USA Basketball, Las Vegas aim to stay married
Since 2006, USA Basketball’s men’s national team has found a summer home in Las Vegas. But when the organization unveiled plans a couple of years ago to build a new headquarters in Tempe, Ariz., the fear was the move from Colorado Springs, Colo., to Tempe also would mean saying goodbye to Las Vegas.
But the Arizona plan fizzled: USA Basketball remains headquartered in Colorado, and it appears Las Vegas will continue to host Team USA every summer.
“We love it here,” Jerry Colangelo, USA Basketball’s chairman and the managing director for the men’s national team, said before Thursday’s Blue-White scrimmage at the Thomas & Mack Center. “When something’s not broken, you don’t fix it. As far as we’re concerned, this is our second home.”
Las Vegas Events and USA Basketball have been in negotiations to extend the current deal, which expires in 2016, when the Americans will train at the Mendenhall Center and play a tuneup game in late July for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August.
“We may not have a minicamp here (in Las Vegas) next summer because we may elect to announce our (12-man) team before, which means we won’t need a minicamp,” Colangelo said. “We may decided to do a big media blitz in New York to announce the team. But we will have a portion of our training camp in Las Vegas and also play a (pre-Olympic) game here.”
Pat Christenson, president of Las Vegas Events, who has worked closely with Colangelo over the years, said with the Thomas & Mack undergoing a $70 million renovation and the 20,000-seat, $375 million MGM-AEG arena set to open next spring, there are more and better options for USA Basketball than ever before in Las Vegas.
“We’ve had great conversations with Jerry, and what we’d like to do is put together a whole program that goes beyond practice and a game,” Christenson said. “We want to make it special and have things like a Fan Jam, get the kids who come here for the high school tournaments involved, do some things with the NBA and really make it big.”
But what would really be big is for FIBA, basketball’s international governing body, to bring its premier event — the World Cup — to Las Vegas.
The 2019 event will be played in China, and if the U.S. is successful in bidding for the 2024 Olympics, having the 2023 World Cup in America would make a lot of sense, as it would give the nations competing a chance to acclimate themselves to the country before the Olympics.
In 2007, the Thomas & Mack hosted the FIBA Americas Tournament, which Team USA used as its pathway to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where it won the gold medal. Las Vegas, with its hotel rooms, restaurants, shopping, entertainment and modern arenas, would be a natural for the World Cup finals.
But while that plan is being orchestrated by Colangelo and USA Basketball, Christenson and Colangelo still have to finalize the deal to keep USA Basketball in Las Vegas through the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Colangelo said with the hospitality shown the national team by UNLV and the use of the Mendenhall Center and Wynn Las Vegas as the team’s headquarters, the idea of looking elsewhere isn’t realistic.
“When you have two parties that want to stay married, you do,” Colangelo said.
In Thursday’s game, 20 of the 34 invitees to the minicamp did not play. The White defeated the Blue 134-128 before a crowd of 12,211.
Only 14 fouls were called in the 40-minute game, which saw several alley-oop slam dunks and a minimum amount of contact. DeMarcus Cousins led the White with 24 points and 11 rebounds, and Andre Drummond had 27 points and 16 rebounds for the Blue.
Contact reporter Steve Carp at scarp@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2913. Follow him on Twitter: @stevecarprj.
