The NBA is one of the world’s largest sports leagues. It has 30 teams, 15 in each of the Eastern and Western conferences, and all of those teams play each other twice during the regular season. The Boston Celtics have won the most championships in the history of the NBA, followed by the Los Angeles Lakers. The franchises are spread out across the United States, from the New York City area to Alaska, and from Canada to Hawaii.
The nba is unique among major professional sports in that it has an in-season tournament, the NBA Cup, that features a subset of the league’s teams. Unlike European leagues such as England’s Premier League or Germany’s Bundesliga, which have separate in-season cups, the NBA’s competition is integrated into the regular-season schedule.
During the group stage of the NBA Cup, the 30 NBA teams will be split into six groups of five teams each. The winners of each group will advance to the knockout rounds, where they will join one wild-card team from each conference. The final four will play a single-elimination quarterfinal.
It is not illegal to grab for the ball, but it can lead to contact fouls. The league has reduced the number of grabbing violations by enforcing rules that make it more difficult to hold the ball with arms or body and by making it harder for defenders to use their hands. It also has penalized overt deception by penalizing players who attempt to exaggerate contact with defenders.
The nba is also experimenting with shorter games, in an effort to increase fan interest and the pace of play. The goal is to eventually shorten the length of regular-season games to about two hours, a significant reduction from the three-hour plus average time of last season’s regular-season games.
Shortening the regular season would require a change to the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players’ union. But reducing the number of games could be costly to the NBA, which relies heavily on revenue from ticket sales, television rights, parking and sponsorships to help fund its $5.7 billion salary cap.