If you’re a friend of the person who wrote the NBA.com article previewing Saturday night’s NBA Cup semifinal between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder, we can safely assume that you’re familiar with brutal honesty.

The Thunder defeated the Rockets on Saturday night and will represent the Western Conference in the NBA Cup Final against the Milwaukee Bucks. To put it mildly, NBA.com’s preview wasn’t exactly a hard sell of the Rockets vs. Thunder matchup.

“Houston Rockets vs. Oklahoma City Thunder may not have been the marquee NBA Cup semifinal the league was hoping for, but it might just be the best window into the future of the Western Conference,” was how the preview article began.

While the article has since been edited, Bobby Howard of the Schooner Pod shared a screengrab of the preview on X (formerly Twitter) along with some sage wisdom.

“Free marketing advice to the NBA: don’t trash the very product you are trying to sell in your lead sentence for your game preview,” Howard wrote.

Free marketing advice to the NBA: don’t trash the very product you are trying to sell in your lead sentence for your game preview. pic.twitter.com/WV75RbsTwB

— Bobby Howard (@BobbyHowardOK) December 14, 2024

It makes sense. We can all speculate that Bill Belichick would have preferred an NFL head coaching job over the job he took at North Carolina. But everything he’s said — at least in public — has indicated that the UNC job is the one that Belichick wants the most. It’s a similar situation here. Would the NBA have preferred to see Lebron James and the Los Angeles Lakers taking on Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors? If you answered “no,” we have some oceanfront property in Nebraska to sell you. But the league didn’t need to come right out and downplay the matchup it got on its own website.

It’s also notable that two upcoming games between the Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers have been shifted to national television. Was the NBA really happy to make those changes?

While it would still be notable, this wouldn’t be such a tremendous gap if the NBA Cup was a tradition that was ingrained in the league’s fans — something that the fans will watch in huge numbers almost regardless of the matchup. But this is a two-year-old tournament that was created specifically to generate fan interest in the early part of the season — when it’s frequently low. Moreover, the early results have been, at best, tepid.

Can you blame the fans for tuning out? How are they supposed to get excited about a matchup that the league itself is telling them it didn’t want?

[NBA.com, Bobby Howard on X]