LAS VEGAS — A five-minute, air-conditioned walk and a key card.

That’s all it takes for any Washington Wizards player to go from his hotel room to a regulation-sized basketball court where he can shoot baskets at any time of day or night during this year’s NBA Summer League.

The Wizards have rented a 14,000-square-foot ballroom at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and turned it into a temporary practice facility that also includes weight-room equipment, a large TV for film sessions and tables where athletic trainers and physical therapists can treat players. For eight days, it serves as the Wizards’ home away from home.

“This is beyond a blessing,” forward Eugene Omoruyi said.

To call the Wizards’ setup a luxury would be an understatement. This booming city has many amenities, but it doesn’t feature an abundance of basketball courts, especially relevant when all 30 NBA teams are in town simultaneously. When summer league is underway, NBA teams can practice at one of four courts at UNLV but only for finite, tightly monitored stretches of time. Local high schools also provide options, albeit inconvenient ones.

The Wizards, however, have solved those first-world problems.

Team officials shipped the hardwood court they used for their 2023 In-Season Tournament home games at Capital One Arena to Nevada, and that court has been reassembled inside the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. When summer league ends, the court will be taken apart and stored in a climate-controlled facility in Las Vegas for use again next summer.

The team rents the baskets and weight-room equipment, in addition to the ballroom.

Team officials would not disclose what they’re paying for the entire project this year, but Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger said the cost is “significant but not extravagant” and added it’s been “worth every penny.”

“Whether it’s at summer league, whether it’s at training camp, whether it’s during the season — we as an organization are trying to reduce, if not eliminate, the amount of friction between everyday life and our players putting in work,” Winger said. “… The ordinary cadence of summer league creates a tremendous amount of friction just because you’re away from home, you’re staying at a hotel, you are limited to the weight rooms that you have access to and you’re limited to the gym time you have access to. It’s a lot of friction.”

Winger added: “I would venture to say that having a makeshift gym like this doubles the amount of work that our players get done at summer league compared to what they would get done without a semi-private gym.”

It seems like the Wizards’ operations and logistics teams have accounted for everything their players and staff need. The weight room and training equipment includes three squat racks, three stationary bikes, three athletic-training tables and kettle bells, dumbbells and medicine balls. There’s even a refrigerator stocked with sports drinks and bottles of water.

The Wizards are renting weight-room equipment for their temporary practice facility in Las Vegas. (Josh Robbins / The Athletic)

The precursor to all of this are the practice spaces the NBA set up in its Walt Disney World bubble in 2020. But the Toronto Raptors also have been innovators. During the 2020-21 season, the Raptors played their home games in Tampa, Fla., because of COVID-19 restrictions in Canada; at that time, the Raptors created a makeshift practice space in a ballroom at the JW Marriott hotel next to Amalie Arena. Last summer and again this summer, Raptors officials created a similar practice space in a ballroom at their summer-league hotel in Las Vegas.

Winger credited the Raptors for bringing the temporary practice-facility model to the NBA Summer League, and he said he expects more teams to follow the Raptors’ and Wizards’ examples in future summers.

Fifteen players are on Washington’s summer-league roster, including rookie first-round draft picks Alex Sarr, Bub Carrington and Kyshawn George and returning players Patrick Baldwin Jr., Jules Bernard, Jared Butler, Justin Champagnie, Tristan Vukčević and Omoruyi.

On a recent morning, after the summer-league team finished its practice, veteran players Marvin Bagley III, Malcolm Brogdon, Richaun Holmes, Corey Kispert, Kyle Kuzma and Jordan Poole did individual shooting drills and lifted weights in the ballroom.

“It’s always a struggle for us players to find places to go while we’re in Vegas to work out,” Kispert said. “This ease of a five-minute walk to get there, with an opportunity for me to shoot at any hour of the day or night if I feel like it, is amazing. The convenience that that provides for me, with the people here in Vegas that I want to see and touch base with, to be able to get in and out of a workout and get my business done whenever I need to is amazing.”

As Kispert swung a medicine ball, Poole lifted a dumbbell and Brogdon and Kuzma did individual shooting drills on the court. Sarr sat courtside with Wizards coach Brian Keefe and reviewed video from the team’s summer-league opener.

“It’s the vets and the young players,” Winger said. “They’re going to go through some shooting drills together. They’re going to go through some walkthroughs together. And it’s all player-led. Where do you get that kind of camaraderie in the offseason if you don’t create the environment for it? So that’s what this does.”

(Top photo: Stephen R. Sylvanie / USA Today)