Rockets forward P.J. Tucker, a veteran of leagues in Israel, Ukraine, Germany, Greece and Italy, has played in assorted in-season tournaments, the sort the NBA and NBA Players Association are considering for the 2021-22 season. He was at best ambivalent about bringing the concept to the NBA.

“I don’t really care,” Tucker said. “It’s like cup stuff. The NBA, I doubt they’ll ever get to that. We play for an NBA championship. I don’t want to play for anything else. There is nothing else. It’s like a consolation? I don’t know. We play for an NBA championship, period.”

Rockets guard James Harden was even more dismissive of the idea.

“Are we in college?” he said. “Is this college?”

Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said that as a player and coach in Europe those in-season tournaments were hugely important. But they came with relative incentives unlikely to be matched in the NBA.

“Heck yeah you cared about them because you don’t know if you are going to win the big one,” D’Antoni said. “There’s two big ones, the European championship and the Italian championship. You win either one it’s successful. You win a cup at the end of the year it’s pretty successful.”

NBA players could feel that way, he said, “If they put good enough bonus money. For us Italians it was for sure because it would double the salary. They pay on wins over there. They don’t pay out before the year starts.”

In Europe, he said, the challenge was shifting goals from tournament to league play. That might not be a factor in the NBA where the tournament would lack the history to be similarly valued. An in-season NBA tournament would likely be in late November or December, long before the focus on playoff positioning.

“That’s hard. It’s not easy emotionally because we would have four championships within the year,” D’Antoni said. “A lot of times you would come off maybe losing the finals in March, a European final, and then the next game is a hard game you need to win in the regular season. So, your energy comes down. It makes it tough to remain emotionally up every game.

“It is exciting and exciting for the fans. You can bum out on one thing and win two other things which is cool. It is an interesting concept.”