Inside the economics of the NBA All-Star Game: The 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend could boost Utah's economy by $250M+.

• Author: Bagley, Judd

"HOSTING SOMETHING LIKE the NBA All-Star Weekend is an absolute slam dunk," says Thilo Kunkel flatly, completely unaware he just provided a guaranteed opening quote. "The host community cannot lose--particularly when working with a reputable organization like the NBA, which has a lot to lose if they don't organize an outstanding event.

Kunkel, director of Temple University's Sport Industry Research Center, is referring to the economic impact enjoyed by hosts of what's evolved into a three-day-long basketball bacchanal that briefly transforms the cities it touches, and which happens to be coming to Salt Lake City next month.

Kunkel earned his PhD in sport management and has published a multitude of academic treatises on the complex interactions of brands, professional sports and fans. But what earns him the most press is the work he oversees estimating the economic impact of marquee sporting events on their host cities. Most recently, Kunkel and his team came to the conclusion that the 2022 NBA All-Star Weekend, held in Cleveland, produced a direct net economic benefit to the city of a stunning $141 million.

This is not Salt Lake's first time hosting the event. In 1993, then-rookie Shaquille O'Neal played his first All-Star game here. It's understood that the NBA's All-Star Weekend selection process strongly favors shiny, modern arenas, and the two-year-old Delta Center--as the Vivint Arena was called at the time--clinched it.

The reverberations of the 1993 All-Star game were profound, as its unambiguous success demonstrated the community's capacity to host high-profile, high-consequence, multi-venue events. This, in turn, provided a launchpad for Salt Lake City's successful 2002 Winter Olympics bid, submitted three years later.

To give a sense of the long-term economic impact of the 2002 games, it's useful to look at skier-days, which is a measure of paid visits to Utah's ski areas over a season. It took the 20 years between 1981 and 2001 for Utah skier-days to increase from 2 million to 3 million, but only three years to leap from 3 million to 4 million--the obvious infection point being 2002. And the impact continues, as the Ski Utah Association holds out the possibility of a record-breaking 6 million skier-days this season.

A look at the past 30 years of All-Star Weekends reveals a venue selection process that is hardly evenly distributed. Indeed, over those three decades, Los Angeles and New Orleans hosted 20 percent of the time. Being awarded a second All-Star Weekend puts Salt Lake in an elite club, which includes such cities as Atlanta, New York City and Philadelphia.

Recognizing the venue selection process is not one in which every city eventually gets its turn, what factors, apart from arenas that sparkle, is the league looking for?

"It's a significant amount of resources that are needed. You have to decide if the return on investment is there, and where are...