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The Milwaukee Bucks will face the Oklahoma City Thunder in the final of the 2024 NBA Cup in Las Vegas this week.
It is the second year of the competition, which has a similar format to the football World Cup.
The Los Angeles Lakers, spearheaded by LeBron James, won the inaugural edition last year, beating the Indiana Pacers 123-109 in the final.
Intended to add more importance to the earlier part of the season, the NBA Cup is a shorter format compared to its regular 82-game league season.
“There was an opportunity to grow the league through additional competitions,” Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice-president of basketball strategy and analytics told BBC Sport.
“If you look around the world, there’s so many examples out there where there is more than one thing for teams to win.
“We felt that it was an untapped opportunity. Not necessarily a need for us, but just something that would re-ally grow the game.”
The 30 NBA sides were split into six regionalised groups of five teams.
After playing the other sides in their group once, the top team from the six pools advanced to the quarter-finals alongside the best second-best side from both the Eastern and Western conferences.
Quarter-finals and semi-finals were played regionally, with the best side from each conference going forward to the final.
“It’s basically a World Cup format with five teams in a group instead of four and eight teams advancing,” said Wasch on the format.
“A lot of the elements look very similar to international football. There’s not a lot of difference with what has been done, except building it into our season. “It’s a pretty close one-to-one mapping.” Due to its regionalisation and the busy NBA season schedule, the results of NBA Cup matches, barring this week’s final, also count towards the regular season standings.
The Bucks have an overall season record of 14 wins and 11 losses from their 25 matches. — BBC.
Online Reporter