Why NIL collectives got involved with The Basketball Tournament

In an effort to promote name, image and likeness opportunities for current college athletes, or to support former college athletes who weren’t allowed to monetize their NIL rights, a few collectives are involved with teams that will compete in The Basketball Tournament.

TBT is a single-elimination tournament that fielded 64 teams and a $1 million prize each of the last two years. It tips off in July and is broadcast by ESPN. Many of the players are former college basketball stars, who often play on teams with other prominent alumni from their college program.

Mass St. Collective sponsored a team made up of former Kansas men’s basketball players called Mass Street. Mass. St. Collective co-owner, president and COO Dan Beckler said there’s an agreement between the collective and TBT.

The Massachusetts Collective is the presenting sponsor for a team made up of UMass alumni that are called The Commonwealth. However, The Massachusetts Collective founder Patrick MacWilliams said the collective isn’t using any of its funds for the sponsorship “just cause that’s not really the mission.” MacWilliams said he’s personally funding the cost, which he said is roughly $30,000.

The collective plans to connect current and former UMass players, including through events in July, when current players will be on campus. The collective is also holding weekly Twitter Spaces with former UMass players who play for The Commonwealth, such as C.J. Anderson, Cady Lalanne, Luwane Pipkins and Carl Pierre.

“Connecting with them – it was one of our first goals, actually, as we started the collective,” MacWilliams said in a phone interview. “Obviously it doesn’t impact current players. But I think it’s important to kind of have the NIL club support people in the future as well, so everybody that’s on the team now knows that our goal with the TBT thing is to have that be for a number of years going forward, too.”

The Gataverse, an online community for Florida athletes and fans, announced a team of Florida alums called Gatorverse, coached by Taurean Green.

Mass St. Collective is planning events with Mass Street TBT

Beckler said the collective’s executives had initial conversations about starting a team with former Kansas players Keith Langford and Tyshawn Taylor. Langford is on Mass St. Collective’s Board of Directors.

Beckler said there hasn’t been an official Kansas alumni team in the TBT in “a number of years.”

Mass Street TBT recently announced the roster additions of former Kansas power forward Thomas Robinson, who was a consensus first-team All-American in 2012 and he led Kansas to the national championship game, and 2020 Naismith Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Garrett.

“While our main priority is to raise funds and get sponsorship dollars for student-athletes currently enrolled, there are a lot of student-athletes that did not benefit from NIL as it is today,” Beckler said in a video interview with On3. “We kind of looked at TBT as an opportunity for us to help those former student-athletes that didn’t have NIL but have gone on to have great professional careers overseas or other places. This was kind of our way of thanking them, honestly, for paving the road to get to where we currently are with NIL.”

One of the host cities in this year’s tournament is Wichita, Kansas, which makes the event accessible for Kansas fans.

“We’re gonna do a lot of different donor events with it,” Beckler said. “We’re gonna engage those donors that we have with the current roster of men’s basketball players and different events like that. But now to give an opportunity to be around some of the guys that maybe they haven’t seen in, you know, five, 10, 15 years.

“Just looking forward to it from that standpoint to really just tell stories and listen to these guys just talk about their KU days, how things are different and really just kind of catch up to them.”

This story was updated to include the announcement about Gatorverse’s application for TBT.