The NBA’s latest arms race? Building wildly expensive practice facilities

WASHINGTON – The Cleveland Cavaliers launched the latest salvo. On a drizzly October morning, several hundred people gathered along the Cuyahoga River to celebrate the ground-breaking for a gargantuan practice facility that could outclass any training centre in pro basketball.

“It’s a tremendous day in Cleveland,” the Cavaliers’ president of basketball operations, Koby Altman, told the crowd, “and we can’t let the weather dampen our mood because we are standing on what’s going to be, this exact location, the most spectacular sports training facility in the world.”

A few minutes later, 17 dignitaries – including Mayor Justin M. Bibb; Tom Mihaljevic, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic; and Cavaliers players Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley – plunged gold-plated shovels into the dirt. Fireworks arced towards the river. Recorded music blared over loudspeakers.

The Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Centre, designed by the architecture firm Populous and expected to open in 2027, will escalate the most visible National Basketball Association (NBA) off-court competition of the last decade to more garish and more player-friendly heights.

Since 2014, with basketball operations departments and team payrolls expanding, 20 of the NBA’s 30 franchises have opened new practice facilities. It has been an unrelenting contest of innovation and one-upmanship, with most of the participating clubs claiming new advantages in athlete care, roster retention and free-agency recruitment.

In recent years, the price tag to build a stand-alone training centre has typically ranged from US$70 million (S$94.4 million) to US$90 million, according to figures cited by the teams, usually paid for by the franchises.

“This is an arms race of sorts,” said Nic Barlage, CEO of Rock Entertainment Group, an umbrella company for Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert. He added that the NBA is built off “innovation and evolution and leveraging all the amazing resources that we all have across the league”.

The facilities boast similar amenities. All feature two full-size basketball courts, allowing each team to operate more efficiently. Most of them, in conjunction with partner health care systems, have state-of-the-art imaging equipment; in some cases, if a player is injured in practice, he does not need to leave the building to receive an MRI scan or an X-ray. There are cutting-edge weight rooms, cold-plunge tubs and high-altitude simulation chambers for training and recovery. Staffed kitchens offer healthy food.

“You want to create an environment where the athlete can be elevated,” said Jonathan Mallie, the lead architect on the Cavaliers project.

In September, the Houston Rockets, who used to train in a facility at their home arena, opened a 75,000 sq ft training centre. The Los Angeles Clippers, who previously trained in a stand-alone building in Playa Vista, California, recently opened an 86,000 sq ft facility within their new arena, the Intuit Dome.

The NBA’s building boom shows few signs of slowing. The Charlotte Hornets intend to break ground in early 2025 on a 160,000 sq ft facility adjacent to their arena, with the expectation it will open before the 2026-27 season. The city of Charlotte will pay US$30 million towards construction, and Hornets officials have said they will pay for all costs above that.

Josh Kroenke of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment has said a practice facility for the Denver Nuggets and the National Hockey League’s Colorado Avalanche is in the design phase. Monumental Sports & Entertainment officials are searching for a site within the District of Columbia to build a facility for the Washington Wizards.

In 2007, the Cavaliers opened a stand-alone training facility in Independence, Ohio, that is still considered one of the league’s better training centres. But since 2014, the other four members of the Central Division – the Chicago Bulls, Indiana Pacers, Milwaukee Bucks and Detroit Pistons – have opened new facilities.

Cavaliers officials said their rationale for a new building had little to do with the competition; instead, they noted that because of the expansion of their team’s basketball operations department, they had run out of room in Independence to expand.

But the Cavaliers clearly intend to outdo everyone. Their new training centre will have a league-high 210,000 sq ft of space. About 150,000 sq ft will be dedicated to the team’s basketball operations. The building will also include 60,000 sq ft for the Cleveland Clinic, which will provide care for the public and gather sports health data intended to help weekend warriors and help Cavaliers players withstand the rigours of an NBA season.

It will also include what team officials are calling the Shot Lab, a half court that will be surrounded by a direct-view LED screen, feature a glass floor and a state-of-the-art sound system. It will mimic the sights, sounds and depth perception within any NBA arena, Barlage said. So if the Cavaliers are about to play a road game against the New York Knicks, for example, Cavaliers players can immerse themselves in a setting that approximates Madison Square Garden.

