How will fans possibly know Friday night’s game against the Mavs is ‘special’ with a normal floor?
PublishedNovember 28, 2025 6:02 PM EST•UpdatedNovember 28, 2025 6:04 PM EST
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The NBA is trying so hard. You almost feel bad for the league. Almost.
The NBA wants you to care about the NBA Cup — its shiny in-season “tournament” cooked up to convince fans that mid-November basketball is as dramatic as a Game 7. And the league truly believes it cracked the code: paint the court neon yellow and hope fans forget it’s still the regular season.
That’s been the strategy since its inception in 2023. Now in Year 3, that’s still the plan.
Not better scheduling. Not shortening the season. Not improving officiating.
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Nope — changing the floor color.
Marketing geniuses, every last one of them.
And when that didn’t work, the league did what any desperate organization does: it changed the name and started throwing money at the players.
First, it was the “In-Season Tournament,” a name so boring it sounded like a dentist convention. So the NBA slapped a new label on it — NBA Cup — because, apparently, rebranding it was going to unlock the excitement fans never had.
Then the NBA juiced the prize pool, adding more cash so players might actually pretend to care. Half the league was like, “Cool, we’ll try on defense for one night. Maybe.”
Because nothing says “this competition is meaningful” like bribing multimillionaires with half a mil for winning it all.
Luka Doncic claims the Lakers’ NBA Cup floor was slippery when his team played the Clippers on Tuesday. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The King And His ‘Unplayable’ Court
And for a minute, the league really thought this was all working. The courts looked like a Crayola factory explosion, fans were squinting through the glare, and the NBA was patting itself on the back for “innovation.”
Then Luka Doncic stepped onto the Lakers’ special-edition banana-yellow NBA Cup court and basically said, “Yeah, this thing is an ice rink.”
Rui Hachimura backed him up: “Oily, slippery… everybody was on the floor.”
Perfect. Exactly what you want in your special tournament: players doing slip-n-slides at midcourt like it’s recess.
So now the Lakers are pulling the plug and going back to their normal floor Friday night against the Dallas Mavericks. The NBA Cup court has been officially declared “unplayable,” which is really just a polite way of saying, “Our marketing stunt almost tore everyone’s ACL.”
And this raises the most important philosophical question of our time:
How Will Fans Know It’s a SPECIAL Game?!
When the Lakers take the floor Friday on a normal court — one that doesn’t blind you or try to kill the players — how will fans EVER understand that this game is worth caring about?
The NBA Cup was already hanging by a thread, and now the one thing that made it “different” — the radioactive courts — is literally falling apart. Turns out you can’t slap a bright paint job onto a regular-season game and magically give it stakes. Who knew?
This was a game that didn’t need slick floors (as in colorful) or NBA Cup marketing gimmicks. It was too simple: Luka’s first game against his old club and Anthony Davis’ return to L.A. But now it’s about slick floors (the wet type).
The Lakers are undefeated in group play, they’ve clinched a spot in the quarterfinals, but the biggest storyline isn’t the tournament — it’s the fact that the NBA basically built a slip-and-fall lawsuit with three-point lines.
And when L.A. takes the court Friday on a normal surface, fans might need a reminder from Adam Silver himself:
“Relax, everyone… this one matters. The court just doesn’t look like a minion exploded this time.”
