LAS VEGAS — Near the end of the second NBA Cup semifinal game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Houston Rockets, the two upstart Western Conference foes broke out into a brief scuffle on the court.

It had been a physical game between two defenses that like to maul each other, and the chippiness between the teams finally broke out into some jawing, posturing and light shoving.

“[The NBA Cup] does have a certain energy to it that makes it very competitive,” Thunder forward Jalen Williams said after the game. “It’s probably because of the money. But there is like a very competitive aspect to it. Obviously, everybody wants free money.”

Now, the league would never quite admit to welcoming an on-court altercation between players, but NBA execs were probably quite satisfied to see the vitriol between the teams and Williams’ comments. That’s because the entire push behind the nascent NBA Cup, which is in its second season, is to add some excitement to early-season games. And in Year 2, various stakeholders — coaches, players, fans — seem to be buying in.

“It’s been fun,” Thunder star and MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said Monday, a day before his team would face the Milwaukee Bucks in the Cup final. “Obviously, the added stakes in the game give it a little bit of a different feel. It’s good prep for the postseason. It’s obviously heightened stakes than a regular season and it’s good to get reps in games that mean a little bit more and have stakes to it.”

Part of the reason for the heightened stakes, as Williams alluded to, is prize money. Players on the tournament-winning team make $514,971, compared to $205,988 for the runners-up and $102,994 for losing in the semifinal.

“I like the tournament,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said before the semis. Rivers had been open all weekend in his desire for his team to be competitive and unafraid to want to win the Cup.

He also added: “I think it’s a litmus test for the team. I look at last year, and I thought Indiana, do they make the Eastern Finals if they don’t have this tournament?”

Both players and coaches from all the teams involved seem to agree that the Cup hasn’t reached the level of the NBA Playoffs, but there’s a little more energy to the games than a typical regular season matchup. Even the scheduling of the games helps to add a little flair. Rivers, for example, said the two days off between the semifinal and final allows his coaching staff to come up with a more detailed game plan than it could for most games.

Perhaps even more importantly for the league, fans seem to have noticed the uptick in energy as well.

“I know they added the Cup to try to make it more competitive early in the season,” said Brandon Jones, a 36-year-old Los Angeles Lakers fan who drove to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. Jones bought tickets for the West semifinal before he knew which teams would appear, and then bought tickets for the East as well when he saw how affordable the seats were. “As a fan, it’s cool because it kind of makes you care a little bit more.”

“I like that it’s added a little bit of intensity and there’s a difference, you know?” said Rishab Aida, a 24-year-old Golden State Warriors fan who lives in nearby Henderson. “I like that they’ve incentivized every level of the Cup so players have something to play for. It’s cool that the players have taken it seriously a little bit.”

The league, though open to evolving and tinkering with the tournament, also seems pleased with the growth of the Cup in its second season. After the first Cup, NBA execs embarked on what they called a “listening tour” with players, coaches and front office members to solicit candid feedback about what worked and what didn’t.

One tweak the NBA made was to move the back-to-back semifinal games from a weekday to the weekend after the league admitted the afternoon local start time on a Thursday last year may have deflated attendance. This year, both semis drew over 17,000 fans, according to the league.

No issue is too small for the NBA when it comes to fine-tuning the Cup. This year, for example, the league tweaked the Cup’s scoring and point differential rules so as to not incentivize teams to intentionally play for overtime to give themselves five extra minutes to run up the score. (Point differential is a key tiebreaker in Cup group games.)

Evan Wasch, the NBA’s head of strategy and analytics, says the tournament will continue to evolve in the coming years. Two points of pride for the league this year though, Wasch says, were the buy-in from the players, who seemed to have a much better understanding of the format in the Cup’s second season. And also the willingness of teams to embrace the point differential tiebreaker and try to keep scoring at the end of games.

Ultimately, the NBA is aware the Cup still has to grow quite a bit to reach its ultimate goal.

“These things take time, you don’t establish traditions overnight,” Wasch told NBC News on Monday. “I certainly wasn’t alive in the 1940s but I would imagine the NBA Finals back then did not carry the same gravitas. We had no illusions that in year one or year two, or maybe even year three, four or five, that this would reach the level that it ultimately could be. And I don’t think anyone can say exactly when it will hit that peak or plateau that we hope they can get to.

“But what we hope that is is a true second championship, that the idea that there’s only one thing to win each year is going to be challenged over time by this Cup.”