The NBA All-Star Game is in Vegas this weekend and half of me wishes I was going to be there (should be the craziest party ever) and the other half is glad I'm not there (as someone who makes under 100k a year I'm imagining it won't be as fun for the little guys). Bill Simmons had a little thing today about what he expects Vegas to be like this weekend and since its so good I'm just going to reprint most of it here:
1. It's going to be one of the most crowded 72-hour stretches in Vegas history, thanks to All-Star weekend, Chinese New Year and a major fashion convention that will swallow up every taxi, hotel room and $25 blackjack table on Friday and Saturday nights. If you plan on gambling this weekend and don't have a ton of money, be prepared to re-enact Mikey's scene at the $100 table in "Swingers."
2. Every ovulating groupie within a 12-hour vicinity will be making the weekend drive to Vegas to hopefully get impregnated by an NBA player — a list that includes every hooker, stripper and jock-sniffing female between 16 and 40 from Vegas, Reno, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Phoenix and every city and town in the Los Angeles area. To its credit, the NBA is recommending that all players wear two condoms at once, even during the day and when they're sleeping.
3. Every celeb and wannabe celeb will descend on the city to party. (If you ever wanted to have Britney Spears puke on you, this is the weekend.) If you hope to hit the nightclub scene, you better be hanging with someone famous. And no, Marc Stein doesn't qualify. Ric Bucher … maybe.
4. Not only is every heavy hitter with any association to the NBA (owners, minority owners, team execs, advertising and TV execs, etc.) heading to Vegas, all of them think they're attending the Slam Dunk Contest and Sunday's game … even though the Thomas & Mack Center holds about 18,000 people and has only 30 luxury suites. As strange as this sounds, Saturday and Sunday could be two of the toughest tickets in recent sports history.
5. There are so many parties on Friday and Saturday night that it's legitimately impossible to keep track of everything. But here's the big question nobody has been able to answer … how will everyone get around? Let's say you're at the Hard Rock on Friday night, and you want to get to the Palms. How are you getting a cab? Let's say you're a heavy hitter and hired a limo, which gives you something in common with the 25,000 other heavy hitters who thought they'd play it smart and hire a limo. Where are all these limos parking? Let's say you're one of the 100 million media members staying at the MGM Grand, and you head down to the lobby to wait in a cab line at 7 p.m. on Friday along with 100 other media members. When will you be actually getting in that cab? Tuesday? Wednesday?
I don't know the answer to any of these questions, much less how Vegas' airport (a notorious train wreck) will handle the onslaught of people coming in Thursday/Friday and leaving Monday morning. On a normal weekend, it takes 30-45 minutes to get a cab unless you can pay off a limo driver. How long will it take this weekend? Two hours? Three? On the bright side, Vegas had a year to prepare for every possible problem and desperately wants to prove its mettle as a potential NBA destination. So maybe the city figured all of this out. I am cautiously optimistic. Others are decidedly pessimistic. We will see.
Sounds like a good time. Now I kinda wish I was going.