Mid-season NBA tourney in Vegas not bad idea

A bunch of good NBA players — but not LeBron, and not some of the other top pros — are in Las Vegas this week to practice for a tournament. Judging from the amount of media who congregate at the Mendenhall Center toward the end of Team USA practice, everybody seems OK with that.

Perhaps this is because the tournament will be played in Spain, and they’re calling it the World Cup — the FIBA Basketball World Cup — and it won’t count in the standings.

Still, if I were Team USA, I’d watched out for the Spaniards.

When they got together in Beijing during the Olympics, a little guy from Spain named Rudy — that’s all it said on the back of his jersey — dunked the basketball with the yellow swirls smack over the head of a guy named Dwight Howard, and there’s still like 12 versions of it you can watch on YouTube. And that game was close for a long time, and it was fun to watch. It had a flow to it.

But back to the point: When Adam Silver, the new NBA commissioner, was here during the wildly popular NBA Summer League and floated the idea of playing a mid-season tournament in Las Vegas that would count in the standings, or at least count for something, the media reacted as if this idea had an anchor attached to it, and the anchor was attached to the Edmund Fitzgerald during a storm on Lake Superior.

“As one of our general managers said, there’s very few things that you can win in the NBA,” Silver said. “I mean, when you think about European soccer, for example, that have the FA Cup, and they have other tournaments throughout the season. So I could imagine if we were to look at some sort of mid-season tournament, I would imagine doing something in Vegas. This would be a terrific neutral-site location.”

Silver floated his idea a few days before the Vegas Summer League set an all-time attendance record, and a crowd of 7,603 turned out to watch the Summer League Kings beat the Summer League Rockets in the final. On a Monday night.

This seemed like an inordinate number of basketball fans to watch a bunch of guys who mostly will be playing in Turkey or in Sioux Falls, S.D., when the regular season begins.

This is why Adam Silver is floating ideas about playing a mid-season NBA tournament in Las Vegas.

If it counted in the standings, and the Fall, Winter and Spring Lakers were to take the place of the Summer Lakers and what have you, then a lot more people probably would turn out. Provided the Lakers eventually return to their winning ways.

This is either forward thinking by the new NBA commissioner or basic supply-and-demand economics. But the way the basketball media pooh-poohed it, you would have thought Silver had announced the Kings were moving back to Kansas City, taking back the hyphen, and would play a third of their games in Omaha, Neb.

Harebrained idea, the basketball media cried, without so much as hearing a single detail about the format. Because there is no format. Again, this was just Adam Silver floating an idea without considering logistics.

It wasn’t exactly an original idea, either.

Movers and shakers on the local sports scene have been moving and shaking and banging on about an NBA event of this magnitude for years.

If and when the MGM builds its arena — as colleague Steve Carp says, it looks pretty good this time, but he won’t truly believe it until he’s sitting at courtside and the Wi-Fi doesn’t work — they believe a special NBA event has a much better chance to succeed than some lousy NBA team such as the Kings relocating here, or an expansion team of imposters.

After the novelty wears off in a year or two, all you’ll have left is a lousy NBA team such as the Kings that can’t rebound or play defense. The movers and shakers know this. And families of four soon will tire of paying $659.92 to watch a guy named Rudy or whatever dunk on the home side, $659.92 being what it now costs a family of four to attend a Knicks game.

(The Bobcats are the cheapest deal in the NBA at $203.06 according to the fan index, but Las Vegas isn’t Charlotte. Charlotte is getting to be a cosmopolitan city and all that, but people in Charlotte don’t pay $310.61 for Donny and Marie tickets. They just don’t.)

When Adam Silver started floating ideas about holding a mid-season NBA event in Las Vegas that would count in the standings, or at least count for something — and who says it would have to be a full-fledged tournament instead of, say, an NBA doubleheader or two to start out with — I knew Las Vegas Events president Pat Christenson would be pleased.

Christenson has been talking about NBA doubleheaders or something similar for years.

With a doubleheader or something similar, a family of four only has to pay $659.92 once or twice a year, instead of 41 times plus playoffs. And then you could book other things in an NBA-style arena such as U2 or Justin Timberlake concerts.

But it doesn’t have to be U2 or Justin Timberlake. That’s just me floating an idea.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski