British Basketball League teams in the Semi-finals are also seeded, with the highest-ranking team drawn against the lowest-ranking team in one Semi-final and the two remaining teams drawn together in the other Semi-final. The culmination of the post-season is the grand Final, held at The O2 Arena in London, which sees the two Semi-final winners play a one-game event to determine the Play-off Champions. The BBL Cup emerged from a breakaway of the English Basketball Association-organised National Cup and was contested for the first time in the 2003–04 season, when Sheffield Sharks were the inaugural winners. The competition is a knockout tournament with
British Basketball League pairings drawn completely at random – there are no seeds, and a draw takes place after the majority of fixtures have been played in each round. When there is an uneven number of member clubs in the British Basketball League, some pre-selected teams receive byes into the next round. The Cup final is played at the Arena Birmingham in Birmingham, usually in early January. The BBL Trophy traces its origins back to a previous competition known as the Anglo-Scottish Cup – and subsequently the British Master's Cup – which was founded in 1984 and was initially a competition between teams