One Portland Hotel Figured Out There's Money in Catering to the NBA

The Hotel Monaco is the place to see LeBron James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant.

ESPN has a pretty good story today about how Portland's Hotel Monaco caters to the oversized nomads who visit the city for 41 regular season NBA games, not including preseason exhibitions and an upcoming playoff series that we're hoping will feature a visit from the Los Angeles Clippers.

The ESPN feature covers a three-day stay at the Monaco by the Houston Rockets, an underperforming crew that last year reached the Western Conference finals but this year just hopes to claim the eighth and final playoff spot in the West.

Their hotel of choice: Hotel Monaco, located a block north of Pioneer Place on Southwest 5th Avenue.

"For the better part of their year, hotels are the primary interior in an NBA life. Players and team personnel spend maybe five hours at arenas, and that's only on game days. The rest of their time on the road—both waking hours and sleeping ones—is spent in a hotel. It's not home, but it's where they take refuge and where their needs are met," ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz writes. "This is the story of one hotel and how it has found its way into the hearts of NBA teams."

Here are three takeaways from the piece.

1. Size matters: The Monaco's beds are 95 inches long, a full foot longer than standard beds.

2. Who ever ordered the bathrobes has a sense of humor, because they have a giraffe-skin motif, the better to accentuate players' heights.

3. Stars such as James Harden and Dwight Howard (c'mon, he used to be good) check in under aliases to duck overzealous fans.

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