In 2017, world-famous rapper/actor/filmmaker Ice Cube helped launch the Big3. The 3-on-3 basketball league aimed to gain attention and adoration by using former players and international basketball stars.
Thus far, the basketball league hasn’t quite risen to the surface many would have liked to. Cube is part of the group that is, thus far, dissatisfied with how things have played out, namely, how the sports media world has handled it. The famed entrepreneur appeared on The Dan Le Betard Show with Stugotz to explain why it’s been such a tough go.
“We knew this wasn’t gonna be an easy lift. We thought we were gonna get a lot more love from the overall sports media community,” Cube said via Barrett Sports Media. “To really virtually ignore a league that’s this great, that’s this dope in the summer when there’s nothing else as far as hoops…The Big3 is where it’s at.”
Cube detailed later that the NBA’s embracement, or lack thereof in this case, has stifled things, along with the COVID-19 pandemic. He said he doesn’t think Commissioner Adam Silver “really digs what we’re doing.”
He probably isn’t wrong that Silver doesn’t “dig” what the Big 3 is doing simply because of their existence in the landscape. In the same way that The Basketball Tournament doesn’t receive too much love from the NBA, for instance.
While it’s true that the league does provide fun action and is around when nothing else is on, it seems to be facing struggles that other supplementary leagues face. There’s, unfortunately, a long list of sports leagues ‘below’ the scale of the major sports leagues that peter out. But to the Big3 and their credit, they have survived the brunt of a lot of unforeseen issues.
With a little luck and adjustment, Ice Cube’s lamenting of the lack of love from sports media for Big3 could be turned around. It’s never fun to see things not work, so hopefully, they turn the right tides.
About Chris Novak
Chris Novak has been talking and writing about sports ever since he can remember. Previously, Novak wrote for and managed sites in the SB Nation network for nearly a decade from 2013-2022