The Milwaukee Bucks are building a new arena, but NBA basketball will be far from the only attraction.
As the Bucks gear up to open their new home next fall, their brain trust is looking over possible draft prospects for the NBA 2K League that will debut in May 2018. The Bucks announced they will be joining 16 other NBA clubs for the inaugural season of the NBA 2K League, with team consisting of five professional gamers who excel specifically at basketball gaming. The Bucks announced their team will be called Bucks Gaming and will feature specially-designed logos and team apparel.
“I think when you talk about where the growth is and how the NBA is on the cutting edge and has a finger on the pulse, really the NBA 2K league, which is a joint venture between the NBA and Take 2 Interactive, is gonna blow things away,” Peter Feigin, the Bucks’ president, said on a recent Bloomberg podcast.
Look no further for evidence of that than the fact that Wes Edens, who co-owns the Bucks as well as pro League of Legends team FlyQuest, sits at the head of the NBA’s esports committee, according to the Bucks Gaming announcement.
“As you can imagine we have two 20-something-year-olds managing this product,” Feigin said. “I look at them everyday and I can’t believe it to say in six to eight months, our NBA 2K team will literally have tens of millions of views, interactions, engagements, which is a little bit more than your 40,000 people watching on local, watching a Bucks game to do it.”
At a time when basketball is growing in popularity, Feigin believes the console-based version of the sport will appeal even more to the elusive 12- to 35-year-old market. “This is gonna be incredible, and we opted in immediately with 16 other NBA teams to start this league. We’ve got huge promise in there,” Feigin said on the podcast.
In fact, esports is being embraced as such an integral part of the Bucks’ brand identity moving forward that it will impact the team’s venues.
“We are creating a venue out in our plaza that will actually have esports lounges to play in and our arena we obviously want to be a destination for tournaments,” Feigin said on a Forbes podcast. “So it is a real thing…these streams with 20 million-plus viewers are kind of the future of spectator sports.”
Feigin told Bloomberg: “We think obviously the 2K League is just gonna be astronomically successful with 30 to 40 million NBA 2K players around the world already.”
