veganfan21 wrote:
Take some aspects of the two posts above this one and do the following:
Contract Charlotte, NO, Minnesota, and Memphis. These are historically weak franchises in terms of value. Gonna see much better competition once the league gets smaller and those players are redistributed.
You'll never see contraction in North American pro sports, especially not since the coup of the Clippers caused franchise values to explode, such that even the lowest-valued franchises in the NBA are coming up on a billion and a quarter. You can't just wave a magic wand and expel franchises from the league (though I should never doubt Adam Silver and his power of woke-capitalist fusion: if someone accuses whichever VC ghoul owns the Grizzlies of grabbing an ass, we could possibly nuke the entire city of Memphis to get rid of him); the other 26 teams would have to buy the other four out for ~$125MM each if my napkin math is close. And while the league could probably shed Memphis and New Orleans without much strife, removing themselves from Charlotte and Minneapolis, mid-major markets where hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have gone into appeasing the NBA's arena demands, would be a public relations disaster that no amount of LGBT pride promotional jerseys would mend.
If there was ever a window to knock off a franchise, it was Katrina, when the Hornets were homeless and the Bobcats were faceplanting out of the gate with an ill-advised regional sports network that cable companies didn't see the point in paying extra to carry. (Thankfully, no one would ever do that here.) Maybe they could have bought out Shinn and merged the two teams as the Charlotte Hornets. But that stuff just doesn't happen today. It didn't even happen yesterday. The last time a franchise "folded" was the NHL's Cleveland Barons, who merged with the Minnesota North Stars but eventually demerged to become the San Jose Sharks.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
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