The NBA’s move to take a page from European soccer’s book will take full flight on Friday.

The long-awaited and much-discussed NBA In-Season Tournament begins with seven games, commencing a five-week tournament that will conclude with a Final Four-style event set for Las Vegas. Teams will compete for the new NBA Cup and a prize pool of about $18 million. Games will be concentrated on Tuesdays (except Election Day) and Fridays.

As growing hype for the event has even included Las Vegas’ $2.3 billion Sphere venue, the league’s aspirations for the tournament were clear from the jump: to inject more excitement into the regular season and deploy a competition model more closely matching the NBA’s global profile. 

Questions remain on how the tournament will stand alongside the regular season, but even some of the league’s most outspoken figures and toughest critics have sensed a palpable excitement.

“All these guys are very competitive. It doesn’t matter which team,” said San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. “They’ve been competitive all their lives to reach this level of basketball. If you put something out there like this, it just adds to that competitiveness and really signals what might happen toward the end of the season.”

Media Matters

The league has unveiled a unified set of court designs for the NBA In-Season Tournament games, a deliberate move to distinguish these games from other regular-season ones. The effort marks the first time the league has implemented an alternate court for all 30 teams, even overhauling the famed parquet floor of Boston’s TD Garden.

Tournament games will be shown on a mix of national and local carriers, including ESPN, TNT, NBA TV, Bally Sports, and team-based, over-the-air carriers.

“Look, if it doesn’t work, I’ll probably talk about it, but I’m a fan of what’s happening right now,” said ESPN analyst and former NBA player J.J. Redick. “The [postseason] Play-In Tournament has been, I think, one of the best things that has happened in recent years to the NBA, and I would expect this to be a success, as well.”

NASCAR is taking over Phoenix on Friday for its championship weekend, which will crown season-long winners across its Cup, Xfinity, and truck series. 

But the 75-year-old American racing circuit is dealing with new competition on home soil as it looks ahead to 2024 and beyond.

Sunday’s Cup final is sandwiched in between two Formula 1 races — Austin in October and this month’s Las Vegas Grand Prix debut. Moving forward, F1 will have three annual races in the U.S., including the Miami Grand Prix.

“F1 putting a spotlight on the sport as a whole, I think, helps all forms of motorsports,” NASCAR chief operating officer Steve O’Donnell told Front Office Sports. “And we continue to be optimistic about our growth.”

Like F1, NASCAR is partnering with Netflix to film a docuseries around this season’s Cup Series playoffs. The latter previously produced its own docuseries, “Race for the Championship,” which aired on USA Network in the wake of the rousing success of F1’s “Drive to Survive.”

On American television, NASCAR is the clear winner, even though its season-long viewership is trending slightly down, averaging 2.87 million viewers through last week’s race compared to just over 3 million last season. Halfway through this season, F1 had been outpacing last year’s record average of 1.21 up to 1.24 million — still less than half what NASCAR draws.

Next up for NASCAR is completing its next set of media rights deals for 2025. The CW has already signed on to take over its Xfinity Series rights, and Fox and NBC are believed to be close to extending their partnerships. O’Donnell did tell FOS that he sees room for NASCAR to exist on network/cable television and streaming. 

F1 has two years remaining on ESPN.

Portland’s on the backburner as the WNBA looks for its next expansion market, creating an unexpected opportunity for another city to quickly capitalize on the growth of women’s sports.

While Portland could still be considered for a WNBA team down the road, the league in all likelihood needs to find a different city to pair with the incoming Bay Area club as the 13th and 14th WNBA teams in 2025. 

“The goal is to add a second one or a 14th team by 2025,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Englebert said ahead of last month’s WNBA Finals. At the time, Portland had been reported as the league’s choice but not formally announced. 

Englebert confirmed she had made a visit to Oregon, along with Denver, in her review of interested markets. She also specifically called out Toronto — which had a sellout crowd at the Raptors’ 20,000-seat Scotiabank Arena for a preseason game this spring — as well as Philadelphia, Charlotte, Austin and Nashville, in that order.

It’s unclear if the WNBA has made formal visits beyond Portland and Denver, which could make Colorado the new frontrunner for 2025. Englebert has been clear that there would be no more than two additions to the league during this round of expansion, and her top priorities are “the right mix of the ownership group with the arena situation.”

Still, there could be further expansion opportunities later this decade. Atlanta Dream managing partner Larry Gottesdiener recently told Front Office Sports that he would like to see the WNBA double its current footprint to 24 teams.

Like many media companies, Fox has no shortage of challenges, including accelerating cord-cutting and a weak ad market. The company itself saw its fiscal first-quarter net income fall 32% to $415 million.

But sports stands as an important bright spot for Fox.

Despite traditional TV usage falling below 50% of all consumption for the first time this summer, newly elevated Fox Corp. executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch says the cable bundle still stands as the company’s core business driver.

“The cable bundle remains our largest and most important revenue stream,” Murdoch said. “We believe that it will remain our largest for years to come.”

Such is Fox’s belief in the traditional TV ecosystem that it’s not rushing to mirror the rest of the market. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max has added a sports tier, Amazon is hitting new audience thresholds with “Thursday Night Football,” Netflix is moving into live sports with even bigger aspirations, and other network operators such as Comcast and Disney also are fully embracing sports streaming.

“We don’t envisage any kind of significant live sports on Tubi in the near-, medium-, and perhaps even long-term future,” Murdoch said. “We are not interested in moving premium content away from our cable distribution partners. That would be a mistake for us and for them.”

Ad Strength

Sports also continues to stand out for Fox in an otherwise tepid television ad market, Murdoch says, specifically college football, which “has never been more popular. Maybe it was underpriced in past years.”

Gains in that sport, however, are being undercut by a five-game World Series on track to be that event’s least-watched edition ever.

“Sometimes you get lucky and get a seven-game series with a matchup that excites the imagination of fans, and sometimes you get less lucky,” he said. “We would have liked to have seen more games and more national excitement.”