The NBA Cup has another Group of Death

Good morning. The NBA Cup groups were revealed. Yes, there is a Group of Death. It seems unavoidable. How will Amazon Prime change the NBA Cup broadcast, though? Let's basketball.

Amazon Prime is the exclusive home of the 2025 NBA Cup. The group stage will be played on the streaming service and League Pass for four consecutive Fridays starting on Halloween; for the final week of the Cup group stage (Thanksgiving Week), games will be shared with NBC and ESPN and played Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Then there's a week off until the normal knockout rounds, all of which will be on Amazon Prime, culminating with the Championship Game That Doesn't Count In The Official Statistics Of The League on December 16.

The NBA had Prime personality Blake Griffin do an explainer piece.

Great title card.

Here are the groups:

The league draws the groups from pools based on prior season's record, and keeps it all within the conference. Of course, basing this year's groups on last year's records is going to be tricky because everything is impermanent. And as you know, I care deeply about fairness in the NBA Cup. So I went ahead and calculated the average projected 2025-26 win totals by group per FanDuel's most current odds. Here's what we've got:

EAST A: 39.7 wins
EAST B: 39.9 wins
EAST C: 38.7 wins

WEST A: 39.5 wins
WEST B: 41.7 wins
WEST C: 46.3 wins

The East groups come out quite evenly split. The West groups do not. The Rockets and Nuggets, both in West C, are two of three West teams projected over 50 wins (along with the Thunder). The Warriors and Spurs are projected in the mid-40s and the Blazers are decent by bad team standards. (Portland's win total is 33.5; I'd probably jump on that over to be honest, were I a betting man.)