The New Jersey Devils are balls-deep in debt. This comes from building a new arena at the worst possible time to be in real estate and being owned by guys who were on Wall Street at the worst possible time to be on Wall Street. As a result, they have to be sold. The prospective buyer is the group that just bought the 76ers a year or two ago. The Flyers (a division of Comcast) own the arena in Philadelphia, so the Sixers are now paying rent. By buying the Devils, they'd also assume the master lease on the Prudential Center in Newark, putting the ownership group in the odd position of renting a building for their team while operating another building.

It sounds obvious how one could consolidate these operations, while at the same time sounding crazy. How could the NBA bail on Philadelphia to add a team in North Jersey, where they just left? But there are murmurs that Stern wants to have three teams in New York (which, when the Islanders move to Brooklyn, would give both leagues the same three-arena footprint), and we know from the Seattle episode that the NBA will happily pull the plug on a perfectly good market if they're not being given free money. Also, 76ers interest seems to wax and wane, while Flyers interest maintains a year-to-year fever pitch -- an obnoxious, belligerent, 1975-obsessed, perpetually dissatisfied fever pitch. If they buy the Devils, it wouldn't be hard to pull a Clay Bennett and run the team into the ground, then make noise about moving to Newark citing lack of fan support. The Sixers are running their front office out of New York now, and they're not even running much of one: they don't have a head coach, and it's August.

I don't really think this will come to pass, even if the Sixers buy the Devils, but one wild card in this is that Seattle is going to wind up back in the NBA one way or another, and probably via an expansion that pro basketball has no business having but will do anyway. The reactivated Supersonics would be Team 31, and I can see where Team 32 would be a reactivated Philadelphia 76ers, the extant franchise having moved to Newark. It's a convoluted longshot, but this is the same league where the Charlotte Hornets are coming back because Tom Benson inexplicably just paid waywaywaaaaaaaay over market value to keep the NBA in New Orleans.

_________________

I'm coming around to everyone else's idea that Bud Lite is currently the best commissioner in sports.