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Hornets shouldn't fly away
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January 4, 2002: 2:47 p.m. ET
Charlotte's NBA team should stay at home, even if it can't sting taxpayers.
A twice weekly column by Staff Writer Chris Isidore
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NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Charlotte Coliseum is younger than any of the basketball players who play there, but to listen to management of the NBA Charlotte Hornets, who have called it home since the team's birth in 1988, it is a dinosaur in need of replacement.
There are no luxury suites or club seats filled with deep-pocket fans enjoying the game on a corporation's nickel. It also has far more modest concession and advertising signage opportunities than at the shopping malls that pass for the modern sports venue.
And thus one of the running stories of the 2001-02 NBA season is the road trip from hell of team ownership and executives to various cities, mostly smaller markets or ones crowded with other sports teams, to find some willing government officials who will give them their dream home.
The only thing known for sure is that when the team completes its quest, it will be worse off than it was beforehand.
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The Charlotte Hornets have seen about half their seats go unfilled this season as ownership explores a possible move out of the city. | |
"The reason they'd be moving is ownership has burned its bridges in Charlotte," said Marc Ganis, president of Sportscorp Ltd., a Chicago sports consultant that has advised other teams on their own relocation efforts. "Wherever they go will not be as good as staying in Charlotte."
Basketball hotbed Louisville, Ky., is interested, but it is a smaller market that has seen growing opposition to public financing for a new arena.
St. Louis and Anaheim, Calif., have state-of-the-art hockey arenas and no NBA teams, but the operators of the two arenas aren't about to split their revenue stream with the Hornets' current owners. A move to Anaheim would make the Hornets the third NBA team in a Southern California market that has yet to embrace the No. 2 Los Angeles Clippers.
New Orleans, which lost a basketball team to Utah and may yet lose its football team, is one other possibility, as is Norfolk, Va., a market about same size as Charlotte which appears most willing to shell out public money to grab the dubious title "major league city."
So Hornet owners Ray Wooldridge and George Shinn are discovering, if they didn't know it already, there are no slam-dunk solutions out there for the Hornets. But they may be too blind or stubborn to realize their best alternative is the growing business and population center of a basketball-crazy state - Charlotte, N.C.
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Charlotte basketball fans have just about had it with the current Hornets' ownership. | |
Part of their problem is that Ganis and others believe the current ownership has so poisoned the relationship with elected and business leaders in Charlotte that a new arena deal there is impossible without a sale of the franchise. Fans are in revolt as well - average attendance in Charlotte this season is down about a third from last year, with about half the 19,925 seats going unfilled each night.
The best solution might be one that team owners enjoy less than players' agents - digging into their own pockets to build a privately financed stadium.
"Building a stadium, especially a single-use stadium, is a big nut to cover," said Gene DeMark, the KPMG LLP partner in charge of the professional services' firm sports unit. "But if you can garner the resources to build your own facility and manage it to attract other events, concerts, etc., you're always better off in a larger market. That can be better than going to a smaller market where you get a year or two of good attendance, then see a drop-off if the team loses its appeal."
Basketball Commissioner David Stern must not be crazy about the idea of his sport leaving North Carolina. But he's also not crazy enough to try to stop the Charlotte owners from moving if they can tap into public largess elsewhere.
The NBA, like the NFL, does not have an exemption from antitrust laws enjoyed by Major League Baseball. As Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis taught the NFL during the 1980s, a league without that exemption gets between an owner and the holy grail of tax dollars in a new market at its own legal peril.
Major League Baseball doesn't have many constructive lessons to offer on the business of sports. But it does have one, a shining palace to the sport along the shore of the San Francisco Bay called Pacific Bell Park, which has rarely seen an empty seat since it opened in 2000.
PacBell would never have been built if San Francisco Giants owners had been allowed to sell the team for $115 million in the early 1990s to an investment group who planned to move the franchise to a dreary but government-built dome in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Baseball, in proof of the old adage about blind squirrels finding acorns, saw that leaving San Francisco was folly, and ordered the team to stay put. City voters, confident in being able to keep their team, continued to block public funds for a new stadium. Eventually PacBell was built with virtually all private financing.
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In 1998 St. Petersburg got the major league franchise it had long sought when the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays moved in. They just forgot to bring any fans with them.
PacBell has left the Giants with one of the biggest debt loads of any professional sports team. But they could be worse off - they could be the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Forbes magazine's latest estimates on franchise value put the Giants at $333 million, and the Devil Rays at $150 million.
Wooldridge and Shinn should be forced to watch a seasons' worth of Devil Rays home games in dreary, near-empty Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg before they leap for the public dollars elsewhere just because they can do so. 
Click here to send mail to Chris Isidore
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