Friday cup game at Houston will be the biggest Blazers game since we lost to Denver in the playoffs! Will be epic if we can somehow pull that win off. We'll then likely have the ability to win any one of the final two cup games to make the next round due to owning tiebreakers over Minnesota and Houston. Really excited to see Sharpe, Camara, Clingan, Timelord, and Banton playing in some more meaningful games with higher stakes.
Had a bunch of cup games last night, although none from our group. Did have OKC lose in San Antonio which helps us as they have to fly home to play the 2nd of a B2B tonight while we were already in hotel rooms resting. Here are the cup standings for our group; Tiebreaker is first head to head so the winner of us vs Houston will have a commanding lead in our group. Second tiebreaker is point differential. Probably only comes into play if we lose to Houston but all three of us/Hou/MIN finish 3-1 or something. Also point differential could come into play if we are 3-1 but lose the group as it would be the tie breaker for the 4th wildcard seed from group B/group C. Or if we win our group point differential could determine us having a home vs road game against group B/group C winners to advance to Vegas. Probably just comes down to this Houston game Friday. We win and we are likely the group A favorites, we'd be 2-0 while owning tiebreakers over both the Rockets and Wolves. Would make our Kings or Clippers games super meaningful closeout games - and great experience for our youth. Going to be extremely hard to win in Houston Friday. This is the biggest Blazers game since we played Denver in the playoffs.
Heard the BlazerSurprise youtube guys overlook this, but point differential is only based on regulation, OT doesn't count. So OT games all count as 0 point differential regardless of the final score. The NBA didnt want a situation where a team was incentivized to sabotaged their own win to force overtime if that would better run up their point differential.
Kings vs Clippers also play Friday in our group. The looking way too far ahead scenario - if both us and the Kings win Friday, we can then clinch our group with a win over the Kings on black Friday.
Last nights Rockets blowout ends the Blazers cup chances. Next Blazers things to root for are: 1 Feb trade deadline 2 May Draft lottery 3 June Draft 4 July free agency 5 ~Sep 2025 cup schedule released
We still have a chance. If we win and OKC, Dallas and Phoenix lose, we will be the West wildcard. Or if one of those teams win, we need a blowout win over the Clippers.
We probably have a fraction of less than 1% of a chance. Simplest path is Dallas and OKC both lose and each have two losses. Suns play the Spurs so in that case the winner gets group B and the loser would have 2 losses below us. Then we can win and get 4th seed west wildcard. Dallas might lose against Memphis. But OKC is playing at home over Utah and is 13.5 point favorites so seems extremely unlikely they will lose. Currently Blazers are -5 point differential (differential is tie breaker if teams did not play cup head to head in same group) 1. If OKC wins and Spurs Win..... Spurs would win Group B (beat Thunder head to head). Thunder are currently +18 - so we would need to win by 24 more points than the Thunder do. Very unlikely. 2. If OKC wins and Suns win..... Thunder would win Group B (beat Suns head to head). Suns are currently +19 so we would need to win by 25 more points than the Suns do. Very unlikely. 3. There is no scenario that Dallas wins and we get into the cup as Dallas point differential is +41. We'd need to win by ~47 point more than them lol. The Dallas and OKC games will be nearly complete when we tipoff so will know by game time.
One kind of odd thing with the cup.... is the teams that get into it then play 2 regular season cup games against fellow cup teams which are stronger opponents, and may even lose a home game (play 40 home games and 42 road games as the Knicks last year). The teams that don't advance in the cup would then play those 2 regular season games against non cup teams that should be weaker opponents while guaranteed 41 home games. So if the teams primary intention was to maximize regular season wins would they prefer to have a lower point differential at the end and get eliminated from the cup in order to make those 2 regular season games easier opponents? It's an odd dynamic.
Yes but many of those cup teams are not stronger competitors necessarily. They just happened to win 3 cup games.
