The NBA is one of the most popular American based sports leagues in the world. And with only 30 teams in 29 cities, it can be tough to bring the likes of LeBron James and Steph Curry to different areas of the world.
To help solve that problem, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver revealed that the league has looked into doing some sort of midseason round robin exhibition tournament to be played in Mexico City, Mexico.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because Silver mentioned something similar a few years ago. He discussed a midseason tournament, similar to English soccer’s FA Cup, where every team would compete in Las Vegas.
Mexico City has hosted two regular season games this season (Phoenix Suns vs. Dallas Mavericks and Suns vs. San Antonio Spurs) and London, England hosted the Denver Nuggets vs. Indiana Pacers but Silver would like to see more teams compete in these international cities.
This obviously brings out a lot of logistical challenges. Mainly, the NBA schedule is already packed with 82 regular season games. And we have already seen a situation where Memphis fans were pissed off after not seeing the Cleveland Cavs stars play so expect more of that if you add even more games.
Or, the opposite could happen. If it’s an exhibition tournament, why would players like LeBron play? It sucks for those in Mexico City to be teased with this tournament and none of the stars are playing because they value rest but that’s what I would do. And that doesn’t do anybody, any favors. You create an arena of pissed off fans who are going to see bench players featured, a pissed off league not able to market its stars and having a more likely chance this tournament is a flop and pissed off stars who either get crap from fans and the media for not playing or play even more and be more tired at the end of the season when it counts.
Pretty much, unless the NBA cuts the schedule (which they won’t do), expands the schedule (which is already too long) or pays some outrageous amount of money to entice stars to play in this tournament (which they probably won’t do), this tournament is probably better off remaining a fantasy than a reality.
[Uproxx]
