But you could tell that, unlike those products of Division 1 programs who’d spent plenty of time on national TV, these guys had never seen a drop of limelight. “He’s a silent killer,” they said of one potential draftee.īackstage, after they made it, draftees dapped each other up and shared a camaraderie not unlike players at the actual NBA Draft. The ESPN-style commentators were radiating their wisdom from a couple of those extreme gaming chairs on a set in the corner of the draft room. For one thing, Knicks Gaming-the team affiliated with the voodoo-hexed New York Knicks-had the last pick because they are the reigning champions of this league. The draft, however, was persistently surreal. This is big business, and only getting bigger. Last year, Disney announced a multi-year deal to broadcast the Overwatch league. In 2018, when the Barclays Center hosted the "grand finals" of a tournament for the shooter game Overwatch, 20,000 tickets sold out in two weeks. The 2017 League of Legends world championship attracted more than 80 million viewers. CNN cited a 2018 report from analytics company NewZoo predicting 380 million people would stream eSports last year. The gaming industry is exploding in this country and worldwide, already a billion-dollar market that's growing by the day.
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Why not take a mononym, like a Brazilian soccer player would, and become a professional athlete? Why not get so good at video games that people will pay to watch you play video games?Īnd make no mistake: people are watching. eSports are a natural extension of this: competition is part of the physical world, so why wouldn't we compete-and watch others compete-in a digital realm? It's a space where people have always felt able to become whatever they want to be. We're accustomed to uploading our lives into the internet ether, creating a digital presence that ranges from a silhouette to something approaching a second life. They square off at a facility in New York’s Long Island City for games that attract a live, in-person audience, as well as many times more people streaming at home on their devices. Each team retained at least two players from the first season, and the coach was tasked here with drafting four more. There are 21 teams nationwide, based in the cities home to their NBA affiliates, with six players and a coach on each squad. The league is a partnership between the NBA and Take-Two. It was developed by Take-Two Interactive in 1999 and has been updated every year since, eventually crowding competitors like NBA Live out of the market.
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If you’re not a gaming aficionado, NBA 2K is the dominant basketball simulator on the market. No wonder that when the top big man in this year's draft pool strode up to the stage, he was a slender 18-year-old who couldn't have been six feet tall.
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There were hundreds, not thousands, in attendance. The draft room inside the stadium’s main entrance area instead of the actual arena. But the scale of this event was always present. “Jazz Gaming is on the clock,” managing director Brendan Donohue-the de facto commissioner, who strangely was not booed when he took the stage-said to kick things off.