NBA All-Star Weekend is the league’s annual excuse to show out. That means Steph Curry hanging out with E-40, LeBron James holding court, and millionaires crowded into every nook and cranny of the Chase Center.
But amid the bottle-service club nights, velvet-roped VIP after-parties, and celebrity pickleball tournaments, one little-known event is perhaps more exclusive than any other. And it’s a tech conference.
This year marks the 25th iteration of the NBA’s All-Star Technology Summit, an invite-only, off-the-record confab that brings together heavy hitters across tech, media, and sports to rub shoulders and discuss buzzy topics while bragging about new partnerships in a league that prides itself on being forward-thinking.
On paper, it’s not dissimilar to San Francisco’s mosaic of business meetings that bring together celebs and CEOs.
But no other event has quite the same mix, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang might strike up a conversation with Spurs center Victor Wembanyama, or the heads of Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, and YouTube all pitch NBA Commissioner Adam Silver at once.
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This year’s five-hour event is scheduled for Friday morning at the grand ballroom of the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.
Panels will include Powering the AI Revolution, Tell Us About Tomorrow: Understanding the Complex Forces Shaping the Future, and Stream Tech: The Next Generation.
Entry is capped at around 500 attendees, with no room for guests. Tickets are not transferable or sold on any secondary market.
What will be discussed behind closed doors reflects the future of a multibillion-dollar industry at a precipice.
From dial-up to broadband
The last time NBA All-Star Weekend came to the Bay Area was in 2000, with the festivities centered around the Warriors’ former arena in Oakland. That year, a young Vince Carter immortalized himself (and a Shaquille O’Neal meme) with his performance in the slam dunk contest.
While most of the basketball world was fixated on the fireworks across the Bay Bridge, a different stage was being set at the Ritz-Carlton atop Nob Hill.
The NBA had organized a conference that featured Shaq alongside Web 1.0 luminaries like AOL’s Ted Leonsis and a brash, 41-year-old Mark Cuban, who had just sold his website Broadcast.com and purchased the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million.
“I remember [Cuban] being the only person forward enough to wear a sweatshirt in a room full of old-school business types,” recalled J.A. Adande, who attended the first NBA All-Star Tech Summit 25 years ago as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
Mobile phones were just becoming widespread, brick-like desktop computers predominated, and most households were still on screeching dial-up modems. But just a few months prior, the NBA announced something quite modern: NBA.com TV, the first subscription network owned by a professional sports league.
In a letter to attendees, the late NBA Commissioner David Stern laid out topics the conference was intended to explore. Many still resonate, including how internet delivery of sports will change the industry and how fans’ experiences of the league will change when most of their interaction with professional sports goes online.
Shaq was on a panel — alongside Trailblazers guard Steve Smith and Larry Irving, then an adviser to Bill Clinton and Magic Johnson — on the lack of internet access for Black Americans.
Rick Burton, who reported on the inaugural conference for the Sports Business Journal, said the event was novel for its time, combining the business insights of the Sun Valley Conference or Davos with the celebrity glitz of the All-Star Game.
“What Stern and [then-deputy] Adam Silver accomplished was to socialize to the most important people in the game that they had to be proactive about thinking about change even if it hadn’t arrived yet,” Burton said.
Silver, who took over as commissioner in 2014, said he particularly prized the sideline conversations between panels.
“The networking that takes place. The opportunity to check in with friends,” Silver told The Standard’s Tim Kawakami in an interview. “It’s just one of those occasions where I think people just really enjoy the whole vibe that comes from the conference.”
League at a crossroads
Suffice to say, the summit — and the world — has changed drastically since its inception. While the future of broadcasting (and now streaming) remains a key issue, the league has dabbled over the years with holograms of dead icons, “smart” jerseys, virtual reality, and NFTs, to varying levels of success.
Shan Aggarwal, head of corporate and business development at Coinbase, has attended the Tech Summit the past three years. He was first invited in 2022, following Coinbase’s partnership with the NBA as its exclusive crypto platform.
His first summit took place during the height of the crypto craze. Back then, he joined Cuban, Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on a panel about the promise of blockchain and its applications to professional sports.
“A lot of folks were trying to figure out, ‘Hey, what are NFTs?’ and ‘What is crypto?’” Aggarwal said. “So I found it to be a really valuable venue to build connections for an emerging technology like crypto that’s looking to further penetrate the mainstream. The NBA really speaks to the world.”
This year, with crypto back at the forefront, Aggarwal expects conversations to focus on meme coins, prediction markets, sports betting, and the intersection of crypto and AI, particularly given the event’s return to San Francisco.
Indeed, if the schedule is any indication of this year’s focus, AI will be top of mind once again. Heavy hitters like Nvidia’s Huang and OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil are slated to take the stage across two panels with AI leaders from Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.
“AI has been transformational and has the potential to be even more transformational to our game and the entire industry,” Silver said.
New toys are fun, but the brass tacks of the league — how its product is consumed and paid for — is under more pressure than ever.
This year’s summit coincides with the NBA’s new 11-year, $76 billion television rights deal, which will see streamers Peacock and Amazon air nationally televised games for the first time. The deal, signed in July, comes at a time when regional sports networks around the country are collapsing as more households pivot away from cable.
“What’s smart about the 11-year deal is that it locks in prices at the current state of media, where traditional broadcast still has a role,” Adande said. “I don’t know if there will be another bidding war in the next round. Will the networks still be around in a decade?”
Even though he’s a veteran of the summit, Adande, a sportswriter who has since worked at ESPN and serves as director of sports journalism at Northwestern University, said an invitation is hard to come by. The last time he tried to attend was in 2020, when he ended up loitering around the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, talking to stragglers.
Current and former athletes, he said, especially the non household names, appreciate the opportunities to explore life outside of sports.
For his part, Cuban, who has participated in every summit and is grieving the Luka Doncic trade, told The Standard he values the networking at the event over the content.
When asked if he had any special memories over the years, he replied: “I don’t. There have been so many of them that they all blend together.”