Las Vegas Strip NBA-ready arena, hotel project hits snag

Plans for a $10 billion NBA-ready arena-hotel project slated for a plot of land just south of the Las Vegas Strip have stalled.

Oak View Group’s plan to construct a 20,000-seat arena with a connected resort on Las Vegas Boulevard and Blue Diamond Road has hit a roadblock, a person with knowledge of the situation told the Review-Journal. The site is near where the planned Brightline West high-speed rail station is scheduled to be built.

Oak View Group issued a statement regarding the project’s future, but it doesn’t mention the Las Vegas Boulevard site.

“We are committed to building a world-class NBA ready arena in Las Vegas and will share more information shortly,” an Oak View Group spokesperson said in a statement.

The deal hit a snag due to a pricing disagreement with land owner Blue Diamond Acquisition for the 25 acres the arena/hotel project would’ve been constructed on, according to the source. In February 2022, Blue Diamond Acquisition purchased nearly 63 acres on the northwest corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Blue Diamond Road for $98 million, according to Clark County records.

Henry Lichtenberger, one of the two listed officers on the Nevada Secretary of State’s website for Blue Diamond Acquisition, declined to comment Friday on the Oak View Group situation.

Oak View Group’s plans to build an arena in Las Vegas don’t rely on the Las Vegas Boulevard site, as they are eyeing other potential locations, including the just-off-Strip Rio, the source indicated.

Dreamscape, owner of the Rio, aggressively pursued landing the Oakland Athletics’ planned Las Vegas stadium, even offering the team 22 acres of land next to the resort for $1 to construct the ballpark. The A’s passed on that offer and struck a deal for 9 acres of the 35-acre Tropicana site, where the team plans to construct a $1.5 billion, 33,000-fan capacity stadium.

Dreamscape didn’t immediately respond for comment Friday morning on the potential for the Oak View Group’s arena project to land on their site.

Other arena projects floated

Oak View isn’t the only group looking to build a new arena in Southern Nevada. Las Vegas-based real estate development firm LVXP announced plans earlier this year to build an arena/hotel project on the former Wet ’n Wild site, on Las Vegas Boulevard, near Sahara Avenue. The same site where developers tried for years failed at getting the All Net Arena project going. LVXP previously announced the hiring of an arena designer and a hotel architect for the project.

There is also a potential new unknown entrant into the arena space. UFC President Dana White last weekend announced, following UFC 306 at Sphere, that he was in talks to potentially be part of an arena project that had yet to be publicly discussed.

“I heard about it a week ago,” White said. “It sounds really amazing, but we will be a big part of that thing if it happens.”

In 2017, he UFC signed a seven-year deal with T-Mobile Arena, making the facility the “Las Vegas Home of UFC.” The deal guarantees at least four UFC cards are held at T-Mobile each year. The deal expires at the end of the year, with the UFC and MGM Resorts International, part owner of T-Mobile Arena, not responding to requests for comment on if an extension was in the works.

The UFC was able to host last weekend’s fight card at Sphere after T-Mobile Arena was booked for the Canelo Alvarez-Edgar Berlanga fight for Mexican Independence Day weekend. With the UFC wanting to stage a fight card on that weekend, MGM Resorts allowed the UFC to host the first live sporting contest at Sphere.

NBA expansion

All the planned arena projects being floated in Las Vegas come as Southern Nevada is seen by most as one of the likely markets the NBA will expand to, once the league gets that process underway.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had said multiple times that the league was waiting to get a new collective bargaining and media rights agreements squared away first, before expansion was seriously considered.

With those agreements now finalized, Silver, who has said Las Vegas is an attractive market for a potential team, will soon begin to look at expansion before the end of the year. Despite the enormous interest from Las Vegas and other markets, such as Seattle, Silver said expanding the league isn’t a given.

“Sometimes it seems as if we’re printing money when we expand, but it’s actually no different than selling equity in any business,” Silver said during a news conference at NBA Summer League. “So I think there needs to be a fair amount of modeling with the league office working with existing owners really thinking through the long-term prospects, again, not just economically but also for the potential for the dilution of talent. But having said that, I think we will engage this fall in earnest in the process of making those determinations of should we expand and if we were to expand, how many teams should we expand and what markets should we look at.”

Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X.