However you measure the longterm efficacy of the NBA's in-season tournament (we recommend this as a helpful road sign), last night's mass homage to Gilligan's Island in San Francisco is what this event was always meant to be—an entertaining outlier on the all-important road to a trophy with no apparent value. That it was buried in the late window on a Tuesday night is one of those puzzling decisions that makes a person wonder if the NBA wants the tournament to matter to its bill-paying viewers in the way it hopes the tournament will someday matter to players.
There was no way to make this one not matter, though. Mavericks-Warriors was its own electronic billboard, a sure spike in the regular-season drone no matter when it was played. Stephen Curry is one of the two pillars of the league's ratings renaissance alongside King James I, and his brilliance has powered the league's last two media rights contracts; Klay Thompson was Curry's left ventricle on a series of near-magical teams that dominated much of the last decade. On Tuesday, they played against each other for the first time since Thompson chose expat status in Dallas with a team that, on paper, seemed to offer a better chance to get him a mood-altering fifth ring than the seemingly aging-out Warriors.
Even if the NBA wasn’t trying to make its in-season tournament happen, this game would have been a significant one. In their time together, Curry and Thompson represented that rarest of player relationships, the one combination in which a fan never felt required to pick one at the expense of another because you committed wholly to both—getting to love both your spouse and your high school crush equally to the complaint of neither, if that makes sense. That the basketball Curry and Thompson played was often so transcendent helped, of course, but the dynamic really was something special, and distinctive enough that seeing them playing against each other would have a perverse sort of appeal even if they weren’t doing so on the perverse and unappealing-looking NBA Cup floor.
Then there were the props. Fans wore Alan Hale Jr. boat captain caps that the organization handed out the hats as a salute to Thompson's boating hobby. Those caps were doffed en masse when the crowd greeted Thompson with a prolonged ovation when he was introduced. It looked cheesy, for all the best reasons.
And finally, there was the game itself, a pre-Thanksgiving game that nevertheless mattered a great deal to the audience and which ended spectacularly, with Curry Currying up the end, outscoring Thompson's Mavs 12-3 by himself over the last three-and-a-half minutes of a 120-117 victory that bumped Golden State’s record to a better-than-at-first-conceivable 9-2. It was a game, frankly, that deserved a much better platform than the back half of the first Tuesday of the league's version of the Carabao Cup.
Again, we're not trying to deduce the value of the Cup or the motives behind it, as in "Adam Silver will sell anything to anyone." That's Comrade Redford's thesis of the day. What we're saying is this game deserved its own night, and a Saturday evening slot on ABC on a day in which the rest of the schedule is all played in the afternoon. It deserved the prime Christmas Day spot. There aren't that many opportunities left for the league to bathe in Curry's ability to grab eyeballs, and the Thompson reunion was added value. That the game wound up being such a convincing advertisement for the concept of watching basketball on television didn’t hurt.
Besides, if the league wanted to give the Cup a push, it would not have offered the rest of the nightly lineup it did. For one, you can only do Steph/Klay the one time, and you can't use props a second time. This was an organic winner, and only the Pacific Coast and haunted East Coast insomniacs got to fully enjoy it in the moment. Next-day replays on NBA TV don't count.
Also, if Silver wanted to jump-start Carabao West, the Lakers would have been in there somewhere, because James is the other long-term attention grabber, and they could have even thrown in the kid as a bonus even if the opponent were, oof, Utah. The league has been fretting about market share for some years now, and the Curry/James confluence remains one of the league's two largest popularity spikes, with Bird/Magic being the first. Even if you claim to be sick of LeBron—and the commercials with Kevin Hart stopped being funny the first time Hart spiked that piece of bric-a-brac, which was months ago—you'll still watch him, even if Curry is now demonstrably more fun. People talk about how much we want something new, but last week’s election proved that to be a lie. Americans mostly want the same thing again and again, even if it’s the Dallas Cowboys. Curry, in particular, is that kind of magic act, and he keeps providing newer hats and better rabbits. He could still carry this league through its Season Of IR, even if the tournament can't. The league just needs to put him where everyone can see him.
