The 2024-25 NBA Cup Preview

A question each team must answer to survive and advance

The NBA Cup is here! Love it (like me!) or hate it (*blows raspberries*), the Cup’s elimination round begins tonight. Forget all the complicated rules; it’s now an eight-team, single-elimination bracket culminating in a championship next Tuesday in Las Vegas, where the winning team’s players each get $500K(!) and bragging rights.

Let’s discuss a key question for each team before their opening game. Each team’s seed is in parentheses. Forgive me if there are any typos below; both my children have decided to hit sleep regressions simultaneously and back-to-back, so I’m operating on two hours of sleep, which isn’t conducive to 2,200 words about basketball. But we carry on!

(2) New York Knicks

Key Question: Can the Knicks’ starters get stops?

The Madison Square Garden crowd will be out for blood. Although the 2021 playoffs, in which Trae Young and the Hawks upset the favored New York Knicks, feel like a long time ago (not a single current Knick was on that team; Derrick Rose started at point guard!), Knicks fans’ hatred for Young still runs hot (as the numerous profanity-laced messages I received from Brooklyn buddies after the Cup bracket came out can attest).

The Knicks already lost to the Hawks once this year; you may remember it as the Zaccharie Risacher game, when the rookie dropped 33 points with an unexpected fusillade of triples. Risacher was hardly the only one with a good game, however. The Hawks scored 121 points in 99 possessions in their November 6th battle, and much of that damage came from the starting foursome of Risacher, Young (23 points), Jalen Johnson (23 points), and Clint Capela (18 points). While Risacher is hardly likely to repeat his performance, the Hawks will welcome back bench gunners Bogdan Bogdanovic and De’Andre Hunter to boost their attack.

Although Knicks big man Karl-Anthony Towns began the season with some truly heinous defensive statistics, lineups with Towns haven’t been as bad defensively as popular narratives would suggest (they’ve been 52nd percentile in defensive rating, to be exact), and the recent return of Precious Achiuwa could give the Knicks the two-big look that coach Thibodeau loves so much. Achiuwa is still ramping up, but his minutes with Towns will be something I’m closely watching.

Without Achiuwa, though, Towns will anchor the middle, and it’s unclear whether he’ll be deadweight or a source of stability. Young wields a scalpel in the pick-and-roll, and he dissected Towns’ drop coverage in the first game like he was in AP Biology. Towns wasn’t the only problem. The wings and guards had issues keeping their marks in front of them. Even the Knicks’ stoutest defender, OG Anunoby, had uncharacteristic difficulty tracking the slippery Jalen Johnson:

New York (especially Towns) has gotten better as the season has gone on, but so has Atlanta. This will be a fun matchup.

(3) Atlanta Hawks

Key Question: How will the Hawks guard KAT?

Surrounded by shooting, Towns has been on an absolute tear this season. He’s averaging 25 points per game while lacing 45% of his long balls, and he smacked Atlanta in the face with 33 points in the lone game the two teams played.

I just sang Capela’s praises as a defender, but KAT is a nightmare matchup, simultaneously too big and too fast for Capela to bother him. The Hawks had their center playing much higher than usual, hoping to bother Towns’ shot. Even with a hand in his face, though, Towns had no problem shooting right over Capela or driving around him:

Onyeka Okongwu and Jalen Johnson took a turn, and each proved too physically weak for their foe.

With Dyson Daniels hounding Jalen Brunson and a fleet of long-limbed wings lurking in help, the Hawks are as well-equipped as anyone in the East to handle the MVP candidate (an uncharacteristically quiet 4-for-11 in their first meeting). They have to find a way to match that impact against Towns, perhaps by having their centers play even higher and hoping the backline rotations are stout enough (Risacher had two blocks at the rim against KAT in their game).

Then again, they did win despite Towns’ dominance last time; perhaps playing him straight-up loses the battle but wins the war.

(1) Milwaukee Bucks