The NBA’s in-season tournament is back for its second season and with it the courts. This year, too, the league is having court designs made specifically for the NBA Cup and presented them on Thursday.

This time the dishes will look different. They will be a little more subtle and not quite as loud as the designs that the NBA released in 2023. They were met with strong reactions from fans, players and coaches. This year, the league also wanted the fields to look different than the fields for other regular season games, but to have a new design.

The NBA commissioned artist Victor Solomon to design the playing fields. He said the league also brought team creative directors into the process this year to give franchises more freedom to make decisions.

Gone are the shady alleys in the middle of the parquet that lead to center court. They have been replaced by three concentric circles radiating from the center. These circles represent the three NBA Cup phases.

A look at the 30 spots for the 2024 NBA Cup. Photo courtesy of the NBA

The group stage begins on November 12th, followed by eight-team single-elimination quarterfinals on December 10th and 11th. The tournament then moves to Las Vegas for the Final Four, with the championship game taking place on December 17th.

“I think when we look back in 10 years, we might be able to say, ‘Oh, Year 1 was cool because it had the stripe, but Year 2 was really great because it had the circles, and Year 5 was like that.’ “And they got better,” said Christopher Arena, head of on-court partnerships and brands for the NBA. “I think we’ll see this tapestry over the course of 10, 15 years, wherever it goes, they’ll all be unique in some way.”

Last season, the NBA tied each team’s spot to its City Edition jersey; This season they will be tied to the statement jersey. The home team wears their statement edition jerseys for every NBA Cup game, while the away team wears their white association jersey. The playing fields all have the NBA Cup logo in the middle and on the lanes.

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Each team will once again have their own unique design. The Toronto Raptors chose a bold purple around the middle of the court, the Charlotte Hornets favored a honeycomb pattern, and the Washington Wizards used pink bookends as a nod to the cherry blossoms in Washington DC.

A closer look at the Toronto Raptors’ custom NBA Cup court. (Photo via NBA)

But just as these courts represent a departure from last year’s initial designs, next season could bring another 30 new courts.

“I hesitate to make absolute statements, but I think the vision is that we change these designs every season so that there is a surprise and delight for the fans,” Arena said. “I think it will create some anticipation as we change them every season.”

The courts, Arena said, are intended to give viewers a visual cue that they are watching an NBA Cup game and not just another regular-season game. The league went through an extensive process to ensure that the courts would show up on television broadcasts and do just that.

🚨New court color just released🚨 Say hello to the new Emirates NBA Cup court!

🔗 https://t.co/1smD3VrVZ3 | #HiveMentality pic.twitter.com/R05JXyRPgW

— Charlotte Hornets (@hornets) October 24, 2024

Prater, the company the NBA uses to beautify its courts, uses drones to give the league a real-time view of the courts as they paint them, and also sends photos along. The NBA then printed half-court versions of each field in vinyl and laid them out on a field in Phoenix for broadcast testing to assess how they looked. Finally, they used the video game NBA2K to simulate games on the court and get a different perspective on how they would look on television screens.

“Is it perfect? No. “But if you’ve played 2K recently, it’s incredible how realistic the game is,” Arena said. “And so those three things give us a sense of whether we need to take a time out and reverse engineer something, or maybe the contrast between the circles wasn’t what we wanted, or whatever it may be. Just once or twice.”

He added: “Again, it’s two games. Three games if you reach the quarterfinals with these four teams. So there are three games. I’m not saying we’re going to do whatever we want and throw caution to the wind, but we can be a little bit more risk-averse.”

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(All images courtesy of the NBA)