Now assured to play five times this season, the teams will battle on Tuesday night. The victor travels to Las Vegas for the semifinals on December 7 and the victors compete for the first-ever NBA Cup on December 9.
The NBA’s first-ever In-Season Tournament quarterfinals are set after many weeks of group play matches. The Lakers will meet the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena in an attempt to get a repeat.
up November 10 at Phoenix, the Lakers put up one of their best games of the year to overcome the Suns 122-119 and take the lead in their five-team group.
In other quarterfinal action, the New Orleans Pelicans will travel to face the Sacramento Kings at 7 p.m., while the Indiana Pacers will host the Boston Celtics on Monday at 4:30 p.m. PT. Tuesday’s Eastern Conference matchup between the New York Knicks and the Milwaukee Bucks tips off at 4:30 p.m., with the Lakers and Suns playing next.
The teams from the Eastern and Western conferences will meet at 2 p.m. PT on December 7 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, with the victors of the quarterfinals moving on to the semifinals. Dec. 9 at 5:30 p.m. (ABC/Ch. 7) is the tournament championship game. The winner team’s players will all receive a $500,000 salary.
Group play saw the Lakers, Kings, Bucks, and Pacers all go 4-0, but tiebreakers decided the rest.
Boston, New York, Cleveland, Orlando, and Brooklyn all went 3-1 in the East and continued to try to score a lot of points. Boston outscored the opponents in their group by 27 points, while Orlando and Brooklyn had plus-22 and plus-20 differentials, respectively. Thus, East Group C was won by the Celtics.
With the down-to-the-wire differential chasing, the West race didn’t have nearly as much suspense as the East. Because of their point differential—the Suns outscored opponents by 34 points, while the Timberwolves had a zero differential—Phoenix (3-1) defeated Minnesota (3-1) to earn the wild card.
The Warriors led by 24 points at the half and by 18 points in the middle of the third quarter, but the Kings stormed back to defeat Golden State 124-123 and kill the team’s hopes of qualifying for the tournament. Golden State needed to defeat Sacramento by 12 points in order to win West Group C.
Each of the four quarterfinal matches is a matchup that was already scheduled four times this season; as a result, all of those matchups will now be played five times this season, one more than teams can normally play a conference opponent in any given season. This is an oddity that some of the teams are probably not happy about.