The new building will be a big deal for additional reasons, team and government officials said. Almost half a century ago, in an incident that embarrassed north-east Ohio residents, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga caught fire. But now, the river is healthier, and the new building will anchor a US$3.5 billion riverfront development project by Bedrock Real Estate, which Gilbert owns.

“It’s going to be a spectacular place for guys to go to work, to live, work and play downtown,” Altman said.

Most of the newer practice facilities feature distinctive touches.

The Pacers use a tunnel beneath Indianapolis’ Delaware Street that connects their facility, the Ascension St Vincent Centre, to their arena, Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Inside the Atlanta Hawks’ Emory Healthcare Courts, injured players can receive treatment on athletic-training tables while they watch, with a clear line of sight, teammates practice. The Pistons’ five-year-old building houses the team’s business operations staff and basketball operations department.

The Orlando Magic’s two-year-old building, the AdventHealth Training Centre, features a 6,000 sq foot atrium. Flooded with natural light decorated by live plants and wood panelling, it serves as a dining area and a gathering place for players, coaches and team staff. A restaurant-grade kitchen serves fresh meals and concocts post-workout smoothies.

Moe Wagner played for the Los Angeles Lakers, Wizards and Boston Celtics – all teams with new facilities – before he joined the Magic, and he said none of those spaces compared to the Magic’s. Natural light streams into every space, even onto the 2½ practice courts, the weights room and the team’s locker room.

“It’s one thing that everything is nice but, first of all, the luxury of Orlando is you have outside space, you have natural light,” Wagner said. “Then there’s a great flow to it.”

But how much does a practice facility matter in how well a team play? How much does it help a team retain their players and attract free agents?

Those questions are difficult to answer precisely.

Practice facilities for the Miami Heat and Nuggets are housed within the teams’ arenas, and if there were an objective league-wide ranking, those facilities almost certainly would rank at or near the bottom.

And yet the Heat and the Nuggets do not seem hampered by their situations. When Damian Lillard sought a trade from Portland in 2023, he initially preferred to go to Miami, who have posted winning records in 13 of the last 16 full seasons. The Nuggets, meanwhile, have had seven consecutive winning seasons and captured their first NBA title in 2023.

When Wagner was asked whether a new facility helps a team win, he paused. “It’s a good question,” he said.

“Probably, yeah. I would say if the standard of the facility is high-end, the players better be, too. I do think that the players feel that. I mean, there’s no excuse, right? There’s no excuse not to work every day when you have a place like that.”

Dominique Wilkins and Joe Dumars can hardly believe how much facilities have changed for players since they entered the league in the 1980s.

Wilkins recalled that the Hawks practised early in his career either at a local health club or at Morehouse College or Morris Brown College.

“Those were different times,” said Wilkins, now a Hawks vice-president for basketball, special adviser to the CEO and TV analyst. “We were great, but we would’ve been even greater if we had these practice facilities.”

A turning point occurred in the early 1990s. In 1992, the Bulls opened what was the NBA’s first stand-alone practice facility, the Sheri L. Berto Centre.

At that time, a Pistons executive, Billy McKinney, was speaking with the team owner at the time, William Davidson, when Davidson asked what his team needed to do to keep pace with Michael Jordan’s Bulls. McKinney told Davidson about the Berto Centre, and Davidson decided to build a stand-alone facility for the Pistons: a training centre across a parking lot from the Palace of Auburn Hills. The arms race had started.

That place was considered amazing at the time but “would be the most basic one in the league right now”, said Dumars, the NBA’s head of basketball operations. “The facilities that the guys have now as opposed to when I was playing are just spectacular. It’s just unbelievable how plush and nice they are.”

He envisions facilities becoming incrementally better in the years ahead.

Talk to officials from many rival teams, and they expect the Cavaliers’ new home to set the standard.

Until another team attempt to top it, that is.

“There’s never going to be an end to the arms race of practice facilities,” Jeff Weltman, the Magic’s president of basketball operations, said, “and there’s never going to be an end to the arms race of anything that we do for our players in this league, because there are 30 of us and we’re all highly competitive and we all want to put our players in the best position to succeed.” NYTIMES