Despite their 8-13 overall record, the Portland Trail Blazers are still alive for a wildcard spot in the 2024 Emirates NBA Cup tournament. Portland will need a victory over the Los Angeles Clippers Tuesday night to remain in contention. Then they’ll have to hope that results around the Western Conference go their way.

Over the past week, I’ve stated a couple times that I hope the Blazers do make it into the NBA Cup bracket. This has stirred up a couple questions in the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag. Like this one, for instance…

Dave,

NBA Cup games? Really? You’re falling into the hype! They’re trying to sell you on this fake new trophy to distract you from your team playing poorly and the games not mattering until Christmas. iirc way back when this started you said you didn’t care about this at all. What changed? I thought you were a purist!

Kyle

Yeah. Hell freezes over, I guess.

The most basic reasoning right now is that they’re going to play the games anyway. Given the choice between playing them for nothing and playing them for something, I’ll choose the something, even if the reward is a “fake new trophy”.

Technically all trophies are made up. The NBA Championship itself only means something because we all agree it does. A guy at our church has a full-on title belt for winning our annual Fudge Competition every year since its inauguration. Even though the battle this year is going to be fierce, as several blue-haired church ladies are gunning for him directly, I doubt Warner and Amazon will come bidding for the rights to televise the proceedings anytime soon. The belt is shiny, but not enough people believe in it to make it important beyond our campus.

If enough people pay attention to the NBA Cup, I guess it’ll become significant. If not, it won’t. Right now it’s closer to the Fudge Championship than the World Championship. Either way, we’re free to throw our allegiances where we wish and consider it as important or non-important as we choose.

That said, there are reasons for even purists to believe participating in the tournament would benefit the Blazers this year.

In the long-forgotten, criminally-underrated sequel to Playstation One’s PaRappa the Rapper—a little game called Um Jammer Lammy—a sensei-like onion teaches a young lady how to play her electric guitar with martial-arts-like aplomb. His best advice to her comes in the form of a catchphrase: “Dojo, casino, it’s all in the mind.” Master Onion was trying to tell her that whatever benefit she got out of her experiences was up to her and was not limited by circumstance. Inside his own mind he had a dojo. Inside that dojo was, improbably, a casino. Whether he was kicking apart 2×4’s or spinning roulette, he could extract valuable lessons from the exercise. “Dojo, casino, it’s all in the mind.” You can get good training from anything you care to.

For the young Trail Blazers, NBA Cup or NBA Playoffs, it’s all in the mind. It doesn’t matter if the bracket is small and the prize less prestigious. Participating in a tournament would give the team something to win and real, professional opponents to fight for it. Should they actually make it to the final game, or win the trophy itself, that would be a boost to their confidence, reinforcing the direction of the team and the individual players who comprise it. Simply put, it’d be a lot more meaningful to see Toumani Camara and Donovan Clingan jumping up and down after winning the cup than it would be to see Anthony Davis and LeBron James do it.

It wouldn’t be bad for the league to have a surprise entry or two either. At first the Blazers making the cut would be like Repo Man entering the 1992 Royal Rumble, but the farther they went along, the more intriguing it’d become. I think eventually the nation would get on board with the youthful (and if they actually did win it, apparently proficient and exciting) roster taking the title.

That $500,000 prize for each winning participant wouldn’t hurt either. Lots of Portland’s roster lives in the low-to-minimum contract range. A cool half a million would make Christmas a lot more fun in their households. I kind of hope that happens for them if it’s possible.

For all those reasons, I think it’d be cool for Portland to make the tournament this year. Maybe five years from now it won’t matter as much, but for now, they are where—and who—they are. Given their youth and the need to propel themselves along a growth curve, I’m all on board for NBA cuppage. It’d have been way cooler, and more probable, had they not slipped on a huge banana peel versus the Houston Rockets last Friday, but hey, we can still hope.

Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!