For Americans who can afford it and the workers who make it possible, summer is a time for pools, beaches, lakes, and water parks — a cooling down of the Great American Machine. Unless you’re looking for the next generation of NBA stars making their professional debut. For this, one must brave the desert heat.
It’s been more than 20 years since the NBA Summer League stepped onto UNLV’s campus with six teams and a laissez-faire fantasy. Two decades later, the 11-day tournament in mid-July is the official offseason hub for all things business and basketball, injecting an estimated $280 million into the local community for 2025 alone, according to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, which we’ll get to later. The organic success of Summer League all but paved the way for today’s Sports Mecca well before F1 ruined our morning commutes or mortgage-backed securities crashed the economy.
Yet, when this magazine assigned me to cover this year’s games, it was the production I was after; the courtside fashion show; images of chapped-lipped tourists walking among giants and dinosaurs; and the very loud rumors surrounding LeBron James and his desire to own an expansion franchise in Las Vegas once he retires.
What I didn’t realize, or couldn’t see until I zoomed out, was how the same razzle-dazzle style of play that crowned UNLV’s Runnin’ Rebels as college basketball’s national champions in 1990 — and during a similar period of economic uncertainty — continues to animate the Vegas legend that the Summer Games plug into.
“I still get asked when I go to conferences if I live in a hotel,” says Nicholas Irwin, research director at the Lied Center for Real Estate at UNLV’s Lee Business School. “I think economists, by and large, view Vegas as this sort of weird conundrum (…) with its scarce resources, limited water, land that’s not very fertile, (yet a place that) gives rise to this giant economy based solely on convincing people to come to the desert and spend their money.”
That reputation may be what fueled speculative headlines leading up to Summer League:
“NBA [owners] to discuss expansion in Las Vegas during Summer League” (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
“NBA’s Las Vegas Expansion Is Inevitable” (Sports Illustrated)
Then the event actually happened, and so much for all that.
“A lot of analysis still needs to be done, and nothing’s been predetermined one way or another,” Silver said at his annual Summer League press conference.
I fell victim to the spectacle, which often happens when I repackage hope and opportunity in a product-based commodity. I’m not alone. Many of us reporters tricked ourselves into thinking this Summer League was the encore edition Vegas deserved.
THURSDAY, OPENING NIGHT. The lady at the media check-in table bundles my ID and a plastic credential card that reads, OFFICIAL MEDIA MEMBER. “Make sure it’s always visible.”
As expected, the media room at the Thomas & Mack Center sits abandoned because the wait is over. Stardom is no longer in the queue. It’s here. It’s now. In minutes, the NBA’s newest savior, No. 1 draft pick Cooper Flagg, makes his Dallas Mavericks’ debut against the Son of LeBron himself, Prince Bronny James, and the Los Angeles Lakers. Only in Vegas could an exhibition game read like the Book of Revelation.
Earlier this week, courtside tickets reached DEFCON 1 — two grand a pop on the secondary resale market. If that weren’t enough, Front Office Sports reported tonight’s “get-in-the-door” price at more than two hundred big ones. Both are Summer League records, nearly double high marks set in 2023 when France’s Victor Wembanyama landed his spaceship in Southern Nevada for his U.S. debut.
“This is the first year I didn’t go,” laments former Vegas Seven editor and local basketball enthusiast Greg Blake Miller, when I sit down with him for some expert perspective. “I feel like I got priced out.”
“I feel like in the early 2010s,” Miller says, while neglecting his everything bagel, “I’d buy three tickets for me, my son, and my dad — that was like our summer tradition — for like $25 each. I could be off on the exact number, but it was very reasonable.”
Today — outside attending opening night or the born-again “Gucci Row” courtside status-check inside the Thomas & Mack — you can typically find general admission tickets for less than a hundred bucks. And you pay for the day, not the game, with up to eight games split between the Thomas & Mack and Cox Pavilion. Plus, the exclusive opportunity to witness “the stars of tomorrow, today,” according to Summer League cofounder Warren LeGarie.
Miller sees it as a tale of two experiences: “There’s the scene, lowercase s, as in, this wonderful festival to watch and take part in. And then there’s The Scene, capital S, which is, people wanna go and have it be a status symbol.” He adds, “Over the 2010s and into the 2020s, (America) became very clearly an experience economy.”
On my opening night, the place is packed. Combustible. Everyone’s got a bounce to them. I feel bouncy. Giddy. I thought it was only casinos that got you high on oxygen.
Then again, maybe it’s the purple and yellow napalm already inhaled from thousands of Lakers fans who’ve managed to carpet bomb the arena tonight.
“This is crazier than (Wembanyama),” says a staff photographer from the G League, the NBA’s developmental league. By week’s end, most players here will be assigned to their respective affiliate organizations or cut altogether.
