Slamball Is Coming Back With New Two Year Media Deal: Will The Young Generation Love It Or Hate It?

Remember SlamBall?

Well, the bastard child of basketball and one of those trampoline places at the mall where you dump your kids is headed back to television.

According to TMZ Sports, ESPN will broadcast both the 2023 and 2024 seasons. This will reportedly include about 30 hours of coverage during the season which runs from July 21 through August 19.

Slamball is a sprint, baby.

"The level of interest in our hybrid team sport not just in the U.S., but across the world, has been beyond our expectations for the 2023 season," SlamBall creator and CEO Mason Gordon told TMZ Sports. "It’s clear that this is the best talent we have had in the sport’s history."

Recently, SlamBall announced $11 million in new financial backing from the likes of Blake Griffin, investor David Blitzer, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin.

SlamBall Is A Fascinating Sport

I always found SlamBall fascinating. First of all, it's one of those ideas everyone came up with at some point. At some point, everyone has had a moment where they were shooting hoops in the driveway with their dumb friends and someone said, "Wouldn't it be cool if there were trampolines in the floor?"

The difference is for most of us, that was a fleeting thought. Gordon figured out how to put it all together and make money off of it.

Secondly, SlamBall blew my mind because it looks like a sport scientifically engineered to deliver catastrophic leg injuries. I mean, look at this:

Watching it makes me nervous, because I feel like at any second I could be face-to-face with some dude's splintered tibia.

The return of SlamBall has been in the works for quite some time and was announced last year.

"There have been all kinds of people clamoring for SlamBall to come back. There has been #BringBackSlamBall media, viewed over 200 million times in the last 12 months," Gordon said last year. "So, I'm ready to announce next summer, 2023, SlamBall is coming back, live!"

This season, all SlamBall Games will take place at Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas.

Follow on Twitter: @Matt_Reigle