The NBA's In-Season Tournament is back for its second season and so are the courts. The league will have court designs made specifically for the NBA Cup again this year, and presented them Thursday.
The courts will look different this time around. They will be slightly more subdued, and not quite as loud as the designs that the NBA debuted in 2023. Those drew strong reactions from fans, players and coaches. This year, the league still wanted the courts to look different than the court for other regular-season games, but to have a new take.
The NBA hired artist Victor Solomon to design the courts. He said the league also drew team creative directors into the process this year to give franchises more agency.
Gone are the shaded lanes in the middle of the floor leading to center court. They have been replaced by three concentric circles originating from the center. Those circles represent the three NBA Cup stages.
The group stage will begin Nov. 12, followed by single-elimination quarterfinals for eight teams on Dec. 10 and Dec. 11. The tournament then moves to Las Vegas for the final four, with the championship game on Dec. 17.
"I think when we look back maybe 10 years from now, we might be able to say, 'Oh, Year 1 was cool because it had the stripe, but Year 2 was really neat because it had the circles, and Year 5 was this, and they got brighter,'" said Christopher Arena, the head of on-court and brand partnerships for the NBA. "I think we're going to see this tapestry over 10, 15 years, where it's going to, they're all going to be sort of unique."
Last season, the NBA pegged each team's court to its City edition jersey; this season, they will be tied to the Statement jersey. Home teams will wear their Statement edition uniforms for each NBA Cup game, while the road team will wear its white Association jersey. The courts all have the NBA Cup logo in the middle and the lanes.
Each team will again have its own unique design. The Toronto Raptors went for a pugnacious purple all around mid-court, the Charlotte Hornets favored a honeycomb layout, and the Washington Wizards used pink bookends as a nod to Washington D.C.'s cherry blossoms.
But just as these courts are a turn from last year's inaugural designs, next season could bring another 30 new courts.
"I'm hesitant to give absolutes, but I think the vision is that we change these designs every season so there's a surprise and delight for the fans," Arena said. "I think it'll build some anticipation if we change them every season."
The courts, Arena said, are meant to be a visual cue to viewers that they are watching an NBA Cup game and not just another regular-season game. The league went through an exhaustive process to ensure that the courts would pop on television broadcasts and do just that.
Prater, the company the NBA uses to put a finish on its courts, uses drones to give the league a real-time view of the courts as it paints them, and sends along photos as well. The NBA then printed out half-court versions of each court in vinyl and laid them out on a court in Phoenix to do broadcast tests to assess how they looked. Finally, they then used the video game NBA2K to simulate games with the court and get another perspective on how they would look on TV screens.
"Is it perfect? No. But if you've played 2K recently, it's unbelievable how realistic the game is," Arena said. "And so sort of those three things give us a sense of if we have to call a timeout and reverse engineer something, or maybe the contrast between the circles wasn't what we wanted, or whatever it may be. Only once or twice."
He added, "Again, this is two games. Three games if you get to the quarterfinals for those four teams. So it's three games. Not saying we're gonna do whatever we want and throw caution to the wind, but we can be a little bit more risk averse."