A couple of months ago, I wrote that I would not be surprised to see the New Orleans Hornets relocate because New Orleans is not a basketball town and does not support the Hornets all that well. I got responses telling me that I had my head up my butt and that I didn’t know anything. Well, let us look at what has happened in the past couple of months:
The Hornets are a good team. In the tougher Western Conference, if the playoffs started today, the Hornets would be in.
I do not check the attendance figures for every Hornets game, but I have yet to see a sell-out in New Orleans. Last night, the Lakers came to town; that’s two good teams playing each other with a marquee player on the visiting squad. There were about 1600 empty seats if the reported attendance actually measured the folks who showed up.
The team and the state of Louisiana just reached an agreement to keep the Hornets in town for the next seven years. Nevertheless, there is an escape clause in the deal for the team if they do not draw an average of 14,375 folks for games between Dec 1 2007 and the end of next season. Capacity in New Orleans is 17,200 so the trigger point is to play to 84% capacity.
This is not something that would need to be done in a “great basketball town”. But it goes even deeper than that. The State of Louisiana did not want to take the chance that the fans would stay home and so they put in penalty clauses that could cost the Hornets’ owner as much as $100M if he opted to leave based on those attendance triggers. New Orleans will keep its NBA team because the state is bribing them to stay and the state is trying to make it financially disastrous for them to try to find a new home. Such are the happenings in that “great basketball town” called New Orleans.
Speaking of the NBA, there sure is a basketball renaissance brewing in Portland. The Blazers seem to have shed the thuggery image; and in the absence of Darius Miles, they seem to be playing team basketball and winning. Have the Blazers joined the list of contending teams in the NBA West? It certainly seems so – and it is all the more impressive that they will likely make this year’s playoffs without Greg Oden playing even a minute for them.
Starting next season, the Blazers will have a very young nucleus of very good players in Oden, Brandon Roy and Lamarcus Aldridge; truth be told, Steve Blake and Jarrett Jack ain’t bad either. I believe the Blazers owe Darius Miles about $24M between now and the end of his contract in June 2010; they would be well advised to pay him that money to stay two time zones away from this team – sort of what they are doing with Steve Francis except they are paying Francis even more money to stay away.
Portland is good and young; other really good teams in the West are good and older. When the Blazers are matured and ready to become a force majeure, the players that make the Spurs, Mavs and Nuggets so good now will be in the twilight of their careers. Portland is a team on the rise not just at the moment but also for the next few years.
The report out of Florida is the Michele Wie spent almost two weeks there last month with her swing coach, David Leadbetter. After Wie’s disastrous season in 2007 where she was more likely to shoot in the 80s than she was to shoot par, Leadbetter is cautiously optimistic about this season where he hopes she can play more and avoid injuries such as the one that befell her last year. The question for the coach would seem to come in the case where Michele Wie has a season that continues to fall way short of the promise she once had as a golfer. In that case, how much of the blame will be heaped on him by the people who have handled Wie’s career to date? You know they will not be heaping any blame on her or on themselves…
I read somewhere that the London Olympics costs have spun out of control to the tune of about 400% so far. Originally, the estimated costs to host the games in 2012 were set at $6.1B. That is a lot of money no matter what level of economy has to generate it. The latest cost figure – and remember we are still five years away from the Opening Ceremonies in London – is $19B plus a $5.6B contingency fund for overruns which is already mostly committed. What started out at $6B is now in excess of $24B – - and counting. Nonetheless, cities are still vying to host the 2016 Games. Here are some questions for the citizens of those cities to pose to their elected officials – in the cases where the cities in question have such luxuries:
1. If the 2016 Games will really cost more than $25B, where will revenues of that magnitude flow from sources outside our own economy? Without some expectation of that happening, the Games cannot begin to pay for themselves.
2. The folks who sold the London Olympics to Londoners and the British government pulled a low-ball $6.1B figure from a nasty bodily orifice. Where are the estimates for the costs of the 2016 Games coming from?
Here’s another Olympic note. The folks running the Beijing Olympics take a very dim view of scalping tickets. They say that the resale of any tickets for the big events like the Opening Ceremonies is “illegal” and according an item on the website for the Games, “”People who engage in criminal activity will be subject to firm punishment according to the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China.” You can find Internet sites offering Olympic tickets to the Opening Ceremonies for as much as $15,000. If you spring for that, you just might be a party to an illegal activity according to Chinese Criminal Law and be part of that “firm punishment” suggested above. Since I think that the Opening Ceremonies in the Olympics are about as entertaining as oral surgery, I will pass on that opportunity, thank you very much.
Finally, a comment from syndicated columnist, Norman Chad:
“This whole business of lowering the lights, flashing the strobes and bringing the players out through fire and brimstone with a backdrop of chilling music has to stop. Sure, the Bulls once got away with it because the payoff was “Michael Jordan!!!” but, frankly, when your starting five is, say, Andre Iguodala, Reggie Evans, Samuel Dalembert, Willie Green and Andre Miller, you should introduce them IN THE DARK.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…