Vegas blowout

This city was built to stage major events and huge parties. But this weekend, even by Las Vegas' extreme standards, qualifies as an off-the-hook blowout.

NASCAR has taken over the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The Mountain West Conference basketball championship game is this afternoon at the Thomas & Mack Center. The Western Athletic Conference has its own basketball title game down Tropicana Avenue at The Orleans Arena. And tonight, downtown, The Smith Center for the Performing Arts has its invitation-only opening gala and concert.

It is a showcase weekend that will put the city on multiple TV networks for days, have Las Vegas datelines all over newspapers and the Internet, and force visitors and locals to make some tough choices about which events they'll attend.

It was quite the scheduling fluke that created this loaded weekend. Normally, NASCAR weekend and college basketball tournaments fall on consecutive weekends. And the opening of the $470 million Smith Center, nearly two decades in the works, is a once-in-many-lifetimes event of great cultural, quality-of-life and economic significance for the city.

NASCAR alone -- with this afternoon's Nationwide Sam's Town 300 and Sunday's Kobalt Tools 400 -- is expected to have an economic impact approaching $200 million, with more than 300,000 total attendees at the speedway. And because UNLV and UNR have had very good basketball seasons -- the Rebels played in Friday's Mountain West semifinals, and the Wolf Pack were in the WAC semis -- tournament attendance should be robust.

This strong beginning to March comes on the heels of a big January for the gaming industry. Nevada casinos had their first month with at least $1 billion in gaming revenue in more than three years, thanks to gamblers celebrating Chinese New Year. And 3.15 million tourists came to Las Vegas that month, up 0.9 percent from the same month in 2011 and the 23rd consecutive monthly gain.

More good news should come next week, when the Pacific-12 Conference is expected to announce that it is moving its conference basketball tournament to Las Vegas in 2013, making it the fourth league to stage its postseason here.

For a city that has taken more economic lumps than any other over the past four years, these developments serve as an important reminder that people still want to visit and do business with Las Vegas. No place else could do what Southern Nevada will pull off this weekend.