Bernstein: Is A Second NBA Team Coming To Chicago?
By Dan Bernstein
When the New Jersey Nets complete their move to Brooklyn in two years, New York City will have two NBA teams. The next-largest market, Los Angeles, already has a pair of teams sharing an arena.
Now, there is speculation that Chicago will also be a two-franchise town.
The NBA purchased the New Orleans Hornets yesterday, and their low attendance (13,860 per game, 27th in the league despite a 13-7 record) remains sufficiently below the threshold for games between now and January 17th that allows them to break the lease with their arena. Commissioner David Stern is keeping all options open: while paying lip service to the current market, he is actively investigating whether or not it benefits the value of other franchises to keep the Hornets in such a small city.
Ian Thomsen of Sports Illustrated makes a strong argument that a new owner should relocate here, where the Bulls are the NBA's most profitable team. He lists Anaheim, San Jose and Kansas City as other possibilities, but zeroes in on Chicago.
"There hasn't been a lot of talk elsewhere about Chicago, but it's the third-largest market in North America," Thomsen writes. "In suburban Chicago near O'Hare Airport, the Allstate Arena could serve as a temporary NBA home until a new arena could be built, depending on the resources of the new owner."
It's a good bet the new owner of the Hornets will be a foreigner. Stern is pursuing international investors, reportedly meeting with some potential buyers as soon as next week.
"An oil-rich buyer from the middle east could purchase the Hornets from Stern himself," says Thomsen, "then move them to a more prosperous market. I don't mean to keep harping on the potential of Chicago, but it has to be the most alluring location on the crowded North American map; if a Saudi billionaire were to move the team to Chicago then he could eventually build himself a new arena, much as Russian owner Mikhail Prokhorov is doing for the Nets in Brooklyn."
What Thomsen fails to address, however, is the longstanding and powerful connection Jerry Reinsdorf has to Stern and the league. It's a significant oversight for one trying to make the case for Chicago as destination, since I doubt that Reinsdorf would allow Bulls hegemony here to be threatened by an exotic interloper, unless Stern could prove that it would be a long-term benefit to franchise values, or offer some other kind of compensation.
Stern has put the price tag at $300 million to buy the Hornets. He wants to be out of the team-ownership business, due to the obvious and uncomfortable conflicts of interest with free-agency and elsewhere. This deal should move quickly after a new collective bargaining agreement is reached.
The idea of some OPEC sultan dropping another NBA team in Chicago and building a sparkling new arena sounds wild at this point in the process, but the same could have been said for the idea of a shadowy Russian industrialist doing the same in the Knicks' backyard.
