Stakes Are Heightened: NBA Las Vegas Summer League Co-Founder on This Year’s Event Amid Expansion Talks

By Mick Akers, Las Vegas Review-Journal

This year’s Las Vegas NBA Summer League has a different feel to it with the league officially exploring the city for a potential expansion team.

Summer League co-founder Albert Hall said the crowd showing out this year, as it has in the past, is as important as ever for the annual event that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver already calls the NBA’s 31st franchise.

“I think the stakes are heightened right for everybody,” Hall told the Review-Journal on Tuesday. “Las Vegas has proven they can be a big major league city with the NHL and NFL and whatnot. I think for us it’s a matter of really being that 31st franchise, as Adam alludes, to show what works, what doesn’t, whoever that new team may be. There is a lot of talk.”

Silver will address the media on July 14, Hall said, where an update on the expansion process is almost a certainty. In March, Silver announced that the league was formally exploring Las Vegas and Seattle for potential expansion teams.

“Doing it (Summer League) for 22 years here, we’ve got a great track record,” Hall said. “However this thing plays out, we hope we’re a part of it in some form or fashion. But it’s exciting. … It’s something that we need to have the locals support Summer League every way possible to show that it can support an NBA team. Quite honestly, Vegas is a basketball town. It really is.”

When the NBA Summer League began in Las Vegas in 2004, it only featured six teams and drew a total crowd of 1,500, Hall said. The event grew each year, to eventually include all 30 NBA teams and become one of the league’s marquee events.

“We were just figuring things out, but we realized there’s a big demand,” Hall said. “Then as broadcast grew, as the internet grew, it’s just one of those things where … we were showing whoever was paying attention that we’re making improvements; we’re making adjustments. People in Las Vegas and Clark County are supporting what we’re doing, especially on some of those big (games), going back to the Kevin Durant or the Blake Griffin and Lonzo Ball nights, where it felt like a prize fight almost. But it showed that people will support this if it’s done correctly.”

Click here to read the full article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal