Welcome to Charlotte, LeBron.
Welcome back, Steph.
Welcome to our Queen City, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis and Dwyane Wade.
And, most of all, welcome to the 150,000 or so visitors expected in town for Charlotte's NBA All-Star Weekend.
This is going to be a blast.
I know many of you have visited our fine city before, but not for an All-Star Game. We're so glad to have you and only sorry that over the next three days of courtside activities that the three best basketball players on the planet won't be joining everyone. I'm speaking, of course, about the Ball brothers _ at least that's who they likely are according to former Carolina Panthers tight end LaVar Ball. (Yes, LaVar really was a Panthers player, for about 30 seconds.)
We've tried to pretend that we don't have a serious traffic problem in Charlotte this week by picking up most of the orange traffic construction cones and hiding them in places you're not supposed to see. But we don't exactly have the space to shoehorn in 150,000 extra people and all their Uber drivers, so please bear with us if you get stuck in an I-77 or Independence Boulevard nightmare.
One word of advice _ whatever time you're planning on leaving to get where you're going this weekend? That's not early enough.
A few additional notes about Charlotte for our honored guests: Don't ever get on a road that includes the word "Queens" in its name. Our iced tea will be served sweet unless you specify otherwise. And we take our basketball very seriously.
North Carolina ranks as the best college hoops state in the nation, and it's not really even close. The best player our state ever produced _ a guy named Michael Jordan _ now owns the Charlotte Hornets and will be serving as your official host this weekend.
MJ will also turn 56 on Sunday, the day of the actual All-Star Game. If you see him in the next 48 hours, it's probably best not to start the conversation by bringing up his lack of success as an owner and comparing it to the six NBA championships he won as a player.
In what was exactly half a lifetime ago for Jordan, he played in the All-Star Game the last time it was held in Charlotte, in 1991.
Does he remember it? Of course he does.
"Had a decent game," Jordan said this week, "but didn't win MVP."
The MVP of that one was Charles Barkley, back in those glorious pre-Twitter days where an All-Star Game could really end up with a final score of 116-114 (that's practically the halftime score these days) and the West played the East.
In Sunday night's game at Spectrum Center, the teams will be all mixed up, based on some sort of bizarre system where Team LeBron and then Team Giannis chose players based mostly on which players LeBron James most wants to recruit in the offseason, or something like that. (Kemba Walker, the Charlotte Hornets' hometown starter for this All-Star Game, plays for Team Giannis and will start alongside Steph Curry to form a backcourt that Hornets fans have always dreamed about.)
All of that's OK, because the result doesn't really matter. Hardly anyone remembers who wins the All-Star Game. The weekend instead serves a grand celebration of basketball, and it's so much bigger now than it was in 1991 that it's almost unrecognizable.
"Charlotte will be the capital of the basketball world for that week, just like it was in 1991," said David Stern, who was the NBA commissioner during that first All-Star Game in Charlotte. "But it's really quite incredible now what that weekend _ really, a full week _ is now compared to what it was then. The international growth of the game is the biggest difference. More than 200 countries are going to be watching Charlotte on All-Star Weekend, attuned to every move."
That sounds kind of scary, actually.
Our city is a lot different than it was in 1991, too. We have a thriving uptown, for one thing. We don't have to fake that anymore.
We're going to try very hard to make the show come off without a hitch, but we all know that's not always possible.
Here's hoping that everyone has fun, tips their servers and gets home safely on Monday. We're going to do our best to show you a very good time.
But can you work with us a little?
We've thrown a lot of parties before. Just never one quite like this.
