Hall of Fame Series Takes Over T-Mobile Arena Monday: UNLV's Women Face USC in a Four-Game Opening Night
College basketball's opening night in Las Vegas is a quadruple-header: the Hall of Fame Series returns to T-Mobile Arena on Monday with Arizona-UCLA and Gonzaga-Purdue on the men's side, and hometown UNLV facing USC — in what is expected to be JuJu Watkins' return — on the women's side.
T-Mobile Arena hosts college basketball's opening-night showcase on Monday, November 2, as the Hall of Fame Series returns to Las Vegas for a fourth consecutive year. The four-game event, announced by the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and Position Sports, pairs two marquee men's games — Arizona against UCLA, renewing that rivalry, and Gonzaga against Purdue — with two women's games.
The hometown game is the women's headliner: USC faces UNLV in a matchup expected to mark the return of Trojans star JuJu Watkins, the 2024-25 consensus National Player of the Year, from her knee injury. The second women's game pairs Arizona with Stanford; Stanford's athletics site lists that opener at 10:30 a.m. Pacific on CBS Sports Network. All four games will be televised across TNT Sports' networks and platforms, per the Hall of Fame announcement.
For the Lady Rebels, Monday is a season opener on a national stage in their own city — the kind of test that tells a team where it stands in November. The series returns to Las Vegas again in 2027, when it is scheduled to move to Allegiant Stadium on November 12 for the first basketball game in that building's history.
