Entertainment
NBA Cancels Hawks’ Promo Celebrating Atlanta Strip Club
UPDATE — 3/9/26 at 6:33 p.m.: The NBA has canceled the Atlanta Hawks’ proposed Magic City Monday promotion, scheduled for Monday, March 16, and meant to celebrate local strip club Magic City.
“When we became aware of the Atlanta Hawks’ scheduled promotion, we reached out to Hawks leadership to better understand their plans and rationale,” commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement on Monday, March 9. “While we appreciate the team’s perspective and their desire to move forward, we have heard significant concerns from a broad array of league stakeholders, including fans, partners and employees. I believe canceling this promotion is the right decision for the broader NBA community.”
Original story below.
San Antonio Spurs center Luke Kornet is calling on the Atlanta Hawks to rethink their planned “Magic City Monday” proposal.
Magic City is an Atlanta strip club that Hawks ownership explained is an “iconic cultural institution” when it announced the promotion on Wednesday, February 25.
“The Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, ‘Atlanta’s premier strip club,’” Kornet, 30, wrote in a post to Medium on Monday March 2.
He continued, “The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.”
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“Allowing this night to go forward without protest would reflect poorly on us as an NBA community, specifically in being complicit in the potential objectification and mistreatment of women in our society,” Kornet wrote.
The Hawks first announced that their March 16 game against the Orlando Magic would honor Magic City in a press release that highlighted the club’s impact on sports, music and culture in Atlanta.
“This collaboration and theme night is very meaningful to me after all the work that we did to put together [Starz documentary] Magic City: An American Fantasy,” team owner and docuseries producer Jami Gertz said. “The iconic Atlanta institution has made such an incredible impact on our city and its unique culture.”
The planned promotion would bring Magic City’s DJ to State Farm Arena as well as their “world famous” lemon pepper wings and limited edition collaborative hoodies. Rapper T.I. will discuss the documentary during a pregame live recording of the “Hawks AF” podcast and at halftime, he will perform “some of his well-known tracks,” according to the release.
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“We doin’ this one for the city … Magic City,” T.I., 45, said.
“From the food to the music and the exclusive merchandise, we are excited to team up with Magic City to create an authentic, True to Atlanta-inspired game experience,” Hawks Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Melissa Proctor added.
A team spokesperson told The Athletic in a story published Saturday, February 28, that the team sold an additional 2,000 tickets to the March 16 game in the first 24 hours after the promotion was announced. They added that social media reaction has been more than 90 percent positive.
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“I don’t think that I’ve gotten as many requests for tickets to a game,” Proctor told the outlet. “I have people saying, ‘Hold a hoodie for me on the side.’”
Proctor added, “When the schedule came out for this year, and we saw we played the Magic on a Monday, we thought, ‘This would be cool. What we thought about was, if we were going to do this, our motto is ‘True to Atlanta.’ And we thought if we could do this in a way that’s classy to the city, with no dancers [performing], and is part of the connective tissue, that’s how it netted out.”
Gertz added that the team would highlight the club’s “G-rated” elements, according to The Athletic.