College Basketball Tourneys Come To Vegas, But Springboard To March Madness Comes With A Price
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
It’s that special time of the year for basketball fans in Las Vegas when four college basketball conferences descend on Sin City to stage tournaments to crown a champion that gets a ticket punched for college hoops’ national tournament.
The West Coast Conference is holding court at Orleans Arena off Tropicana Avenue. And after the WCC plays its tournament title game Tuesday, the Western Athletic Conference arrives at the 8,000-seat arena at the Orleans casino-hotel. Meanwhile, the Mountain West Conference hold its tourney at Thomas & Mack Center, while the Pac-12 schools visit T-Mobile Arena to determine their conference champ.
Las Vegas’ tourism infrastructure and arenas are well suited to accommodate the several dozen college basketball squads. And the three arenas are well managed with strong reputations for moving games along and the teams in and out of the locker rooms.
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And there’s another reason why the basketball conferences use Las Vegas as their annual early March home base for their tourneys.
Three of the four conferences receive healthy six-figure payouts from Las Vegas Events, the events arm of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), the public agency that uses a $450 million annual budget to attract heads to southern Nevada’s hotel beds.
The Las Vegas Events contracts with West Coast, Mountain West and Pac-12 conferences all extend through 2019.
The LVE payments are $300,000 annually for the West Coast Conference, $500,000 per year for the Mountain West, and another $500,000 annually for Pac-12.
Las Vegas Events spokesman Michael Mack said that, according to the LVCVA, the WCC, MW and Pac-12 tourneys had a direct combined economic impact of $23.1 million in 2017.
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It would be interesting to find out the LVCVA’s methodology for determining “economic impact.” But when I worked at the Review-Journal newspaper in Las Vegas, the LVCVA declined my requests for an explanation on how the LVCVA reaches its economic impact numbers from various events.
It’s common practice for the LVCVA to subsidize sports events organizers to stage their events in Las Vegas. For example, the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) has a 10-year, $175 million deal with Las Vegas Events for the NFR to stay in Las Vegas through 2024.
These subsidies are the cost of doing business to keep multi-day sports events — especially those that are staged during slower times of the year for hotels and motels — in Las Vegas.
These basketball conference tournaments are coming at a crucial time for the Southern Nevada tourism economy because tourism numbers were down for the last month that was analyzed by the LVCVA.
The number of Las Vegas area visitors in January 2018 was nearly 3.4 million, down 3.3 percent from January 2017, according to LVCVA data.
Total room nights occupied in January 2018 were also down 3.5 percent from the same month in 2017 one month earlier, according to LVCVA numbers.
Even gambling revenues are down 3.7 percent in Clark County in January 2018 from one year earlier. The Las Vegas Strip was especially hit as gaming revenues dropped 8.9 percent from January 2017 to January 2018.
And convention attendance dropped a whopping 16.7 percent from January 2017 to January 2018. (The convention attendance drop hurts Las Vegas sports events because some visitors come a day before or leave a day after a convention, and sometimes will use that free time to attend a sports event.)
So, Las Vegas is happy the basketball conferences keep on coming with their teams, fans and room nights.
The recent decreased tourism numbers can be tied to the Oct. 1 mass shooting on the Strip, where 58 outdoor country music festival fans were killed and another 500 were injured.
The room tax revenues that are being collected monthly to help the public subsidize the Raiders’ $1.9 billion stadium project have also been running below budgeted levels for October, November and December 2017. The public is giving $750 million to the Raiders to build the domed, 65,000-seat stadium on 62 acres at Russell Road and Polaris Avenue.
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