George Shinn, the last NBA lockout and arena politics inherent in small markets conspired to kill Charlotte as an NBA market by 2001. To resuscitate the Queen City, Michael Jordan needs to get what he wants.
Nov 22, 2011 - Weeks ago, Michael Jordan emerged as a hardline owner in the NBA lockout, reportedly leading a cabal that refused to go beyond a 50-50 revenue split in negotiations and actually wanted to be more aggressive than the pitbull-intense the league has already presented.
Were his name Jordan Michael, and were he a M&A specialist from Wall Street who bought the Charlotte Bobcats as a reclamation project, no one would raise an eyebrow. Charlotte is exactly the type of market that struggles in today's NBA. The Bobcats are not good, and when a small market NBA team is not good is seems practically impossible to turn a profit. Were the Bobcats good, financial success would still be difficult -- payroll expenses would be expected to grow, but you can only add so much revenue year-over-year -- and would be fleeting. The position that a franchise owner in Charlotte has in this stalemate is almost required to be on the hard line.
The dissonance came from Jordan's previous career -- Greatest Basketball Player Ever -- and his aggressive role in previous NBA labor battles, most notably a 1998 exhortation to Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin to sell his team if he couldn't afford it. Jordan can't afford the Bobcats, and no one can make money on the team, which really means that in an economy where few have patience for losing bets, no one can afford the Bobcats.
But it didn't have to be this way in Charlotte. The city was once a beacon of hope for smaller markets in the NBA, proof that with some on-court success, a rabid fan base and some key sponsors, success was possible outside of Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
What happened?
George Shinn brought Charlotte into the NBA in the grand expansion of 1989. Like the Miami Heat and Orlando Magic, Charlotte met with pretty quick success. It took just five years for the Hornets to break .500; meanwhile, the Charlotte Coliseum was packed just about every night. From the team's second season through 1996-97, the Hornets were at 99 percent capacity or greater every year. Charlotte even had a 364-game sellout streak in there, a great mark considering that the Coliseum was much bigger than some NBA arenas (with a maximum capacity of 24,042).
In 1998, attendance dropped a bit, as the team lost about 1,000 fans a game. The Hornets were still excellent, going 51-31 on the season. But something had changed. It got worse. In 1998-99, attendance fell below 20,000 a game despite the team remaining above .500. In 1999-2000, the turnstiles clicked fewer than 18,000 times a game, despite a 49-33 record. In 2001, just 15,000 showed up each night. In 2002, attendance sunk toward 11,000. By the next season, the Hornets were playing their home games in New Orleans.
What happened?
Shinn happened. In 1997, he was accused of sexual assault. A trial was broadcast nationally, drawing huge attention. While Shinn was eventually exonerated, more nasty stories came out, and the Hornets owner had admitted to having affairs, including with one of the team's cheerleaders. The trial was a huge embarrassment for not only Shinn, but Charlotte. It alienated Shinn from the community; in a 2008 interview with the Charlotte Observer, Shinn admitted that he basically stopped trying after the sexual assault charges.
In a small market in the NBA, you can't afford to stop trying. You can have good talent (as the Hornets always did), you can have passionate fans. But you can't afford to stop trying to fill every seat, reach every set of eyeballs. There's no luxury of comfort.
Shinn learned that the hard way. It didn't help that the 1998-99 lockout came as Shinn's sexual assault case reached notoriety, and it really didn't help that Shinn began agitating for a new taxpayer-funded arena to replace the 10-year-old Coliseum. With the lockout, the NBA pissed off fans. With the sexual assault, Shinn embarrassed fans. With the arena demands, Shinn insulted fans. That's a holy trinity of bad mojo; as you can see in the chart above, attendance tanked despite continuing on-court success. Charlotte was dead as an NBA market.
Well, Charlotte wasn't dead, because Robert Johnson, the CEO of BET, wanted to re-animate the market. In 2004, he was able to do so. David Stern has a set of interesting relationships with cities that get screwed by their NBA team owners. Stern did nothing to stop Shinn from bleeding Charlotte to near-death, and he rammed through the relocation to New Orleans (a small, troubled market before Hurricane Katrina, one that had already failed once). But he maintained a sort of public sympathy for Charlotte, which he considered to be an NBA city. (Three hundred and sixty-four sellouts don't lie.) He's done the same to Seattle: he did little to bridge the gap between legislators and Clay Bennett, but he seems to indicate regularly he'd like the Emerald City to return to the NBA. (One could effectively argue that even Kreskin couldn't convince Washington state politicians to play along.)
