How The LGCY Series brings sport, music, fashion and community into one cultural space
Basketball has never ended at the sideline. The culture surrounding the game has been shaped just as much by music, fashion, sneakers, entertainment and community as by what happens on the court. That understanding is at the heart of The LGCY Series. The ambition is not to reinvent basketball, but to tell a bigger story about what the game has become and the culture it continues to create.
“Basketball, to us, is so much more than the game itself. It’s music, fashion, entertainment, community and everything that has grown around the sport,”
says Philipp Dembowski, one of the three founders and Managing Directors of The LGCY Series.
Some of the most recognisable names in German basketball stand behind the new format. Dennis Schröder and Franz Wagner lead the Series as League Presidents, with Moritz Wagner also part of the wider LGCY universe. Dembowski himself is one of the three founders and Managing Directors behind the platform.
In 2026, The LGCY Series launched its first season and immediately made its ambitions clear: three events, three cities, three sold out venues and almost 10,000 spectators and guests.
The season opened in Berlin, where around 2,500 people filled the sold out Uber Eats Music Hall to watch eight international teams compete in a five on five format. From there, the Series travelled to Braunschweig, Dennis Schröder’s hometown, for a streetball festival before closing its inaugural season with the final at Munich’s BMW Park on 9 August. But this was never designed to be just another conventional basketball league.
Innovations such as a four point zone and the Coaching Challenge, a digitally interactive GlassFloor and the integration of music, creators and entertainment turn basketball into the starting point for a much broader cultural experience.
The connection to the HipHop Ball comes from a shared understanding of culture. Neither platform sees sport, music, fashion and community as separate worlds. They are influences that constantly shape, challenge and inspire one another.
Or, as The LGCY puts it: “Different people and different influences come together to shape a culture.”
Culture Doesn’t Exist in Categories
What connects The LGCY Series and the HipHop Ball is therefore bigger than any single event format. It is a shared belief that culture cannot be neatly separated into categories.
A pair of sneakers might be someone’s first connection to basketball. For someone else, it might be a song, a player, a certain style or the community surrounding the game. Culture creates entry points that the sport itself might never have been able to create. And perhaps that is where the strongest connection between these two platforms lies.
Basketball carries music and fashion within it. HipHop has always moved between sound, dance, graffiti, language, style and sport. None of these worlds exist in isolation. They borrow from one another, challenge one another and continuously create something new. New forms of expression. New communities. New ways of belonging. That is what keeps culture alive.
From the Court to the Rotes Rathaus
On 14 November, these worlds will meet inside Berlin’s Rotes Rathaus. The LGCY Series will become part of the second HipHop Ball Berlin, joining Big Moe and Josi Trapp on stage for an intermezzo exploring basketball culture, community and a bigger question: Why should urban culture also be present in the spaces where social and economic decisions are made?
For The LGCY Series, this is part of what makes the HipHop Ball so relevant. It brings urban culture into conversation with business, decision makers and institutions, creating encounters between worlds that too often still exist separately. And that matters far beyond one night of visibility.
It is about giving people from within the culture access to new spaces, networks and opportunities. At the same time, it invites institutions, businesses and society at large to recognise the economic, creative and social power that has long existed within urban culture.
Basketball Culture meets HipHop Culture. The court meets the ballroom.
And perhaps something new begins the moment we stop asking which category culture belongs to.
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