The Maui Invitational is bringing a loaded group of teams to the island in 2023.
The tournament’s field that year will include perennial powers Kansas, Gonzaga and UCLA, as well as big brands in Marquette, Purdue, Syracuse and Tennessee. The eighth team in the field is Division II Chaminade, which participates in the event every other year and last won a game in the 2017 tournament by knocking off Cal.
“When I put each year together, I’m hoping that it’s going to be the best field ever. That’s the way you approach it,” tournament chairman Dave Odom says. “And 2023 very well may be the best one, at least on paper, that we’ve ever had.”
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Four of the eight teams in the field have won the tournament before, including Kansas in 2019 and Gonzaga in ’18 in what, in both cases, featured thrilling title games. And the ’23 event also features teams that have had tremendous success lately, as six of the seven teams in the field played in this year’s NCAA tournament and three of them (Kansas, Gonzaga and UCLA) have played in one of the last two Final Fours. Plus, barring coaching changes, six of the seven D-I coaches in the tournament will have 400 or more career wins to their name.
The tournament returns to the Lahaina Civic Center in Maui beginning in 2022 after being played in the continental United States each of the past two seasons due to issues related to COVID-19: Asheville, N.C. in 2020 and Las Vegas in ’21.
“It’s hard to express how important the tournament is to the island and to us, who bring the tournament to the island,” Odom says. “The last two years have been good from the standpoint that we were able to make the best out of the situation … as we pulled those off, one of the residual feelings that we all had was a bit of emptiness.”
The 2022 field features Arkansas, Arizona, Cincinnati, Creighton, Louisville, Ohio State, San Diego State and Texas Tech.
