Will The NBA Play In Cameron?

As a Duke grad and a guy who clearly loves basketball, Adam Silver understands that Cameron Indoor Stadium is a special place. Now he’s considering having NBA Cup games on campuses and in college arenas. Will that work at Duke?

Well, maybe.

There are some obvious issues, with the first being the size of the arena. Cameron seats 9,314, which is pretty minor compared to Rupp Arena (20,500), the Dean Dome (21,750), KFC Yum! Center (22,090) or the JMA Wireless Dome (over 30,000).

However, a big arena is not everything. If it were us, we’d look at places like the Pit in Albuquerque (15,000+), Allen Fieldhouse (15,300), BYU’s Marriott Center (18,000), and Texas’s Moody Center (10,000) in addition to Cameron, because those places are going to draw well and are the right size to really make the games look spectacular. The Pit would be really fun given the acoustics of that semi-subterranean arena.

As far as Cameron goes, the magic there is mostly because of the students who sit courtside and getting the students in would probably be a financial hit for the NBA because they don’t normally pay for those seats. They’re included in Duke’s $70,265 tuition on a first-come first-served basis – hence the tenting phenomenon.

Duke’s student sections 17 and 18-20 seat between 1,200-1,600 so let’s call it 1,500 for the moment. The average ticket price for an NBA game is somewhere between $85-200 so again for the moment, let’s call it $150.

The ticket revenue for the league at $150 would max out at $1,397,100. Compare that to the Smoothie Center, where the Pelicans would earn about $2,550,000.

As noted above, the magic at Cameron is the Crazies and to guarantee the Crazies are there, you’d have to shave off about 1,500 tickets and let them in for free. That means losing $225,000 per game.

Now, it’s possible that other sources of revenue, obviously video for instance, could easily make that up and borrowing the Cameron Crazies for an intense video experience might be worth it to the league.

But what teams would Duke students invest in?

Well, guys like Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel, Jason Tatum and Paolo Banchero. And we’re not sure the opponents would be very happy about that.

So there’s a lot to overcome for this to work. Does that mean it can’t?

No. For one thing, Duke likes to highlight its NBA successes and what better way to do it? What better way to impress a young recruit? You can imagine Banchero or Tatum in town selling a recruit on what Duke did to help their NBA career. So Duke would probably be excited about the marketing potential.

So it’s an intriguing idea but there are some real pitfalls for the league. So don’t get your credit card out just yet.