In-Season Tournament 101: The Format, Rules, and Procedures

I. The first-ever In-Season Tournament will begin on November 3 and conclude on December 9 with the Championship. At the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, the Semifinals (on Thursday, December 7) and Championship will be held.

The Group Play and Knockout Rounds are the two phases of the In-Season Tournament.

A. Group Play: Based on their won-loss records from the 2022–23 regular season, each of the 30 teams has been randomly assigned to five-team groups within its conference. Each team will play four designated Group Play games on “Tournament Nights” starting on Nov. 3 and running through Nov. 28 – one game against each opponent in its group, with two games at home and two on the road.

B. Knockout Rounds: Two “wild cards” (the team from each conference with the best record in Group Play games that finished second in its group) and the eight teams with the best Group Play game standings in each of the six groups will advance to the Knockout Rounds. The Quarterfinals, Semifinals, and Championship will all be single-elimination games in NBA franchise markets on Monday, December 4, and Tuesday, December 5. The qualifying teams will compete for a prize fund and the NBA Cup, the new trophy for the In-Season Tournament.

With the exception of the championship, all 67 games from the In-Season Tournament’s two halves will count towards the rankings for the regular season.

In the 2023–24 season, all 82 regular-season games—including those played as part of Group Play and the Knockout Rounds—will be played by each team.

All seven Knockout Round games as well as fourteen Group Play games (two on each Tournament Night) will be shown on national television. In-Season Tournament game and broadcast schedule will be revealed in August.

2. Tournament Information

The 15 teams in each conference were randomly allocated into three groups of five teams to decide each team’s opponents in the Group Play games. Here are the groups:

Each team was put into a “pot” prior to the drawing based on its performance during the previous regular season (2022–23). One team from each pot was randomly chosen to join one of the conference’s three groups in each conference. The pots looked like this:

The three clubs in a conference with the best prior-season records are placed in Pot 1.
The teams with the fourth- through sixth-best records from the previous season are in Pot 2.
The teams with the seventh- through ninth-best preseason records are placed in Pot 3.
The teams with the 10th through 12th-best records from the previous season are in Pot 4.
The teams with the 13th through 15th-best prior-season records are placed in Pot 5.

B. Group Play: From November 3-28, Tournament Nights will be held every Tuesday and Friday (with the exception of Tuesday, November 7, when there won’t be any games). Only Group Play games will be played in the NBA on Tournament Nights. Games from Group Play will be considered Regular Season games for all intents.

A team will play one Group Play game against each of the other four teams in its group. The performance of a team in these four intraconference contests will decide whether or not that team advances to the knockout rounds. If there are two or more tied teams in a group, the ties will be broken using the following tiebreakers (in order of priority):

• The Group Stage’s head-to-head record;
• Difference in points at the Group Stage;
• The overall group stage point total;
• The NBA’s regular-season record from 2022–2023; and
• Random drawing (in the odd event that after the preceding tiebreakers, two or more teams are still tied).

The team with the best record after Group Play matches in each of the six groups plus one wild card team from each conference will proceed to the Knockout Rounds, for a total of eight teams. The team from each conference that finished second in its group and had the best record in Group Play matches will receive a wild card.

With the exception of the head-to-head record in the Group Stage, the tie between the teams will be broken using the same tiebreaker methodology as stated above if two or more teams are tied for the wild card in a conference. Prior to determining the application of wild card tiebreakers, group ties will be resolved.

C. Final Rounds: The eight teams who advance from Group Play will play single-elimination matches in the Knockout Rounds, which begin with the Quarterfinals on December 4-5. Winners advance to the neutral-site Semifinals on December 7 and the Championship on December 9. For all intents and purposes, games played in the quarterfinals and semifinals of the first and second rounds of the Knockout Rounds, respectively, shall be considered Regular Season games. The Championship will not be considered a Regular Season game, meaning that neither the outcome of the game nor any player or team’s performance in it will be taken into account when calculating Regular Season statistics.

The two clubs in each conference with the best Group Play record will host the quarterfinal games, and the team with the best Group Play record will host the wild card team. The tie between the teams will be broken using the same tiebreaker technique as mentioned above if two or more teams are tied for the higher seed in a conference.

The 22 clubs who don’t make it to the Knockout Rounds will play two regular-season games each on Wednesday, December 6, and Friday, December 8, which are days when there are no In-Season Tournament games scheduled.

The matches for these games will be chosen using a system based on the Group Play standings in each conference (5th–15th). Since there will be an odd number of clubs in each conference who do not advance to the Quarterfinals, two of the 22 games will be scheduled cross-conference. Depending on travel restrictions, these matchups between bottom-finishing teams in Group Play will be planned, and no team will play more than one of its two games outside of its conference. Where possible, the remaining 20 games will be held inside conferences against teams that would ordinarily face each other three times over the season.

The opponents for each of the four clubs that fail in the quarterfinals will be from their respective conferences on Friday, December 8.

III. Prizes and League Honours: For the 2023–24 season, players on the teams who compete in the Knockout Rounds will get a share of the In-Season Tournament prize pool, with shares rising in proportion to how far a club advances in the competition.

The NBA will announce the Most Valuable Player and All-Tournament Team following the end of the In-Season Tournament. Players will be chosen based on how well they did in both Group Play and the Knockout Rounds.