🎬 Story
Where is the 2026 NBA Cup final? Hinkle Fieldhouse, the Hoosiers gym, after three years in Las Vegas
The 2026 NBA Cup final is on Friday, December 11, at Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, a gym completed in 1928 that now seats 9,100 and where the climactic scenes of the 1986 film Hoosiers were shot. The event leaves Las Vegas, which staged all three previous final fours, and for the first time the semifinals are played at the higher seeds' home arenas. The final does not count in the regular-season standings.
Clinch Desk · Fri, Sep 25
For three years the NBA Cup ended in Las Vegas. This year the venue and the format both change. The league has announced that the 2026 final will be played on Friday, December 11, at Hinkle Fieldhouse on the Butler University campus in Indianapolis, streamed exclusively on Prime Video. The building sits about six miles north of Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the Indiana Pacers' arena downtown. When it opened in 1928 it held roughly 15,000, most of them on bench seating, and NBA.com notes that no basketball arena in the country was bigger until 1950. After renovation it seats 9,100.
The building also has a film credit. The 1986 movie Hoosiers grew out of the 1954 Indiana high school state final, which Milan High School won as a heavy underdog. That final was played at Hinkle, and the film's climactic scenes were shot in the same gym. The league put that history up front when it announced the venue.
A year after Milan, the same building produced a second landmark. In 1955 Oscar Robertson led Crispus Attucks High School to the state title there, and the NBA describes that team as the first all-Black team in the country to win a state basketball championship. The gym was still called Butler Fieldhouse then; it took Tony Hinkle's name in 1965. Two chapters of Indiana high school basketball already live in the building. In December a professional trophy joins them.
The calendar, from the league's key dates page as updated on September 23: group play from October 30 to November 27, quarterfinals on December 4-5, semifinals on December 8-9 and the final on December 11. In past years the semifinals and the final were staged together in one city. This time the semifinals go to the arenas of the higher-seeded teams, a first for the event, and only the final moves to Hinkle.
The final is also kept apart in the record books. The league's Cup FAQ, last updated on August 12, draws the line at the championship game: group games, quarterfinals and semifinals all go into a team's regular-season record, while the final is played outside the regular season. The regular season stays at 82 games for every team, so the two finalists end up playing one more game than everyone else.
The trophy has changed hands every year: the Lakers in 2023, the Bucks in 2024 and the Knicks in 2025. New York beat San Antonio 124-113 in Las Vegas on December 16 last year, and Jalen Brunson was named Cup MVP. Six months later the Knicks beat the Spurs again, 4-1 in the NBA Finals, and became the first team to win the Cup and the championship in the same season. The two meet again on Christmas Day at noon ET in New York (2 a.m. on December 26 in Korea), an ordinary regular-season game played after the Cup is over.
Which two teams reach Indianapolis is not known, and this piece does not guess. What is fixed is the date, the building and the fact that the final sits outside the regular-season record. Cup holders New York, last year's runners-up San Antonio and host-city Indiana each have their regular-season schedule on their team pages.
Related