Big show planned in Big D for NBA All-Star Game

DALLAS (AP) — When it comes to the NBA All-Star game, everything is bigger in Texas.

Take it from one of the hosts of this year’s spectacle in Dallas, which will draw the largest crowd ever for a basketball game.

“It’s going to be such an amazing, huge event. I mean this will be the biggest All-Star ever,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said recently. “There’s going to be so much going on, it literally could be for North Texas the largest party weekend in the history of the United States. That’s how big this thing has gotten.”

LeBron James and the rest NBA’s best — minus Kobe Bryant, who was scratched Thursday with a sore left ankle — will play tonight at the new Cowboys Stadium, with more than 90,000 fans expected. Cuban and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had been hoping the league would push for more than 100,000, and the building could accommodate it, but that’s unlikely with the way the venue will be reconfigured for basketball.

Still, it will easily topple the record for largest crowd to watch a basketball game of 78,129, set for a college game between Kentucky and Michigan State at Detroit’s Ford Field on Dec. 13, 2003.

“You guys have been to All-Star weekend in other places,” Cuban told a group of reporters. “I mean, we shut down cities. I mean, literally, you go to any city and it basically shuts it down. So imagine having 100,000 people and all the people come for the parties. I mean, literally, it’ll be the largest party weekend in the history of this country. I don’t think there’s going to be any question about it.”

Cuban added the attendance and party scene would “make the Super Bowl look like a bar mitzvah.”

“That sounds like something Mark Cuban would say,” said Toronto All-Star forward Chris Bosh, a Dallas native. “It’s good that the city of Dallas is excited to have it. Everybody’s getting excited and it’s going to be good.”

The players are looking forward to playing in the $1.2 billion stadium, with its high-definition video boards that stand roughly 60 yards wide and 25 yards high.

“It’s going to be fun,” said James, a Cowboys fan who attended the first regular-season game there in September. “The home of the Cowboys makes it a lot more special to me because of how much I love and watch those guys every year. It’s going to be fun.”