NBA Basketball: Why the League Needs To Split Up the New Orleans Hornets

Bill Simmons had David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, as his guest on his February, 14th podcast, the B.S. Report.  He talked about several things from the looming lock out to conspiracy theories.

One interesting thing that stood out to me was the discussion on the New Orleans Hornets. The franchise was in negotiations to be bought out after Katrina had ravaged the city. Because of the local economy, the price of the Hornets at that time was considerably low. When buying stock if you can buy a 15 dollar stock for 10 that’s a steal.

In the case of the Hornets, it was more like 15 dollar stock for five dollars.

Not wanting the cost of an NBA to be so diminished, David Stern and the NBA went ahead and bought the Hornets for 10.

So who owns the New Orleans Hornets if the NBA owns them?

Simply, the other 29 owners of the other NBA teams each have a 1/29 share in the New Orleans organization.

In the podcast, Stern talked about the different options for the New Orleans organization. Apparently several people are willing to pay that 15 dollar price for the Hornets, but want to move the team out of New Orleans because they feel the city can't support an NBA franchise.

Another option is contraction. Since the NBA owns the Hornets, they only need to get rid of one other owner to get the league down to 28 teams.

This will do a couple of things. First, if you are a team that is in the lottery, now instead of having 14 teams in the running for a top pick, you now have 12. The NBA won’t give the worst team a better advantage than 25% for the number one pick, so the percentages go up for the ten through twelve teams.

This will help certain teams turn their misfortunes much quicker. Example: the Chicago Bulls, the ninth worst team in the league after the 2008 season won the rights to the number one pick which they used to get Derrick Rose. Three years later they’re one of the best teams in the East.

Second, it used to take two stars to win a championship. Jordan and Pippen, Magic and Kareem, Shaq and Kobe, and the list continues.

In 2008 the Celtics started a new trend in the NBA requiring you to have three stars to win a championship. Now the Miami Heat have three stars. The Orlando Magic have traded twice this year to get three star players, if you consider Gilbert Arenas and either Hedo Turkoglu, Jason Richardson, or Quentin Richardson stars. Even the Bulls now have their version of three stars. New York will get three stars when Melo and Chris Paul eventually get there.

If the league was to contract that would force at least two stars to other teams in other markets to compete for a NBA Championship, along with some better role players to be distributed as well. The NBA becoming less diluted would not only make the NBA product better, but would give markets that would otherwise have no chance at competing for a championship a better chance at attracting the stars to compete.

With a salary cap—Stern is arguing for a hard cap in the new collective bargaining agreement—teams can’t load up on the star players so the stars are going to have to end up in a place they normally wouldn’t consider.

Better players playing with better players means better basketball is being played. When this happens people who don’t normally watch will now start tuning in.

If the lockout doesn’t happen in the NBA and does happen in the NFL, the contraction of the New Orleans Hornets would put the NBA ahead of the NFL in terms of popularity. The league needs to do this to be the best.