NBA Finals, what an impact on the cities of the finalist teams!

The NBA season is getting ever closer to the hottest phase, that of the playoffs which will lead until June and until the name of the new champion team for 2024 is discovered.
Needless to say, the wait is growing, because it is true that over the years we tried to improve the spectacle of the regular season, but the competitive and emotional ferocity of the playoffs with the level rising and the competitions from inside or outside make the basketball spectacle completely different.
What happens in the two cities that find themselves hosting the NBA Finals, the final act of the season which pits a team from the Western Conference and one from the Eastern Conference, is also different.
It is played in the best of 7 matches, whoever reaches 4 victories first takes home the title and sporting glory.
What remains, however, for the cities that host this great sporting event which also becomes a media opportunity to make itself known to a vast, heterogeneous audience spread throughout the world? Of course there is the exaltation of victory or the honor of defeat, but we must not underestimate the economic impact that a grand sporting show like the NBA is able to potentially bring to very different places in the United States in terms of location, history , culture and way of seeing the world.
The last two cases are those of Denver and Miami, two very different realities: one nestled at 1600 meters above sea level between the rocky mountains, the other located in front of the ocean with a climate and atmosphere that has very little cold.
The 2023 NBA Finals brought millions of dollars to Denver Even before the Denver Nuggets were NBA champions for 2023, analysts' estimates on the related activities that the Colorado city could have benefited from thanks to the performances of Jokic and his teammates in the Finals against the Miami Heat were remarkable.
The estimate was between 17 and 25 million dollars, as reported by the Denver Post.
Figures that only show the direct effects that the NBA bandwagon is able to generate, while the hypotheses for indirect benefits even went up to 100 million dollars in the most optimistic hypotheses.
The data was reported by the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation which imagined a total duration of 6 games for the challenge between the Nuggets and Heat.
Reality has returned a Denver victory in 5 games, which is why the predictions can be considered reasonably accurate.
So for the games played in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, we considered how much people would spend on food, drinks, lodging and transportation from the airport and around the Denver metropolitan area.
When the action moved to Miami, however, activity remained high in Denver, with basketball fans ready to organize parties or go out to the city's clubs so as not to miss even a minute of action on the parquet.
More generally, sports, recreation and tourism represent big business in Colorado.
They accounted for $60.1 billion in spending in 2022, with nearly 319,000 jobs directly linked to these three sectors, according to an analysis by the Common Sense Institute.
Miami also thanks the Heat and the NBA Finals.
Similar discussions can be discussed if we look at what happened in Florida, with the figures that do not differ much from those hypothesized for Denver.
Without forgetting that if 2023 was the first appearance in history at the Finals for the Colorado franchise, the Heat are more used to certain scenarios.
In this way it is also possible to observe how in the past the economic effects on the city generated by basketball have been anything but negligible.
For example, in 2012, a study by the Washington Economics Group (WEG) calculated the total economic impact generated each year by the Heat and their home arena at nearly $1.4 billion, including direct and external benefits.
Returning to 2023, however, according to the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, we are also talking about revenue of 25 million dollars from the 2023 NBA finals.
Without forgetting the television coverage, the images of the cities that scroll on the screens of billions of people, the articles, the videos, the podcasts, the services…
In short, getting to the NBA Finals is not only a great sporting achievement but also a great deal for the cities that are lucky enough and privileged to experience truly unique weeks.
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