BIG3 comes to Tulsa
Rapper-turned-entertainment mogul Ice Cube’s BIG3 3-on-3 professional basketball league stops by Tulsa’s BOK Center on July 9.
Three-on-three basketball with former NBA All-Stars like Allen Iverson, Mike Bibby and Rashard Lewis? How do you get to see it? Right here in Oklahoma.
The BIG3 — the selfproclaimed American professional 3-on-3 basketball league — is real and it’s in Tulsa this weekend. But if you look at the list of cities on the 10-stop tour, Tulsa stands out.
The first two weeks of the BIG3 have come in Brooklyn and Charlotte. After the eight-team league plays at Tulsa’s BOK Center on Sunday at 2 p.m., it heads to major metropolises such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Dallas. There are stops in Los Angeles and Seattle, and a championship game scheduled for Las Vegas.
At a little more than 400,000 residents, Tulsa is the second-smallest city to host the BIG3. Lexington, Ky., will host on Aug. 6, but even Lexington — a city of around 310,000 — houses the University of Kentucky, one of the premier college basketball programs in the country. So why Tulsa? “Part of what we really wanted to do was make sure we went to other markets that were not just NBA markets,” Jeff Kwatinetz, co-founder of the BIG3 , told The Oklahoman. “We wanted to mix up environments for the players and reach fans that don’t normally get to be reached.”
Kwatinetz, who founded the BIG3 along with rapper-turned entertainment mogul Ice Cube, said close to 100 cities put in bids to host the league this summer. Tulsa earned a bid for not just its proximity to an NBA franchise in Oklahoma City, but for the BOK Center as well.
The BOK Center has hosted at least one Thunder preseason game every season since the team moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.
“There’s a great new building that a lot of people like going to,” Kwatinetz said. “We’re trying to be as inclusive as we can.”
According to the BIG3, more than 6,000 tickets have been sold as of Thursday. Kwatinetz said the league typically sees ticket sales increases in the final three to four days before the games.
Those games have been a mixture of thrilling buzzer-beaters, injury mired bummers and week-to-week tweaks. With former NBA players being thrust back into competitive halfcourt games, there have been inevitable injuries. Former Sacramento Kings point guard Jason Williams was ruled out six to eight months with a knee injury after his first game.
To the BIG3 ’s credit, it’s been willing to change its format on the fly. After a first week of sluggish play in Brooklyn, rules changes were made. Instead of first team to 60 points wins, it’s now first team to 50. In order to shorten game times, a rule was implemented after Week 1 where halftime is automatically triggered when one team gets to 25 points.
It’s all for the fan experience, one Kwatinetz thinks will be positive in Tulsa. He’s expecting ticket sales to top 10,000 when the doors open Sunday.
“We’re excited we’re doing so many tickets in a small market,” he said. “If I told people at the beginning of the year that we’d do this event and we’d have that many people in Tulsa, they would have thought I was crazy.”