O'Shea Jackson Sr "Ice Cube" Talks BIG3 Season Eight
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. We should point out Game 7 of the NBA Finals is this Sunday. That means the season's wrapping up in the spotlight, at least when it comes to professional basketball.

will now sort of shift to some of the other leagues out there. That includes the Big Three. You know Ice Cube. He's a music legend. He's an actor. He's a producer. He's also the co-founder of the Big Three League. This is three-on-three half-court basketball, and its latest season just tipped off last week. Week two starts, well, this Sunday. I had a chance to sit down with him to talk about the evolution of the league, the evolution of team valuations, and what's next for the sport overall. Take a listen.

It's more passion. You know, getting in people's face only goes so far. You know, you got to have the passion to win and the passion to, you know, step up to the competition. And that's what we provide. You know, we let athletes be themselves because nobody want to see robots play the game.

You know it's really about personality entertainment and good best or so that's what we provide with the big 3 at a time in the summer.

where it's going to be hard to find a good game. It's interesting. This is the first season, correct me if I'm wrong, that Big 3 is basically focused in specific cities. So before it was kind of touring around, but now you have specific teams in Chicago and Dallas and a few other places here. What was the decision to switch from that touring format to a more traditional city-based format? Growth. You know, we...

We owned all the teams as far as the league. The teams were centrally owned. And we knew to grow this league, really, we had to have owners, team owners, who could really help us plant flags in these cities all around the country, even all around the world, because we're looking at London and Mexico City.

So having owners was very important to grow the league and to expand past the teams we have to 16, 20, 24, and so on. So it's the start of the beginning of the rest of our lives in a way because now we can actually really

see this league grow very fast. How have valuations, the individual team valuations, been like? I mean, I've seen publicly a couple of numbers thrown around, but are you seeing a significant increase in those individual team valuations based on the way you would have valued them, you know, a couple of years ago? You know, we're just at the beginning stages of it. So, you know,

Right now, we say you can get a team for a bargain basement price, you know, compared to other franchises that's out there. And so we feel like we got the greatest upside when it comes to our business model and how things are structured with the big three. So, you know, we feel like, you know, we're a great bet.

if you want to, you know, flip or you want to, are you in it for the long haul? You know, so one day we'll be up there with the big boys and have those, you know, super evaluations. So I am curious as to where you see Big Three maybe 10 years from now or eight years from now, I should say, given that we're now eight years from its inception. You know, hopefully in that amount of time,

you know you could be able to 10 times 12 times what we're doing now so um you know we do see that these franchises are gonna scale up very fast and um and you know people are gonna make a lot much a lot of money you know especially if they got in early uh so you know we we do see

the curve just going up. But when we talk about like the legitimacy of Big Three, and I remember when it came out, there were a lot of people kind of scratching their head. Why do we need this? Why is Ice Cube involved? But now you look at a league that has big corporate partnerships, Procter & Gamble, a partnership with Starter. I was reading about this. We had the CEO of Red Lobster on the other day and was talking about the big promotion that they're doing with the Big Three. On top of that, you got Chris Haynes, just a legendary NBA reporter who's now going to make his home the Big Three.

That's a big deal, right? Yeah, but look at our history. You know, we have Hall of Fame Commissioner Clyde Drexler. We have Hall of Fame coaches, you know, from Dr. J to Iceman George Gurman to Nancy Lieberman.

Gary Payton, now Michael Cooper. We got Calvin Murphy. You know, these are Hall of Fame players who are putting a stamp on this league. Some have been around since the inception of the league. So,

We have stand power. They wouldn't be around. Dr. J wouldn't be around for eight years if this wasn't something great. So we know we're on the right path, and we've been stamped by the greatest that ever played the game. And so it's really no one who can look at us and say that this is a novelty, this is something that,

is very well respected throughout basketball.

Wrapper Ice Cube there, the CEO and co-founder of the Big Three Basketball League. For enterprise organizations, managing all your food needs is a tall order. But with Easy Cater, you get a single workplace food vendor with the tools and resources to make it easy. Giving teams across your organization an easy way to order from a huge variety of restaurants, all on one platform. All while consolidating your corporate food spend so you can control costs.

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