The Basketball Tournament offers $1 million prize to winner

There was something fishy about the messages James Fraschilla received on Facebook starting in April.

Several times over the course of that month, the then-Oklahoma guard opened his feed only to find information from various people associated with a nationwide basketball tournament that was supposedly offering the winning team a $1 million prize. The promoters called it The Basketball Tournament, and they wanted Fraschilla to put together a team of Oklahoma alumni to compete in it.

At first, Fraschilla, son of ESPN analyst and former college coach Fran Fraschilla, thought it was too good to be true. A $1 million, winner-take-all, event? It had to be a scam, right?

Understandably, the Highland Park product was hesitant to proceed. But the folks with The Basketball Tournament kept coming at Fraschilla with information. They sent him a link to their website. They showed him former NBA and college greats who had played in The Tournament the year before. And, perhaps, most impressive of all, they pointed out to him that this year’s semifinal and championship games will be broadcast on ESPN.

“It turned out to be a legit thing,” Fraschilla said. “They’re only in their second year, so that’s kind of why I hadn’t heard about it. They kept talking to me and they told me about the different alumni teams in it, and they told me who played last year. So it kind of seemed like a cool thing. They asked me to take the initiative, so I was the one going out and making phone calls and trying to get together our roster.”

The Oklahoma alumni team Fraschilla was able to put together — which includes Tony Crocker, Cade Davis and former North Crowley standout Willie Warren — will be one of the 97 teams vying for the $1 million prize when the single-elimination tournament kicks off later this month.

The Sooners will start off in Atlanta, the host city of the South Regional. They’ll need to win three games in order to advance to the Sweet Seventeen held in Chicago. From there, the competition only figures to intensify.

Current and former NBA players such as Jamal Crawford and Nate Robinson (Seattle Pro-Am) and Mike Bibby, Brian Scalabrine and Jason Williams (Grantland) will lead their respective teams in the West Region. Other college alumni teams such as Syracuse (Boeheim’s Army), Saint Louis (Majerus SLU Crew) and Notre Dame (The Fighting Alumni) should also be tough competition.

Plenty of other wild card teams, most of which are peppered with former college players or professionals who play overseas, could play the part of spoiler as well.

“We’re all about presenting no-frills, five-on-five team basketball,” said The Basketball Tournament founder and CEO Jon Mugar. “What we do is college rules. The only alteration we have is 18-minute halves as opposed to 20-minute halves. And we have six fouls per game instead of five fouls per game.”

Mugar, a former college walk-on at Division III Tufts University near Boston, said he started The Basketball Tournament last year in part to allow basketball players who necessarily weren’t the most elite talents — at least by NBA standards — to get a chance to play in high-stakes, televised games.

“The goal was to create the biggest, most open, democratic sporting event in the world and then to put a giant sum of money at the end to attract a very high caliber, broadcast-worthy level of basketball,” Mugar said.

Last year’s inaugural tournament was held in Philadelphia and featured a $500,000 prize for the winners. The Fighting Alumni, Notre Dame’s alumni team from last year, defeated Team Bartsool in a game that was streamed on ESPN3.com.

This year, both the stakes and the stage are bigger. The winner’s prize money has doubled and the semifinal and championship games will be broadcast live Aug. 1-2 on ESPN.

“It turned out to be a legitimate thing,” Fraschilla said. “The winner takes home $1 million, so why not put in a team?”

This story was originally published July 9, 2015 at 6:41 PM with the headline "The Basketball Tournament offers $1 million prize to winner."