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New York Knicks to Participate in NBA 2k eSports League
NY’s basketball home among 16 other NBA franchise investing in the next generation of games meeting sports
Every day of senior year of high school went like this for me:
7:55 AM — Decide not to fake illness, wake up.
8:22 AM — Get to class 22 minutes late, fall asleep on desk.
10:00 AM — Hit the courts to shoot hoops during 20-min break.
12:30 PM — Eat lunch real fast, hit the courts again for full-court pickup during recess.
Rest of the day PM — Don’t remember.
3:30 PM — Get out of school, varsity basketball practice.
5:30 PM — Practice ends, stick around and shoot free-throws.
6:30-11:30 PM — Eat an entire large Papa John’s BBQ-Chicken pizza while playing the latest NBA 2k game, the greatest sports-simulation franchise of all time, for five hours.
Ball was, as the youngsters say, life, but if that’s the case I probably spent more time living on a PlayStation than the actual hardwood. The math cuts pretty close.
I’m telling you this because the NBA just announced that 17 teams will participate in an upcoming NBA 2k Esports League, a collaboration between the NBA and Take-Two Software, NBA 2k’s lead distributor. The league will debut in 2018, and will feature virtual representations of NBA teams such as the Knicks, Celtics, Warriors, Cavaliers, Heat, Mavericks, 76ers, Raptors, and many more, all on the hook for three-year, $750,000 investments.
The league’s infrastructure is still in its infancy. Revenue generation, investors, sponsorship deals, broadcasting partnerships (i.e. whether Twitch or YouTube will be involved), athlete contracts, draft machinations, all that stuff has yet to be worked out. But this marriage between jocks and jock-nerds isn’t new. The NBA 2k League is actually the crowning moment — the Draymond Green 4-on-3 pass to a streaking cutter — of months of pro sports executives trying to crack into the uber-lucrative esports business.
Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks’ majority owner, has been one of the more outspoken players on this front, devoting $7 million to an esports betting service called Unikrn.
“Hundreds of companies every year try to get me to invest, whether on Shark Tank or off camera. However, I only put my money and my name on the companies that I feel will be successful, truly advance an industry and have a leadership team that I respect. Unikrn fits all these requirements,” said Mark Cuban. “The rapid growth of esports has created an entire new category of competition and I am proud to partner with Rahul Sood and his team to help bring eSports to an even greater audience. As a sports fanatic and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, I’m excited to be involved with a new sport just as it’s poised for huge growth.” (The Dot Esports)
He isn’t the only NBA executive to dive into the esports industry. As of September, the Philadelphia 76ers became the first North American professional sports team to own an esports team, after it purchased two esports organizations, Dignitas and Apex. Last summer, American broadcasting giant Turner Sports and talent agency WME/IMG organized major esports tournaments live on TBS. If you’re an NBA fan that’s never heard of esports, then it might come as a surprise that your team knows all about them.
You might also be thinking $250,000 per year for a video-game league is a little steep. That money could go somewhere more else, right? Six years ago, I bought nosebleed seats for a Knicks/Pistons game for $15 a pop, and that included StubHub’s service fee. That doesn’t happen anymore. Ticket prices continue to grow every season, even though the some teams like the Knicks have nary improved their on-court product. $250,000 might be nothing more than a dime in The Madison Square Garden Company’s pocket, but that’s an extra dime that could go towards cheapening the overpriced beer you buy at games, or maybe that ridiculously pricy Pastrami Sandwich from Carnegie Deli between Section 106 and 107. Let’s not pretend $250,000 is going to keep franchise center Kristaps Porzingis around, yet even scaled down significantly the question inherent in funding esports remains significant: why should our hard-earned pastrami money go to a bunch of gamers?
The answer is that NBA 2k is uniquely qualified to satisfy both 2k and NBA diehards. It’s the perfect intersection: the sports video-game. Sports and video games have long been mutually exclusive, but NBA 2k somehow exists in the middle of the Venn Diagram. As much money as industry-leading esport League of Legends makes, it will always be inaccessible to a massive number of sports fans. It doesn’t look like a sport. It looks like a bunch of cartoon characters on a cartoon map. The terminology, the play-by-play commentators, the pre-game ritual, all of it is too different. To understand one has to learn a new, complex language that is entirely unathletic, apart from the most peripheral sense of the word: reaction times, micromuscular precision, et cetera.
In truth, most esports aren’t anything like sports in the orthodox way we think about athletics. They’re more like games that are practiced, spectated and generate revenue like sports, all while bearing zero resemblance to the athletics. But NBA 2k does look like basketball. Hoops fans won’t need to stretch their imaginations to understand it as an esports league (of course, they won’t need to physically stretch to play it either). It’s hard to sell your NBA fanbase on the acquisition of a new League of Legends team. They won’t get it. It’s easy to sell them on more basketball.
When I was in high school, my friends and I wanted to play ball 24/7, but the human body just isn’t designed for that. So we fired up the PS3, and carried out in-house tournaments until it was time for everyone to go home. When I’d get back to my house, I’d keep on chucking up shots with NBA 2k’s single player mode until my eyes weighed heavy with fatigue. And if I played too much that day — on the courts or on the PlayStation, it didn’t matter — it was hard to sleep; the pinging smack of a basketball rang in infinite jest in my head.
It matters that organizations like the NBA are giving an outlet to young hoops fiends. There’s a lot of those little junkies out there, itching to get on their consoles after practice. $250,000 will pay itself back in the blink of an eye, but this marks something bigger, a trend that transcends the whole “esports aren’t sports” thing. Maybe somewhere else, like in League of Legends, people care about that kind of nomenclature, but not here. This is just basketball. And we can never have enough basketball.
— Harrison Liao, staff writer
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