3 Point Buzzer: Issue 02

🌟 Editor's Note

Welcome to the 3 Point Buzzer, your quick hit for sports business, media, marketing and technology news.

Thank you for all the support from the first edition. I’ve been building my subscriber base for over a year before pressing send, and am proud to have so many influential folks read this. I’ll be in The Hamptons next weekend if any readers will be in town. It’s time to hit Carissa’s and the Clam Shack.

🗓️How the NBA Summer League Grew From Scratch to a July Mega Event

Picture this: it’s 2004, and six NBA teams show up in Las Vegas for a handful of exhibition games in a tiny 2,500-seat gym at UNLV. This was before the big TV deal. Before all the hoopla. No official branding or crazy NBA 2K sponsored concourse activations. Just some flyers and hopes that maybe some folks would care.

Fast forward 20 years later, and the NBA Summer League generated a $250 million economic impact for Las Vegas, per NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. That’s everything from covering spending on hotels, dining, transport, and entertainment by fans and team personnel. Yes, it’s a big deal.

Hit that rewind button though, and that first season was financed with about $30,000 of founders Warren LeGarie and Albert Hall’s own money. As Hall joked later in a wonderful New York Times piece by Kevin Draper, “I put a proposal on a size 21 shoe… ‘We’re trying to get our foot in the door.’” They lost money that first year, but by Year Two, they were profitable.

Disclosure: As a former summer league intern myself, my favorite piece of leadership that Warren and Albert displayed was their attention to detail: anytime they noticed a piece of trash, they would pick it up. Yes, the heads of the entire event, with hundreds of interns and staffers under them, picked up more trash than anyone.

Back then, summer leagues were scattered and kinda chaotic. “I went to every summer league, and people hated them,” LeGarie said. Games started late, fans were few and far between, and scouts couldn’t see who they wanted. It was more a chore than something anyone looked forward to.

But LeGarie and Hall saw something different: a chance to centralize basketball business in a single place in July. They pitched it to NBA leadership, including David Stern, and got the blessing and eventually support from Adam Silver.

Within a few years, the league caught fire. By 2007 the NBA attached its name. By 2008, 22 teams were involved. And today, all 30 NBA franchises participate in a roughly ten-day tournament in mid-July at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center and Cox Pavilion.

🎟️ From Bargain Ticket to Full House

What began in a 2,500-seat venue now fills arenas seating nearly 18,000. Over a typical 10-day run, 120,000 to 130,000 fans attend, and nearly 38% of them come from Southern California alone. Hall calls it “the people’s league.”

It’s cheap, family-friendly, and way more accessible than regular-season games. Like all walks of life though, even the best experiences get pricier, with lower bowl seating for the marquee Cooper Flagg vs. Bronny James matchup this July costing $650 for some tickets.

Only a handful of years ago, it was feasible to pay $25 for a ticket that allowed close court access. So while it may be harder to call it an amazing deal, NBA Summer League is still an eclectic place to run into characters in the NBA universe (walk the concourse and you’ll see GM’s, reporters and sometimes even players hanging out. It’s wonderful for the game of basketball to have fans so close to the action.)

📺 Media + Business Meets Basketball

While Summer League is still one of the purest locations to focus strictly on the basketball, it’s become the center of the NBA business during summer. It’s a mix of media production, business networking, talent scouting, and entertainment. ESPN and NBA TV broadcast almost every game.

In 2024, as the league hit its 20th anniversary, it featured dedicated meeting spaces for owners, GMs, agents, and media. There’s a Sports Business Classroom for students, lounges for filming, autograph stages, sneaker labs, even an NBA 2K25 branded festival and film showcase involving players-turned-filmmakers.

LeGarie once said, “We always believed this would become like South by Southwest… bringing in music, documentaries about athletes, a cross section of everything else.” Today that vision is reality.

🏀 Basketball at Its Core

Despite all the glitz, the true joy of Summer League is to glimpse rookies and the NBA’s young talent showcase their games. You can watch rookies catch their first NBA action and have fun overreacting to their performances. You can see which second year players dominate and prove they’re done with Summer League, or, in more unfortunate cases, see those same players struggle to make an impact.

