Details revealed about NBA's new in-season tournament

The semifinals and the final of the NBA’s first in-season tournament will take place on Dec. 7 and 9 in Las Vegas, reports ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN (Twitter link).

The Dec. 9 championship game – which will represent an 83rd in-season contest for the two participants – won’t count as a regular season game, but the quarterfinals and semifinals will.

As Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press tweets, when the NBA releases its schedule for 2023-24 in a few weeks, each team will initially be scheduled to play 80 regular season games. The 22 teams that don’t make it to the knockout stage of the in-season tournament will have two games added to their schedule during the season, while the four teams that lose in the quarterfinals will each have one game added.

The final four teams won’t require additional games on their schedule, since they’ll each play at least two in the knockout stage of the tournament.

As previously reported, leading up to the knockout stage of the tournament, each of the NBA’s 30 teams will play four “group stage” games (two at home and two on the road) during the first few weeks of the regular season — these games will take place on two designated days of the week.

The NBA notes within its new Collective Bargaining Agreement that teams will be divided into three groups of five per conference (six groups in total) based on the previous year’s standings.

Each group will feature one team that finished top three in the conference the year before; one that finished between fourth and sixth; one that finished between seventh and ninth; one that finished between 10th and 12th; and one that finished between 13th and 15th. Using that criteria, the groups will be determined based on random drawings.

For instance, it would be possible for one of the three Western groups this season to feature the Nuggets (last year’s No. 1 seed), Warriors (6), Lakers (7), Mavericks (11), and Spurs (15). A hypothetical Eastern group could consist of the Celtics (2), Knicks (5), Heat (8), Bulls (10), and Magic (13).

While we know the six group winners and the top two “wild card” finishers will advance to the eight-team knockout stage, the NBA still hasn’t clarified what the tiebreakers will look like. That’s an important detail since a four-game group stage won’t give teams much room to distance themselves from one another.