Stern let Charlotte bleed under Shinn, but tried to correct the mistake by adding a franchise there in 2004. But expansion in the NBA is not easy, even compared to other leagues. The chart at right shows the average time it takes an expansion team in each league to have a winning season, using data going back to the mid-1990s. The NBA presents the longest timeframe: an average of 6.3 seasons.
And it makes sense, doesn't it? In no league do individual players matter more than in the NBA. You need stars to even break .500, except in special cases. How do you get stars? You draft them, you sign them or you trade for them. True superstars are rarely traded, and then only with the threat of free agency. If you're an expansion club -- Toronto excepted -- you're likely a smaller market; in the NBA, smaller markets tend not to have success signing superstars outright. (This lack of free agent success for small markets affects the trade possibilities, given the constraint that most superstar trades come under duress of pending free agency.)
So there's the draft. If you get unlucky in or botch the draft, of course it will take you a while to succeed. The Vancouver Grizzlies, who needed nine seasons to break .500, botched the draft. Word up to Big Country. The Raptors did well in the draft (Vince Carter), and came on more quickly. The Bobcats have managed to be both unlucky in (getting the No. 2 pick in 2004, with Dwight Howard sitting atop the pack) and botch (Adam Morrison) the draft.
It took the Bobcats six years to make the playoffs; even then, they hired a pricey coach, mortgaged part of the team's future and crashed right back into the lottery. The team's hope now lies in Kemba Walker and Bismack Biyombo. No offense to those fine young gentlemen, but it's hard to see the Bobcats escaping their expansion nightmare any time soon.
The real problem is that expanding back into Charlotte did nothing to rekindle old emotions. Attendance has been pretty bad for the Bobcats, even in the team's debut season. Shinn had a good team with passionate fans, and killed the market. The NBA's problematic expansion process failed to resuscitate the Queen City. It's time is truly running out.
When you look at it this way, Jordan's lockout stance is easy to understand.
That's really a part of the lockout that's hard to accept, especially for those of us who are strong supporters of organized labor in all of its forms. Some of these owners are bad people. Shinn seems to have been pretty awful. He's gone, but for every bought-out Shinn, there's happily-making-money Donald Sterling. And for every honest-to-goodness terrified Peter Holt, there's a billionaire-with-his-hand-out like Herb Simon. I'm often guilty of focusing on the outrageous (like Paul Allen bitching about high payrolls) at the expense of legitimate concerns.
Jordan has legitimate concerns. Charlotte cannot survive without a revamped system that draws down costs and shares more revenue. (One could accurately argue that players have already conceded plenty to draw down costs, and that MJ needs to address revenue sharing with his buddies in New York and L.A. But I digress.) Charlotte deserves basketball. The city's fans proved themselves in the 1990s, before one of the bad apples ruined it all. If a new deal can make the NBA as feasible in Charlotte, New Orleans, Salt Lake City and Sacramento as it is in Chicago, Boston and Dallas, then it will improve the league.
The league just needs to realize that the deal that achieves that has already been offered by players, and that holding out for relatively silly salary cap items endangers the fan support in small markets that the NBA is so desperately trying to save.
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I agree with many of your points
and Charlotte deserves to keep its NBA team.
by thewiz06 on Nov 22, 2011 10:22 AM EST reply actions
I went to college outside of Charlotte and your graph, it is accurate.
An important inflection point is also the Panthers- they started playing in Charlotte in 97 I think. While they do exist as competition for limited season ticket dollars, their ability to fill the stadium even when the Panthers stone cold suck is why i think pro leagues want to expand into Charlotte- they want that kind of loyalty. That and Lowes Motor Speedway fits something like 215,000 people regularly in there.
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by Londonjoe on Nov 22, 2011 11:41 AM EST reply actions
I think you also have to consider that Charlotte is a big banking city with Bank of America and Wells Fargo (fka Wachovia) there.
doesn’t hurt the town one bit.
by thewiz06 on Nov 22, 2011 1:04 PM EST up reply actions
Re: Panthers
They don’t fill the stadium when the Panthers suck. Even though seats may have been purchased, people didn’t go, and that’s not just a Charlotte issue — it’s an issue with the entire American South. Every single pro sports team in the American South has an attendance issue — remember the Braves failing to sell out during playoff games? — especially when they don’t win. Tom did a good job laying out much of why Charlotte’s situation is so toxic, but it’s also worth noting that Charlotte’s toxicity for the NBA is on top of general toxicity for pro sports in the South.
