NBA ready for Texas-sized All-Star Weekend

When anything involves Mark Cuban, Jerry Jones and the state of Texas, understated just doesn't come to mind. So the expectations for NBA All-Star Weekend in Dallas are as oversized as the personalities directly involved in throwing the league's mid-winter showcase this season.

"This," Cuban said in January, "will be the biggest All-Star [Weekend] ever."

The game on Sunday is already expected to draw over 90,000 fans to Jones' brand-new Cowboys Stadium, a total that would shatter the previous attendance record for basketball, 78,129, which was set on Dec. 13, 2003 for a college game between Kentucky and Michigan State at Detroit's Ford Field.

Cuban initially had hopes to break the new stadium's record of 105,121, which was set on opening night this season when the Giants beat the Cowboys, 33-31. But NBA commissioner David Stern won't make drastic accommodations to the stadium's layout just for an attendance figure.

"We made certain decisions based upon what would be best for the comfort of our fans to make it almost impossible to break a record - the record for attendance in that building," Stern told The Associated Press earlier this month. "But the record we're going to be proud of is the largest number of fans ever to attend a basketball game. In history."

(Actually, the game won't even draw the biggest crowd for a sporting event on the day it's played. The Daytona 500 also will be held Sunday, with an estimated crowd of 185,000.)

Aside from the amount of fans that will be in the building, the city of Dallas is expecting to burst at the seams with the usual influx of fans, players and celebrities who flock to the All-Star Game. The city has projected as many as 300,000 people will visit for the weekend - hotels have been sold out for months - and as much as $90 million in revenue has been the reported expectation.

And then there is, of course, the fun.

"It literally could be, for North Texas, the largest party weekend in the history of the United States," Cuban said. "That's how big this thing has gotten, that's how overwhelming it is."

The league should be somewhat concerned, of course. Though all-star weekends in Phoenix last season and New Orleans in 2008 were mostly uneventful, "overwhelming" was the issue when the NBA chose Las Vegas as its base in 2007. The addition of NBA fans (and the usual collection of coat-tail riders and hoop honeys) caused a great deal of pedestrian grid-lock on the Strip and led to over 400 arrests. There was also the Adam "Pacman" Jones incident at a strip club.

The NBA has no interest in topping those kinds of feats in Dallas. The only plan is to do it bigger and better than anything else.

Last week's Super Bowl in Miami drew 75,000 fans to Sun Life Stadium, so the NBA will surpass that. "All-Star weekend will make the Super Bowl look like a bar mitzvah," Cuban said.