The Basketball Tournament
American basketball tournament
The Basketball Tournament (TBT) is an open-invitation tournament played each summer in the United States, with the stakes being a cash prize (the most recent tournament in 2026 had a $2 million purse going to the winners). The number of teams playing in the tournament has varied since its establishment, but in recent years has settled into a 64-team field.
The event was founded in 2014 by real estate developer and TV producer Jonathan Mugar, and as of 2025, the tournament airs in the U.S. on Fox and its sister network Fox Sports 1 (FS1).
Format
Teams in TBT are arranged by the general manager, sometimes based on which college basketball program the players competed for. The tournament has had as many as 97 teams, in 2015, and as few as 14 teams, in 2026. Since 2016, the tournament has most often used a 64-team field. In 2019, the 64 teams were divided into eight regions, with each regional winner advancing to the championship venue. In 2020, the tournament field was reduced to 24 teams with all games played at a single venue, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In 2021, the 64 teams were organized into four regions, with each region's top two teams advancing to the championship venue. The 2022 event returned to the former eight-region format, with the eight regional winners advancing to what TBT organizers call "Championship Week", with quarterfinals at two sites followed by semifinals and the final at the championship venue.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Basketball Tournament” is american basketball tournament. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Basketball, Tournament and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22080099. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 2014, 2025 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Basketball Tournament” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.