After watching two small Midwestern cities and one small mountainous city host the NBA All-Star Game, Oklahoma City fans, who have watched their city evolve over the last 15 years, wonder when the time will come for them to get a front-row seat to the weekend festivities.
Joe Mussatto of The Daily Oklahoman talked to Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt on the topic.
“There’s only two NBA markets smaller than ours,” said Holt, who has spearheaded most of OKC’s recent growth, including pushing forward a bill that would bring the city a new cutting-edge arena. “There’s only one of these (All-Star games) every year.”
OKC’s new downtown arena will cost a minimum of $900 million and will open as early as 2029, but despite doing wonders for the city’s economy and making it more attractive to tourists and touring acts, OKC’s still miles away from hosting an NBA All-Star Weekend.
There are three requirements, per an NBA spokesperson:
- 7,250 hotel rooms and a minimum of three five-star hotels.
- Convention center of 650,000 square feet of exhibition space.
- 75 nonstop domestic flights and at least 20 international flights.
No, Indianapolis doesn’t have the third requirement, but the league’s requirements changed since 2017 when Indianapolis was awarded its bid in 2017.
With the new parameters in place, even OKC’s beautiful new arena isn’t enough to save the city. Here’s a brief breakdown of why OKC doesn’t meet the NBA’s standard to host an All-Star Weekend.
There aren’t enough hotel rooms
As of July 2023, the Oklahoma City Convention and Visitors Bureau reported that downtown OKC only has 4,919 hotel rooms. Whether they are all five-star rooms or not, downtown lacks the requirement by approximately 32 percent.
The convention center isn’t big enough.
OKC’s two-year-old Convention center is 500,000 square feet, lacking the NBA’s requirement of 150,000 square feet, about the size of 75 average-sized houses.
OKC’s airport misses the mark by a large margin
We’ve all been critical of OKC’s airport despite the City’s efforts to improve it. Honestly, 90% of the time, I’d prefer to make the drive to Dallas for a cheaper flight and broader destinations.
There are no international flights, and it only offers a third (25) of the league’s requirement of 75 non-stop flights. Not to mention, two are seasonal flights. Those flights only travel to 21 cities.
Despite Oklahoma City being one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, reaching approximately 1.5 million residents within the metro area, it will likely fall short of the league’s requirements, even into the 2030s.
“I don’t want to leave you with the impression that it’s impossible to imagine us ever having it, but it’s just very challenging with us being a small market, almost the smallest market in the NBA,” Holt told The Oklahoman.
“We were never really going to be in the running for something like this regardless if we’d had all the hotel rooms in the world,” Holt said. “Our arena was probably farther below standards than we had even realized until recently.”
