While one Connecticut summer sports institution, the Travelers Championship, plays on, another will be sidelined for a second straight year. 

The Jim Calhoun Celebrity Classic, which has featured a biennial all-star basketball game featuring many former UConn greats, as well as a pair of annual celebrity golf events at Avon Golf Club and the Mohegan Sun Golf Club, is once again canceled.

The event, which typically occurs in early August, was canceled last year amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The basketball game at Mohegan Sun Arena, which began in 1999 and has raised millions of dollars for the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center, had actually been put on hold before the pandemic. Former stars who had played in the game for many years, including Ray Allen, Richard Hamilton, Caron Butler and Charlie Villanueva, were simply getting older, crowds had been getting thinner and the event was losing its spark in recent years.

The last time the game was held, on Aug. 10, 2018, Allen, Hamilton, Rudy Gay, Khalid El-Amin and Hilton Armstrong were among the participants, along with former UConn women's standouts like Svetlana Abrosimova, Carla Berube and Ashley Battle. But younger stars like Kemba Walker, Andre Drummond and Jeremy Lamb didn't show up. The announced attendance was 5,323.

Event organizers were planning to hold special UConn basketball-oriented events at Mohegan Sun Convention Center instead of the game last summer, including a potential Q&A session with Walker and Calhoun, but that had to be scrapped due to the pandemic. No such events were planned for this summer.

And while golf has been the one sport that's largely continued throughout the past 15 months, including the Travelers, there simply weren't enough sponsors on board and other logistical roadblocks to allow the celebrity golf events to resume this summer.

According to Peter Gold, whose marketing firm, Gold, Orluk & Partners helps coordinate the event, the golf events could "possibly" return next year. The all-star game, not so much.

"Probably unlikely to zero," Gold said of the chances. "At least not in the form that we know it. What it will look like in the future is uncertain."

Gold noted that perhaps in future years, a Calhoun-Dan Hurley event emerges. Gold also organizes some of Hurley's public events, though the coach's summer camp has been canceled for the second straight year.