Looking At The Financial Benefits of a 1V1 Tournament

     The NBA All Star Break has come and gone, and it was nice to see it have a touch of Unicorn during the Skills Contest. The Three Point Contest saw Eric Gordon put on a nice display. The Dunk Contest proved its inconsistency by being a solid, yet unexciting affair. The most notable part of that weekend was Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant singing kumbaya in the way of a lob. However, there is one event that I believe can generate some much needed buzz for the All Star Weekends for years to come. This idea would be a One on One tournament. The overall benefits from this tournament would be tremendous for the league.

     Before I go any further, this was not my idea, as I got the idea for this tournament from Youtuber, Mike Korzemba. He talked about the breakdown of the tournament and how the league would get their stars to compete in what he would call the "Jordan Classic", a homage to perhaps the greatest one on one player in NBA history. I won't talk about the idea in depth here, as the video says everything there needs to be said about how the tournament would work. 

     In all honesty, this idea has me salivating at matchup possibilities like KD taking on Russell Westbrook in what would be the ultimate basketball grudge match. Hell, we could even get Joel Embiid's dream of seeing our own Kristaps Porzingis take on future superstar, Karl Anthony-Towns. What should have Adam Silver salivating though, would be the exposure this would give the league and thus, the financial ramifications would be greatly increased. 

Just let KAT and Porzingis play 1 on 1

— Joel Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) February 18, 2017

     Like I mentioned before, the profits this would bring to the NBA would be gigantic. Considering the amount of stars involved, the event can likely command around the same type of pricing for tickets and commercials as the All Star Game would. Here are the average ticket prices since 2015's All Star Game. 

Year	Average Price
2015	$1,121
2016	$1,014
2017	$1,007

Sources: Fortune.com and Foxnews.com

     Essentially, the average ticket price of the three games would be at $1,047.33. There's also seat capacity to take into account. Between 87 and 94% of the seats have been filled in each of the past 5 All Star games. That number would certainly be matched to witness the "Jordan Classic". 

     In order to put into context how much money would be made off these ticket sales, next years All Star Events will take place at the Staples Center. The Seating Capacity would sit at 18,997 for basketball games, and let's say 92% of the arena (about 17,477 people) is filled. That would mean that not counting expenses, $18,304,437 would be made from ticket sales alone. 

     Considering how the tournament would probably take about an hour to complete (including commercials), that would probably be about 54.5% of the airtime dedicated to the actual event, and 45.5% of it dedicated to commercials. That makes for about 27 minutes to dedicate to commercials, so from that front the "Jordan Classic" would probably not pull in as much revenue as the All Star Game does. 

It would sure be fun seeing KAT try his hand in this tournament.
Image from Pinterest

     Another important thing to note would be sponsorship opportunities. Seeing as how this tournament would garner a lot of fan interest, companies like coca cola and nike would be lining up to shell out millions for a partnership. Korzemba talked about how coca cola would potentially pay lots of money to name the 8th seed the coca cola rising star. 

     Overall, this tournament would be a huge opportunity for the league to capitalize on the sheer amount of star power it now possesses. The NBA has almost always been a league driven by stars, and given how this past All Star weekend was a disappointment (and overall has been shaky the last few years), a major change like this is needed.