of the group schedule is done and the math is mostly known. Teams know exactly what they need: a win, a win by a certain margin, or a loss by less than a certain margin. Some teams tip off already knowing whether they're playing for a group title, a wild card, or nothing.
That's when the format is at its best. You get games where a team up 14 in the fourth quarter keeps pushing because it needs 16. You get a team that's out of the game but still in the wild card race playing the last two minutes like a playoff game. If you only watch one Cup Night, make it the last one.
Which Cup games are worth your time
Not every Cup game is a big deal. A matchup between two 0-2 teams on the third night is just a regular-season game. The ones worth watching tend to look like this:
- Group finales between teams tied at the top. When two 2-1 or 3-0 teams meet in their last group game, the winner usually takes the group outright through head-to-head. It plays like a knockout game a week early.
- Games where the margin decides a wild card. If a second-place team needs to win by a specific number to pass a team in another group, every possession late in the game counts. Check the wild card standings before tipoff so you know the number.
- Games that affect a third team. Sometimes the team with the most at stake isn't playing. A blowout in one arena can knock out a team watching from another, which is why late games on the final night often matter to fans of teams that already finished.
- Early-week Thanksgiving games. The November 24 and 25 nights land right before the finale, so they're often where a team either sets itself up or falls out.
The games to skip are just as easy to spot: two teams already eliminated, or a team that's clinched its group and has nothing left to play for.
After the groups
The 22 teams that don't advance still play 82 games. The league leaves a gap in the schedule and fills it after group play, with each eliminated team getting two extra games, one home and one road, against other eliminated teams. The two teams that lose in the quarterfinals, one from each conference, play each other for their 82nd game. The two finalists end up playing 83, since the championship doesn't count.
If you want to know which games tonight have something riding on them, Cup or not, the tonight's NBA page lists them, and the this weekend page covers Friday's Cup Night along with everything else on the slate.
What we've seen so far
We score every NBA game, Cup nights included, so here are the group games that turned out most worth watching through the first two Cup nights:
- Trail Blazers at Lakers, Nov 6: Luka Doncic scored 53 and the Lakers came back from 16 down to win 124-118.
- Magic at Raptors, Oct 30: Scottie Barnes scored 41 and Orlando still won 121-114, with Desmond Bane at 28 and Franz Wagner at 26 and 11.
- Rockets at Mavericks, Oct 30: Dallas trailed by eight after three, then beat the unbeaten Rockets 116-111 behind Kyrie Irving's 35 and Cooper Flagg's 33.
None of those was a group decider. That comes on the last Cup nights, when a team's margin of victory can matter as much as the win itself.
How The Lineup Is treats Cup games
The app doesn't give a game extra weight for wearing the Cup logo. It scores a Cup game like any other: the two teams, what's at stake, and what's actually happening in it. So a group finale between two teams tied at the top rises because of the stakes, and a lopsided Cup game sinks like any blowout. The knockout games are single elimination, and elimination is one of the 11 factors every game is scored on.
The Lineup Is is an iPhone app that ranks every game by whether it's worth watching.
Get The Lineup Is on iOS — free — or see tonight's best games ranked right now. More from the blog.