Sports 4 Dorks

It hurt to say it back in 2002, when the Charlotte Hornets
became the New Orleans Hornets.

It hurt to say it in 2004-05, when a rebuilding 18-64
Hornets team could be seen playing in front of crowds that looked no more than
4,000-strong (in spite of the listed average attendance of over 14,000 per game).

It really hurt to say it after August of 2005.

It hurt to say it when the Hornets organization, smiling
faces across the board, moved back into New
Orleans "for good" this summer.

It hurts to say it now: New Orleans can’t support an NBA team. 

TrueHoop
quoted the great Brian Berger of Sports Business Radio last night, and his words deserve
another outlet:

"All you need to know
is that the Hornets, led by Chris Paul, have one of the best records in the NBA
this season, but they have the worst home attendance numbers of any NBA team. New
Orleans’s population is only about 300,000, or about 65 percent of its
pre-Hurricane Katrina size. And most of those people are concerned with
rebuilding their lives and homes and not plunking down money for entertainment
options like season tickets to NBA games."

Very true, and really, we have to move even farther beyond
that. This was a city that couldn’t successfully house an NBA team back in
2002. It’s a city that deserves our attention and tourist dollars and all the
adulation we can muster, but it’s size and business scope isn’t conducive to
supporting a team for 41 home games, plus preseason, plus any postseason
appearances that might result. 

There are smallish and successful NBA outposts in San
Antonio and Salt Lake City, and the NBA does the whole "fair and competitive
balance"-thang better than any other league (baseball doesn’t try, pro football
doesn’t need to) considering its disparately successful franchises, but it was
a bum move for George Shinn to alienate North Carolina and upend the Hornets,
and no NBA team is going to work in New Orleans despite our best intentions and
sincere hopes. 

So, moving beyond this depressing bit, let’s get into the
real news: the Hornets and the state of Louisiana
recently re-negotiated their lease, ostensibly to make up for the two seasons
the team spent playing part of its schedule in Oklahoma City, extending it until 2014. Unfortunately
for Louisiana,
a provision of that lease allows the Hornets to break free of it (with
penalties) if the team doesn’t average 14,735 fans from December 1^st
of 2007 until the last game of 2008-09.

Considering the fact that the 23-12
Hornets are barely averaging over 11,000 (and those are just paid-for tickets,
even fewer appear to be in the arena at times) a game, it looks as if the
groundwork has been laid for a move.

Which stinks. New Orleans should have never been put in a
situation to try and support an NBA team to begin with, George Shinn’s ego
forced the city and the state of Louisiana into a relationship it should have run
screaming from some six years ago, and a city of 300,000 shouldn’t be made to
feel bad about not shoe-horning 1/20^th of its population inside the New
Orleans Arena. 

John
DeShazier wasn’t exactly chiding that population this morning, and I can’t
argue against the points he makes in his column, but I’m not going to bemoan
the inevitable end of a pairing that was doomed from the beginning. We’ll
figure out the moves certain franchises (the Hornets, the SuperSonics) need to
make, the cities that need to have holes filled (Seattle, Oklahoma City), and
the price these dodgy owners have to pay later on.

For now, let’s just get used to the disheartening idea that
the NBA isn’t long for New Orleans. 

God, I hope I’m wrong.