“Were you here two years ago?” I ask.
“Yeah, that was my first Summer League. But this is much bigger.”
IT'S 2004. LeGarie arrives with co-founder Albert Hall for the inaugural Las Vegas Summer League (the NBA didn’t officially attach its name until 2007). “I joke we had inflatable people (in the stands),” Hall told filmmakers for NBA Stories: Twenty Years of Summer League.
Carole Adams Hattar doubled down on the Mickey Mouse operation turned global event. “I started bringing groups of schools, kids, Boys and Girls clubs, YMCA, just about anyone I could find who would come in, and seating them on one side of Cox Pavilion, so it looked like the stands were full,” recalls the event’s director of community relations. “It was a struggle to get people to come because nobody had any idea what Summer League was.”
Attendees totaled 1,700 the first year.
Today, more than 130,000 fans, players, coaches, managers, agents, and other collared casuals feed into its growing ecosystem, with NBA-sponsored events like leadership and tech conferences, jump-started by enough glitz, glamour, and headline drama, on and off the court, to meet your TikTok quota.
Summer League isn’t just the offseason hub for league officials; it’s an event-driven experience unlike any in sports. At the heart is what Commissioner Silver calls the NBA’s 31st franchise, essentially identifying the league with Las Vegas itself through Summer League and Team USA. The league doubled down on its investment here by adding the Emirates NBA Cup to its Vegas lineup for 2023 and beyond. T-Mobile Arena hosts for the third time in December.
Effectively, Las Vegas gave the NBA a summer home, while the NBA helped to legitimize Sin City on a cultural scale — not all that different than Jerry Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels shining a light on its own misunderstood community as a national symbol for tomorrow.
“A lot of the country thinks that blue-collar and razzle-dazzle are two different things,” Miller says. “It was ballet, but at the same time it was hard-nosed as hell. That team was a blue-collar team in a blue-collar city; that’s what I think sometimes didn’t get recognized. They didn’t get it.”
SATURDAY NIGHT. DAY 3. The crowd inside the Thomas & Mack rises to its feet.
It’s LeBron!
LeBron James is here …
Le-Bro-n-n-n!
Moisture glazes my palms. I feel the combustion happening in real time as I blast out of the media-only tunnel connecting the arena’s bowels to the lower seating section. There, a tsunami of madness swallows me: fans, foes, reporters, photographers, other credentialed dorks, and spoiled rich kids — we’re barreling down the aisle toward the King and his royal family.
Like most normal people, they’re here to watch their son. Except
LeBron is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He’s anything but normal; he’s the King.
Not even expansion gossip can escape the billionaire basketball god. His desire to own an expansion franchise in Sin City is more than gossip. Why here, you might be inclined to ask. Good question. He did call our newly crowned sports city a great “attraction” in a 2023 Summer League press conference. He went on to mention how impressed he’s been over the years by the level of fan commitment he’s seen around Summer League — but didn’t make any attempt to connect or understand the fan base, let alone Clark County, which leads me to believe he views Las Vegas as a profitable opportunity, not a calling or purpose.
LeBron wasn’t in attendance for the opening-night spectacle. Now, the ESPN cameras are covering this hurricane as it makes landfall along the baseline, where LeBron, his wife, Savannah, their 10-year-old daughter, Zhuri, and a few trusted confidantes are surrounded by a rotation of daps, hugs, flashing cameras, microphones — the storm surge feels endless …
When the chaos settles, I shoot back to the media room and shed my notebook for my camera. Minutes later, I’m cleaning my Nikon lens in a roped-off area below the suites. The man to my right also wears credentials and a hefty beard. “What was all that commotion a few minutes ago?” he asks.
“LeBron’s here,” I say, motioning downward.
“Shit. How’d I miss that?” We both laugh.
“There’s no more traffic in L.A.; it’s all here now,” he says with a smirk.
“What are you doing at Summer League?” I ask.
“I’m starting a sports rep company. It’s a great place to find new clients.”
We exchange business cards. His reads: … Esquire. “I’m an immigration lawyer.”
I don’t remember “economic impact” being a colloquial catchphrase for general consumption. So I hit up the expert.
“When you do these economic-impact studies, you have to make so many assumptions (that) a lot of times you get away from the real truth of what’s happening, because it’s so amorphous,” admits Irwin, our urban economist. “You can get to the results you want in ways that are still defensible in your assumptions. So, it’s really tough to get a true estimate of what the effects are.”
Great. More Looney Tunes math.
I do, however, appreciate the shapeless notion of economic impact moving across the valley like an impressionistic ghost. Naturally, this leads me to wonder: What’s the cultural impact of economic impact?
