Okay, NBA commissioner David Stern, In a podcast interview with ESPN.com, was asked what decisions he would take a mulligan on over the course of his 24 years on the job.
"I wish we hadn't had the Vancouver experience," Stern replied. "Great city, and we disappointed them, and we disappointed ourselves." Now there are a couple things I find wrong with this statement, first of all a betting scandal involving a referee is pretty big and the failure of the Seattle Supersonics, a franchise that lasted 40 years and had tradition, is much worse.
Now for those who don't know the story here is a summary, in 1995 the NBA decided to expand into Canada with two teams, one in Toronto and the other in Vancouver (the two largest media markets in Canada) however the league set up the expansion so the teams could not succeed, first of all they denied both teams the right to the first or second picks in the NBA draft therefore they could not draft good players, the second was that the NBA had implemented bad management teams to both franchises (when the head is weak the body suffers), the third was the fact that the Canadian Loonie was roughly 65 cents to the US Greenback which not only made ticket prices ludicrously high to cover the costs but also good players wouldn't come to play for the Canadian franchises because they could make better money on US teams. Therefore the owner of the Grizz, who was losing money, sold the team to Michael Heisley in 2000 who promised to keep the franchise in Vancouver however one year later he cited bad attendance records as a cause to relocate the team to his hometown Memphis and the leaugue and Stern agreed.
What Stern failed to realize was that for a team that had a career .281 win percentage there were an average of 16,000 fans a game which is much higher than what the Memphis Grizzlies (they don't even have grizzlies in Memphis) draw for a team that has actually been to the playoffs and now they are in financial disarray and up for sale and relocation but that doesn't mean they'll go back to Vancouver because David Stern added that he didn't think the league could return to Vancouver.
"I don't think we can go back," Stern said. "I think that was a great city, and I think we just didn't take advantage of the opportunity."
The bottom line is that the NBA did work in Vancouver especially given that the franchise sucked but people still supported it. Though the Grizz didn't get many corporate sponsors, that was also because they sucked, they did have sufficient revenue, even with a weak dollar, to support a franchise and they had at the time a state-of-the-art facility in GM Place. David Stern please just retire already because you obviously didn't learn your lesson from the experience when you let the same thing happen to the Sonics who now play in... actually where do they play now? I know its in some small city with a crappy population and crappy media awareness but i just can't remember oh well who cares right 'cause we can watch them on tv right? I mean they do get on tv right!?
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Peace and Much Love To Ya
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