Key Points
- The 2026 NBA Cup championship will be played at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
- The winner-take-all game is set for Friday, Dec. 11 on Prime Video.
- It is the first NBA Cup final held outside Las Vegas.
- The Butler University arena opened in 1928 and inspired scenes in the film "Hoosiers."
The NBA will stage its 2026 Emirates NBA Cup championship at Hinkle Fieldhouse, the home of Butler University in Indianapolis, the league announced. The winner-take-all game is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 11 during the 2026-27 season and will stream on Prime Video — the first time the Cup final has been played outside Las Vegas since the in-season tournament launched.
Why Hinkle
Hinkle Fieldhouse is one of the sport's true cathedrals. The barn opened in 1928 seating some 15,000 — for years the largest arena in the country — before renovations trimmed it to about 9,100 seats, and it is best known to most Americans as a movie set: the climactic state-championship scenes in the 1986 film "Hoosiers" were shot there. Its real history runs deeper. In 1955, a young Oscar Robertson led Crispus Attucks High School to the Indiana state title at Hinkle, making the school the first all-Black team in the nation to win a state basketball championship.
The Read
Moving the final out of a neutral Las Vegas arena and into a 9,100-seat college gym is a deliberate downsizing, and that is the point. The NBA Cup is fundamentally a media product — a reason to watch regular-season games in November and December — and a packed, intimate, century-old fieldhouse televises far better than a half-full neutral-site NBA arena. Staging the game on Prime Video, part of the league's new 11-year national media package, underlines what the Cup is really for: building a new marquee event, with its own aesthetic, inside a schedule the league has spent years trying to make matter earlier. It is also a quiet counter to Las Vegas, the city the NBA is otherwise courting as an expansion market — the tournament that put Vegas on the calendar is, for a year, taking its title game to the Midwest instead.
Source: NBA Communications
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