The NBA did a very Major League Baseball thing and took a piece of semi-interesting news and buried it at a time when absolutely no one would pay attention to it. Marketing 101 right there. They dropped the NBA Cup groups at almost 10:00pm Eastern time on the first night of free agency when everyone is caught up in the all the player movement.

The Hornets are in East Group C along with the Celtics, Hawks, Wizards, and Bulls.

A little refresher on how the NBA Cup works for those who are new here:

• Teams are split into 5 pods based on last season’s records, 1-3, 4-6, 5-8, etc. Each group gets one team from each pod assigned at random.
• Each team will play all of the other teams in their group as part of a round robin. Those games will all occur on Tuesdays and Fridays, mostly in November, and will also count as regular season games. All games played on Tuesday and Fridays will be cup games. They’re basically Cup Nights.
• The three group winners and one wild card advance to a single elimination knockout tournament. Teams that don’t make that stage will play two consolation games against other teams that didn’t make it.
• The teams that lose in the first round of the knockout will play one more consolation game against another team that lost in the first round of the knockouts. All of the consolation games will count as regular season games.
• The semi-finals will count as a regular season game. The finals will not. That ensures that everyone plays 82 games that count towards the regular season.

A fun wrinkle to the NBA Cup this year is the fact that the championship won’t be played in Las Vegas like it was in the first three iterations of the event. Instead, it’s going to be hosted at Hinkle Fieldhouse on the campus of Butler University. It is the gym where Milan High School won a state championship in 1954, which served as inspiration for the movie Hoosiers. It’s also the venue where in the following year, Oscar Robertson led his Crispus Attucks High School team to the state championship, becoming the first ever all black school to win a state championship.

The 9,100 seat venue will provide a historic backdrop that’s going to be very unique for an NBA game. It’s going to be fascinating to watch. Hopefully the Hornets will be there. That’d be pretty cool.