Thanksgiving week means college basketball in Las Vegas

In Las Vegas, Thanksgiving week means college basketball.

Las Vegas will play host to three tournaments — Men Who Speak Up Main Event at the MGM Grand, Continental Tire Las Vegas Invitational at Orleans Arena and Global Sports Classic at the Thomas &Mack Center during the holiday week.

“The beauty of Vegas is that it has quickly become the capital for basketball when you start looking at everything on the docket from Summer League to USA (Basketball) to the AAU tournaments to Pac-12,” Jon Albaugh, senior associate director of bd Sports, which stages the Main Event, said. “Everybody loves coming here now and the Las Vegas community really embraced basketball as kind of its signature sport.”

Men Who Speak Up Main Event

Over the past few years, bd Global has infiltrated heavily into the Las Vegas market.

“We’ve got this event, we’ve got Duke-UNLV opening the new (T-Mobile) arena, we’ve got a women’s tournament at T-Mobile a couple weeks later and we launched the Vegas 16 back in March,” Albaugh said. “We’re not from Vegas, but we’ve quickly found a home here. It’s a great community for events, sports, basketball, and everybody just loves coming to Vegas and we love being here. ”

Competition for teams can be difficult, especially with other tournaments around the same week.

“It takes awhile to build it out. We launched this three years ago and we’re just now seeing the fields that we want to start having out here every year,” Albaugh said. “Having BYU, (Valparaiso) and Alabama this year is very strong for us. We’re going to keep rolling it out next year and have an even better field as we go forward. ”

Continental Tire Las Vegas Invitational

When tournament director Chris Spencer first wanted to bring college basketball to Las Vegas, he had to undergo a difficult process.

Spencer recalled senators going after him to try to stop him from bringing his tournament to Las Vegas in the early 2000s.

“There were no tournaments in Vegas until I decided to take on the NCAA and do it,” Spencer said. “It went off without a hitch and, because of that, now we have all kinds of stuff going on for college basketball, including a postseason tournament.”

Now, Las Vegas has become a hub for it, and Spencer is working in a much different environment as he fills his tournaments.

“The landscape is a lot different. It’s not just that there are two other tournaments in Las Vegas,” he said. “That’s part of it, but there’s all kinds of tournaments now. There’s Bahamas, there’s Grand Cayman. There’s Jamaica.”

Global Sports Classic

The Global Sports Classic will provide the most local appeal, with UNLV playing in the eight-team tournament at the Thomas &Mack Center.

The Rebels will take on Texas Christian and the winner of Western Kentucky or Washington.

Two games — Cal State Fullerton and Northern Arizona — played before the tournament starts were part of the preliminary rounds.

“For UNLV to basically get four home games and not have to return these games is unheard of,” tournament director Maury Hanks said.

Hanks said he tries to get the best teams possible in his tournament — in the past having four future NCAA Tournament teams appear in the field at once — and though he occasionally runs into schools reluctant to bring their players to Las Vegas, he said he’s never had problems filling his tournament.

“Everybody’s looking for something different,” Hanks said. “One of my biggest selling points is I think I’ll have the best referees. Somebody may have as good of referees as my events, but nobody will have any better. The referees that are working the games next week for UNLV, most, if not all have worked the Final Four.”

Contact Betsy Helfand at bhelfand@reviewjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @BetsyHelfand