As for why teams always want to come to Charlotte: it’s because of the media market. It was fast-growing over the past two decades, and depending on how you define it, it’s in the top-30 American population centers. Of course, that ignores that a bunch of those people are transplants with already-defined fan loyalties, and that many (most?) of the natives are predisposed to enjoying college ball more than pro ball.
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by David A. Arnott on Nov 22, 2011 1:54 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
The Panthers' ability to fill their stadium is based on PSLs, and nothing more.
And CMS only has two major races a year. A lot easier than ten Panthers games or 41+ Bobcats games.
Personal attacks are the weapon of the ignorant.
Panthers '011: This is what we've been waiting for...we get to overpay the core of a 2-14 team!
by MichaelProcton on Nov 25, 2011 8:27 PM EST up reply actions
Is 50-50 enough
for the Charlotte’s, Indy, SAC and New Orl to survive? I hope so.
Explain again why a break even proposition (Only if aggressive revenue sharing IS accomplished) for owners is reasonable from the players point of view while they have guaranteed profits of $2 billion?
I hope 50-50 is enough for those smaller markets, I’m just not sure.
I do appreciate that you have finally offered a look at the other situations in NBA ownership/cities rather than ranting about the equal number of bad apples (equal number) in ownership – not to mention all the remaining owners who lie somewhere in the middle.
Money doesn’t seem to be the biggest issue anymore anyway, it’s about freedom of movement viewed positively, it’s about flexibility for agents to make deals justifying their existance on the negative . . .
As to that, I’ve argued in the past that because the Star players are so important to success (winning) due to the nature of the basketball game where a few key players are so much more important than other sports, that to really increase the chances of competitive parity, player movement does need to be more restrictive than in any other major sport.
So if the remaining items are about league competitiveness as the NBA claims – they’re arguing about the correct thing at this point. I know you think the competitiveness issue is a pipe dream or an outright fallacy and have referenced many writers to support your view, I’d like to know who out there does have a solution that would / might work if the draft, salary controls and some restriction of player movement isn’t the answer.
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by lietothegirls on Nov 22, 2011 1:44 PM EST reply actions
Once again, as a fan I don't CARE
what a franchise might or might not be worth in 10 years, I care about the game on the court.
But
Should any revenue sharing deal also include some requirement of league approved third party detemination of franchise value prior to any future sales? Other brands carefully control what individual franchises are bought and sold at in order to protect the brand itself. That would (eventually) solve some of the concerns that owner costs are being partially caused by debt from inflated franchise values at purchase and sale.
"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."
- Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower
by lietothegirls on Nov 22, 2011 1:53 PM EST reply actions
Good stuff
I hope the misguided people who have been trashing Jordan and small market teams read this article.
"I could never be a thug, they don't dress this well." - Malice
by Julius Coxswain on Nov 22, 2011 1:58 PM EST reply actions
Great piece
As a person who grew up on the boarder of VA and NC while watching my 2nd favorite NBA team in the Hornets getting ran into the ground by Shinn I 100% remember the events and cosign this piece
One thing i can do...................is FINGER ROLL.
by gunnin' gervin on Nov 23, 2011 2:19 AM EST reply actions
Thank you for the insightful article Tom.
As a Bobcat fan, it’s hard to explain these circumstances to the fans of other teams. Now I can just poin them to this piece for reference.
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by Charlotte Bobcat on Nov 25, 2011 5:15 PM EST reply actions
Great read!
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by Warmec on Nov 25, 2011 5:23 PM EST reply actions
I think you are wrong in one specific way.
You overplay the “problems” that Shinn caused and totally glossed over what an idiot Bob Johnson was. Shinn was (yes, as noted) acquitted, yet many of the Bible-thumping conservatives down here never let him live it down, as though the very players for his team weren’t guilty of the same “crimes.” And then when Bob Johnson came in to town, he totally mis-evaluated his market, trying to create an urban game experience in the middle of an upper-middle class suburban region. He was detached and egotistical, naming the team after himself despite Bobcats having no logical tie to the region whatsoever. The Hornets left on bad terms, but Johnson did NOTHING to win back support for the Bobcats.
Personal attacks are the weapon of the ignorant.
Panthers '011: This is what we've been waiting for...we get to overpay the core of a 2-14 team!
by MichaelProcton on Nov 25, 2011 8:31 PM EST reply actions
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