By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Like the Wyoming Barrel Man who comes to Thomas & Mack Center for every UNLV-Wyoming basketball game, the Mountain West Conference seems to have found a home for its annual men’s and women’s hoops tournaments at TMC.
An agreement between the Mountain West Conference and Las Vegas Events/Thomas and Mack runs through 2023 to stage the postseason tourney at the UNLV facility. The conference removes all UNLV references from the court and venue and tries to make it as neutral a site as possible for the conference’s men’s and women’s hoops teams.
Four teams from the men’s side made the national Big Dance tournament — tourney winner Boise State, runner-up San Diego State, Colorado State and Wyoming. Meanwhile, Utah State made the NIT, but UNLV, which lost to Wyoming in the quarters, did not get an NIT invite.
On the women’s side, the tourney champ, UNLV, is off to Tucson to play Arizona Saturday at 7 PM at the national tourney.
The Mountain West Conference will begin negotiations with Las Vegas Events and the arena on a potential extension soon, said Javan Hedlund, a conference associate commissioner.
The conference does not have official tournament attendance numbers, but it appeared they were similar to the 2020 tourney numbers. The Mountain West held its conference basketball tourney at Thomas & Mack in March 2020 before the COVID-19 virus pandemic shutdown the sports world.
Las Vegas Events, the nonprofit arm of the LVCVA public tourism agency in Las Vegas, gives $300,000 to the Mountain West in the form of a sponsorship to have the league stage its tournament here. The West Coast Conference also gets $300,000 from Las Vegas Events for its tournament at Orleans Arena, while the Pac-12 gets a $500,000 LVE sponsorship for its tournament event at T-Mobile Arena.
PSA