The NBA Cup championship has a new home next season.
ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Tuesday that the next NBA Cup championship on Dec. 11 will be held at Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse.
Hinkle is one of the oldest arenas in the country, opening in 1928. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has previously expressed a desire for the league to hold the NBA Cup final in historic college arenas.
The 2026-27 title game will be the first held outside of Las Vegas.
The NBA had a contract with Las Vegas’s T-Mobile Arena on a year-by-year basis, leaving open the possibility of finding a new home. Now, that locale has been determined for this winter.
Hinkle has a capacity of just over 9,000 and has played host to several U.S. presidents, alongside the first U.S. vs. Soviet Union basketball games, circuses, tennis matches, and ice shows, among other events. It was also used as a barracks for American soldiers during World War II.
“Hinkle Fieldhouse offers a special setting to capture the excitement and drama of the Emirates NBA Cup Championship,” the league’s head of global events, Kelly Flatow, said in a statement. “Playing the championship in an iconic basketball environment like this will further establish it as a signature moment on the NBA calendar.”
The arena has been described as “as loud as loud gets” by Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens, who coached at Butler from 2001-13.
The Lakers won the inaugural in-season tournament in 2023, with the Bucks winning in 2024 and the Knicks winning in 2025 over the Spurs, a preview of the 2026 NBA Finals.
