In this paper, an event-triggered nearly optimal tracking control method is investigated for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems by integrating adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) and integral sliding mode (ISM) control. By introducing a neural network (NN) adaptive term, the designed ISM-based discontinuous control law is employed to eliminate the influence of the uncertainties and obtain the tracking error system constructed from the sliding mode dynamics, as well as relax the known upper-bounded condition of uncertainties. In order to guarantee the stability of tracking error system and improve the control performance, under the ADP technique, a critic NN is applied to approximate the optimal value function for solving the event-triggered Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and the event-triggered nearly optimal feedback control is obtained. The feedback control law is updated and transmitted to plant only when events occur, thus both the communication and the computational resources can be saved. Furthermore, the stability of tracking error is proven thanks to Lyapunov’s direct method. Finally, we provide two simulation examples to validate the developed control scheme.