When it comes to Golden Knights fandom, Miller remembers there being an emphasis on identity from the very beginning. “(Owner Bill Foley) made a brilliant decision giving them a name that wasn’t Vegas-y. It gave us a chance to feel something different about ourselves. Okay, it’s a name; our team has a name, like other teams have a name … It gave it a sense it was Las Vegas’ team.”
Identity has always been this city’s biggest bet.
Perhaps that’s why the Raiders have struggled to find their local footing since marching in with their stadium demands. What did taxpayers get for their community investment? The NFL’s most expensive tickets for the last five years, and the Allegiant Stadium insurrection of visiting fans, who represent more than 60 percent of attendance on any given Sunday.
Now, more than anywhere else, this experience-based business model centered on economic powerhouses — like F1, the Super Bowl, or Raiders owner Mark Davis’ subsidized smugness — has produced an oversaturated and fickle gig economy.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen long-term,” Irwin says. Our conversation followed the Lied Center publishing a study on housing affordability that found a Clark County resident must earn at least $57 per hour to afford the median mortgage payment. “There’s this tension — I don’t know how it’s going to be solved, because the gig economy is not able to pay the wages to allow people to live here like … they could a generation ago.”
I can’t help but think: What does this mean for an NBA team? What happens when (another) “multipurpose” arena appears on our horizon? Will Summer League become another gentrified spectacle that prices locals out of their own market? What then of its community roots? And where would that leave UNLV’s economic and cultural impact within our new Las Vegas?
“UNLV is going to have to reassert its identity across the valley as the core of our community,” says Miller, his bagel now a memory. “Thomas & Mack is Us.”
Back at courtside, LeBron is surrounded by a bunch of gobsmacked infidels, me included. I raise my camera and mark the King through my viewfinder. Click. Click click click click click.
He wears a blue denim bucket hat, an already exhausted accoutrement, for today’s digital cage match. The evasive tactic forces me to dig in, fight through screens, dive for every loose ball — get out in transition on offense. I proceed to capture LeBron from every angle. Left. Right. Through the legs. I’m Stacey Augmon slicing up gravity the way he did in that championship run. I can’t be stopped.
Halftime: I’m under the basket. Watching again as LeBron entertains a succession of photos, hugs, chitchat … I want a close-up. Something that demands the front page.
During warm-ups I dart across the court like a coyote in the suburbs. It’s no use. LeBron’s staring straight down to Mexico.
Again, I pinch one eye shut and press the other against my camera’s viewfinder … Oh shit —
It’s just me and him now. Eye to eye. I holster my camera, frozen between thoughts, because at present, LeBron James is staring me down. It’s also my first encounter with a billionaire; I’m nervous. Finally, he leans into his friend and gestures back my way. He starts with his hands to further the plot for his bobblehead confidante … the rest comes into focus.
LeBron’s been watching me. My every move. I realize this while his guy nods along. Dazed and confused, I watch LeBron’s friend bring his hand to his mouth and begin rolling his wrist in a clockwork motion, over and over, as if to say, Keep eating, son.
I swipe through the images. From every angle, there he is, staring back. I’m staring back at me, too. I realize I’ve turned LeBron the person into a product — something I could use, when all I wanted to do was write about basketball in Las Vegas. A gust of regret pushes me into the aisle, through the oncoming crowd.
MONDAY NIGHT. DAY 5. Tomorrow, owners will assemble for the Board of Governors meeting in a publicly unknown location. League expansion is expected to be seriously discussed for the first time, though early-bird chirpings indicate some owners have recently soured on the idea. Vegas, it seems, will have to wait.
That said, Summer League is a gift in today’s world. A vestige of living, breathing virtue inside our daily vacuum of compressed caricatures.
“I got T-shirts! I got colors! I got sizes! I got T-shirts! I got colors! I got sizes … ”
Vendors make their final pleas. Fans buzz by left and right. The sluggish fade away after a long day of basketball and arena food. Behind them, the mighty Thomas & Mack Center projects forward.
The arena is a cultural landmark, where the Runnin’ Rebels flashed and dashed their way into the cultural conversation as sports, fashion, and hip hop were about to redefine America’s culture and economy, and this place was near the center of the basketball world. A place where the NBA’s first female coach, Becky Hammon, led the San Antonio Spurs to the 2015 Summer League championship. As she subsequently led the WNBA’s Aces to three league titles in four years with the team’s, and the city’s, signature mix of grit and glamor.
At the end of our conversation, I ask Greg Miller what a potential NBA team would mean to Las Vegas. He smiles. “A full house.”
If Summer League is where you can catch the stars of tomorrow, today, then Las Vegas is America’s past, present, and future, playing now.