Coaches and staff also find opportunity here. Assistant coaches get head-coaching experience. Executives hold summer meetings. Team interns network. Referees and staff undergo training. It all happens in one city in one month. The NBA off-season has essentially migrated to Las Vegas.

🧭 Looking Back and Ahead

Fast-forward to now, and Summer League isn’t just basketball: it’s a full ecosystem of scouting, media, business, and culture. What started as a long shot in 2004 is now a July staple, a proving ground, and a money machine. All thanks to LeGarie and Hall’s entrepreneurial spirit.

🔥 Sports Biz News Roundup

• Apple in talks to acquire U.S. Formula 1 broadcast rights

  • Apple has reportedly offered $150–200 million annually, more than double ESPN’s current deal, aiming to bring F1 to Apple TV+ following the success of its F1: The Movie and to expand its live sports footprint

  • F1 is a perfect fit for Apple: it has a premium brand, and its lack of commercial inventory during races is less hampering for Apple TV+, a platform that is ad-free…for now. The real question: Will Apple TV+’s projected user base of just 40 million be enough to keep F1 as culturally relevant?

  • Netflix’s shoulder programming show Drive To Survive certainly helps, but we all saw what happened to the MLS when a growing league took Apple’s money in exchange for less distribution

• Polymarket to Raise at $1bn Valuation

  • Polymarket is “nearing“ a $200 million funding round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, valuing the platform at $1 billion. Polymarket considered raising $50m in September 2024, alongside the launch of a native token, but have seemingly decided to go the traditional route

  • Keep an eye on Polymarket. Their TAM is massive and they possess a very young user base

• Flutter to buy Boyd Gaming’s 5% stake in FanDuel in $1.76B deal

  • Flutter will acquire the remaining interest it didn’t own for ~$1.55 b plus ~$205 m in commercial adjustments, bringing its FanDuel ownership to 100%; FanDuel is valued at ~$31 b and accounts for nearly half of Flutter’s revenue

  • Sports betting isn’t going away anytime soon

• Big East & ESPN sign six‑year streaming rights deal from 2025

  • ESPN+ will stream over 300 events annually across all Big East sports, including women’s basketball and Olympic sports—marking the return of the conference to ESPN after more than a decade

  • These types of deals may not garner the biggest headlines, but they are the type of content - lots of inventory, high fan engagement - that allow ESPN to still be a home for all sports even as they lose rights to big-pocketed streamers (*Coughs F1*)

• Uber named the official rideshare and on‑demand delivery partner for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic & Paralympic Games and Team USA

  • Uber Eats will deliver meals to the Olympic Village and enable mobile food ordering at select venues. The company will also support NBCUniversal’s broadcast coverage for both the LA Games and the 2026 Milano‑Cortina Winter Olympics

  • Strong integration for Uber, which is going to be essential when the Olympics come to LA in 2028 and the metro still isn’t finished. As an LA resident, we are in for a transportation infrastructure nightmare. For my wealthy readers, may I suggest a helicopter?

• UEFA eyes major expansion of its OTT platform UEFA.tv

  • The organization has launched a Request for Information (RFI) to assess how to scale its free global OTT service from around 250 live events per season to approximately 1,000, aiming to enhance features and explore new monetization models such as tiered subscriptions, pay-per-view, dynamic ads, and branded content

• Adobe announced as the Premier League’s Official Creativity and Digital Fan Experience Partner

  • In a multi‑year deal unveiled at Adobe Summit London, Adobe will empower the Premier League and its ~1.8 billion global fans via its AI-powered tools - Adobe Express, Firefly, and the Experience Platform. These are being integrated into Fantasy Premier League for creating custom badges, kits, banners, video clips and social content. The goal is to deliver highly personalized digital and mobile experiences

    tailored for fans worldwide

• New Philadelphia 76ers Arena Will Redefine Home-Court Advantage, CEO Says

  • HBSE and arena partner Comcast intend to push well past recently opened and technologically advanced venues such as the Intuit Dome and Chase Center, each located in California

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