Just weeks ahead of the official draft for the NBA 2K League’s inaugural season, the NBA is already setting its sights on global expansion.
NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum said the basketball league is looking to turn its new esports league into a “truly global sport” that can coexist alongside the physical game just as the WNBA and G League have coexisted alongside the traditional men’s league.
“We’re going to have teams eventually from Team Beijing play Team Dehli play Team London against the Celtics and create truly global competition,” Tatum said at a South by Southwest panel discussing the evolution of basketball.
Tatum said the NBA invested in NBA 2K because of the younger demographics esports tend to attract, which isn’t surprising as it has been a primary motive among many of the traditional sports teams that have invested in esports over the past few years.
Attracting that audience is a major reason why the NBA (through the G League) and NFL (through Thursday Night Football) have started streaming games on Twitch, Amazon’s social streaming service that’s popular with esports fans.
“Twitch is a completely different experience than watching on TV, it’s information overload. But that’s how this young demographic is consuming the sport today,” said Tatum. “We need to be in [esports] because we need to attract those younger demographics.”
The NBA was first alerted about esports a few years ago when it learned that entire basketball venues were being sold out for esports competitions, according to Tatum. In 2015, Madison Square Garden, the midtown Manhattan home of the NBA’s New York Knicks, reached a sold-out capacity of 11,000 people for a championship round of League of Legends.
Since then, traditional sports team franchises across the four major U.S. leagues have been investing in esports. Some have invested in battle arena games such as League of Legends and Dota 2, or first-person shooter games such as Overwatch, while others have turned to games that mimic traditional sports, such as Take-Two Interactive’s NBA 2K or EA’s Madden for football.
In 2016, Axiomatic, an esports and gaming investor group run by multiple owners of traditional professional sports teams acquired a majority stake in Team Liquid, a Dota 2 championship team. In 2017, more traditional sports team owners invested in a new esports league that seeks to mirror traditional sports with city-based teams based off the first-person shooter game Overwatch. The NBA’s Golden State Warriors spent millions of dollars to launch a League of Legends team and are participating in this year’s North America League of Legends Championship Series.
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The NBA’s inaugural 2K league will kick off in May after an April 6 draft at the Hulu Theater adjacent to Madison Square Garden’s lobby. Ever on the hunt to streamline the two drastically-different-but-now-linked sports, the league borrowed the ping-pong ball draft lottery that’s used by the NBA to determine official draft orders. Tatum said the NBA preferred NBA 2K over battlefield or shooter video games such as League of Legends because it felt like a more natural transition from traditional ball playing.
“We thought this would be a great opportunity to engage with this audience with a product that’s natural to our own game,” he said.
At SXSW, some audience members were aghast at the thought that the NBA 2K League could one day be as big (or as important to the NBA) as traditional basketball. Tatum, however, doesn’t expect esports to replace traditional sports, but to target a different kind of audience and players with a totally different skill set, which he believes would enable them both to grow organically.
“I still think there will always be a place for going out to watch live sports, live competition,” he said. “This is a different skill set, it’s a different competition. Our goal is to grow both. To grow the actual game, the physical game of the the NBA, and the digital game.”
While the league is dedicating resources to expanding its presence in esports and has ambitious goals of taking the NBA 2K international in future seasons, Tatum says the NBA will continue to invest as it always has in its minor and youth leagues to engage new generations of ball players.
“We don’t lose sight of that,” he said. “If we do that [invest in minor and youth leagues] we’ll continue to grow the fan base for generations to come despite the growth of esports.”