Giannis in bloom and the elephants in the room: seven NBA Cup takeaways | Claire de Lune

The Milwaukee Bucks’ romp to the title in Year Two of the in-season tournament in Las Vegas was dwarfed by a persistent bugaboo: the NBA Cup doesn’t really matter yet. Giannis Antetokounmpo’s NBA Cup final opponent Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Denver’s Nikola Jokić have deservedly been garnering a lot of MVP buzz a quarter of the way through the regular season. But over three days in Las Vegas, Antetokounmpo added to what is already a pretty convincing case of his own to take home his third NBA MVP trophy. He’s been putting up tremendous numbers all season, averaging a preposterous 32.7 points, 11.5 rebounds and 6.1 assists while logging a 19-rebound triple-double in Tuesday’s final, a 97-81 win over Oklahoma City. But his stat line isn’t existing in a vacuum; he’s looking as dominant, if not moreso, than he ever has. And he’s been deadly from the mid-range this year (as Kevin Garnett gave him props for over the weekend), which is a significant complement to his near-unstoppable inside game. In Tuesday’s showdown between MVP frontrunners, Giannis looked decidedly like the best player on the floor.

When flying out of Las Vegas from Harry Reid International Airport, one finds themselves shopping for magazines and water bottles amid a sea of zombies with blank stares, and it always feels like there’s this strange unspoken elephant in the room: this is a place where almost everyone is hungover, but no one verbally acknowledges it. It was hard not to notice the NBA’s own elephant in the room in Vegas this weekend: that a clear succession plan for a basketball world after LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant doesn’t really exist. The collective holding of breath from the NBA media machine after Curry’s Warriors were eliminated at the quarter-final stage, thus ensuring that no bona fide, tried-and-true needle-mover would be joining the party in Vegas, was palpable. Last year’s inaugural tournament featured James and the Los Angeles Lakers: both of whom have sat atop the NBA’s popularity rankings for decades. This year had no such luck. While the four teams (Milwaukee, Oklahoma City, the Houston Rockets and Atlanta Hawks) certainly made for entertaining basketball for hardcore fans, the brutal truth is that no next-gen star, not Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, not Antetokounpo, has even come close to reaching the popular heights of James or Curry. For reasons perhaps unknowable, they just don’t have the juice. The NBA has a young star marketing problem that doesn’t seem any closer to being solved than it was a couple of years ago, and as James, Curry and Durant inch ever closer to retirement, the issue only grows more urgent.