Its true that Mexico City wouldn't be a desirable place for players, and its true that it can be dangerous, but this is a very exaggerated statement. Do you realize that in Mexico City alone there are 3 professional soccer teams in the Mexican first division? and that soccer is a much bigger sport in Mexico than basketball, and that generates a lot more passion as well? They lose games every other weekend, the players dont get killed because of it. That doesn't mean there are have not been instances in the last few years where athletes have been involved in crimes, there are, but these occurrences are rare, and they usually have more to do with other issues like them getting involved in gambling, drugs or just by being somewhere they shouldn't have been, and there are places like that anywhere in the world.
The problem is not about how much talent. Super teams being formed has nothing to do with that. Theoretically, there will be more super teams if the size of the league shrinks. (Talent is more concentrated.) But that's not the case. Look at how the Celtics dominated in the '60s when the league was much smaller. The problem with an expanded league is that there will be more bad teams. Right now, more than half of the teams are losing. Only about a third of the teams are even relevant in any competitive sense. The number of relevant teams will not increase if you add two more. You just increase the number of mediocre to bad teams. And that means more meaningless games.
Not sure Mexico City would be a test case anymore than Vancouver/Toronto have already been that test case... I mean I get that Canada is culturally much more American than Mexico... but neither is the real test case of the logistics of international expansion beyond these geographically close bordering countries. Meaning, the issue with say London as an expansion, is clearly geography. Plus there's already good/great (entertainment wise) European basketball. I assume the real market the NBA would love to dominate more and more is China/Asia. But there will clearly not be an Asian NBA team anytime in the near or medium term future. I could see them making a play at the Chinese Basketball Association... some kind of 50% acquisition or the like, which would create a China NBA of secondary players. Why not sold on Louisville or Vegas? The NBA obviously wants to expand West. Problematically Vegas is the real only option here. Every other meaningful area already has a team... the lone exception being San Diego (and that has obvious stadium issues, plus LA has 2 teams already). Other cities that could support a team would include Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Columbus, Kansas City, St. Louis. But Vegas is the obvious Western one (after Seattle, which is a no brainer), and has a much higher population growth rate. Not that this would ever happen, or is even being pushed for, but if they're looking for a Western option instead of Vegas, Austin actually makes a lot of sense. It's on par with Vegas size wise from an MSA perspective, with even higher future growth. It just doesn't seem like Austin will ever care about professional sports enough to attract one in the near term. Already, I can get to a Spurs game from central Austin in an hour and half - since Spurs arena is north of town with not much around it so parking isn't a big deal. But the #'s support it. And if DC, Philly, Brooklyn, NY all have teams close together, and you have Chicago and Milwaukee close together, SF and Sac. are less than 2 hours drive time (traffic aside), etc.
Should be Seattle and Vancouver IMO. Truly great cities that deserve a franchise. Only 1 team in the PNW is not enough.
You're right it'd be a hard sell to NBA players, but it shouldn't be. There are a lot of rich people living in Mexico City right now. There's an ecosystem already developed right now to live safely in the rich neighborhoods. I think they'd be just fine. Besides which, they can live in the US and fly to Mexico City for the season. They don't have to be there year-round.
When someone wins someone else has to lose. You can't have a league full of winners. If there are two more bottom teams , some other team that are mediocre will get more wins, and turn into good teams. Anyway there won't be 10 contenders in the NBA ever. The number of contenders will be the same.
Same problem I would have. Would love to have an NBA team in Austin, and I think Greater Austin could support one (lots of money in this town), but I could never root for them against the Rockets. I sure as hell could root for an Austin team against anyone else, though. Dream on.
There is another problem with Europe. I don't know if it's the same with Mexico but maybe. Teams = clubs in all sports = you are a fan for life. You come to Greece for example and build an nba team. I couldn't care less. I am a panathinaikos fan in all sports and I will never suport a greek nba team over MY team. The concept of franchise doesn't exist. Same with Spain , Italy etc. England is not like that because they simply dont care at all about basketball so their clubs don't have basketball teams. I don't know the state of mexican basketball league but if it's like europe, good luck convincing mexicans to support a new foreign nba team over their own club.
Right, that's why I said there is already good/great basketball there. add in the geography issue which is enormous, and true nba expansion to europe isn't happening. London is a long long long outside possibility. A flight from the West Coast to London is still 10+ hours, and while it wouldn't be so bad for those teams flying there, the problem would be the London based team's away games.... they'd have to schedule like 4, 10 game road trips... which is in no way fair from a scheduling perspective. I don't think Mexican basketball is anything like that. You do get some long flight times (eg. Boston, Toronto to Mexico City), but you can schedule those into road trips. I don't think its going to happen, but I can see it very seriously considered.
That was my point. The number of contenders will stay quite constant. When you add more teams, you are not adding more contending teams. You are just adding more mediocre-bad teams. You end up having more games without a contender playing. This is especially noticeable for a long 82-game season like the NBA's. There are plenty of garbage games already.
And so what? In that article above they said they may go away with divisions. That probably means they will try to have the same number of games each team plays or near it. Fans can't only care about when the contenders play. Otherwise this year that are only two same old contenders why would i.e a Pacers fan even go to the stadium and pay $ to watch his team? It's pointless since they will never win the championship this year. If you love bball and you love your team you will even enjoy seasons with mediocrity. Even a bad season if there is a young rookie with star potential. Im sure Minny fans, and Philly fans enjoy watching their teams this year even though they suck. And if there isn't you can always focus on the draft to see who your team should pick. Only rare cases like BKN give their fans no reason to care. LMAO..MΠΑΟΚΑΡΑ.
This is a good point. I understand Club America is the preeminent football club in Mexico and based in Mexico City. I don't think they play any sport but soccer. There is also a 10-team pro basketball league in Mexico that started around 2000. So I don't think they have quite the structural difference that Europe does.
I disagree and I say look And this is my point. When 90% of the teams don't have a chance of even sniffing the Championship, you've got a problem. Everyone knows that 1 of 3 teams has a chance of winning this year out of 30!! Warriors, Cavs and Spurs. That's it. What is really the point of watching unless you just love the sport. 27 other teams know there is no freaking chance they will beat those 3 teams 4 times in the playoffs and the league knows it too. They might as well go straight to the playoffs and let them Duke it out with maybe the Raptors to give the Cavs someone to warm up with. It's pathetic how uncompetitive the league really is overall. They are constantly trying to hype a player on a team as a star to get people to watch that game but the teams suck.
What? The Rockets are the favorite to win it all this year. How dare you missing that! You must not be a true Rockets fan!! Seriously, there will always be just a handful of teams that have a chance to win the championship in a given year in almost any sport. That's not a problem. There usually are about 4 or 5 other teams that are competitive and have a fighting chance of upsetting one of those true contenders. Last year's OKC was far and away from the Warriors and Spurs in the regular season. But they beat the Spurs and almost beat the Warriors. The Raptors almost got beat in the first and second round but was able to take the Cavs to 6 games. These were relevant teams even though they did not have very good chances of going all the way. So I wouldn't say only three teams are worth watching. I was arguing with malakas that there would always be that number of teams (about 7 or 8 teams) that would be relevant like that. Adding more teams would only add more irrelevant teams. Games played without those relevant teams are worth watching only to the diehard fans of those mediocre/bad teams. How many people would be interested in watching the Timberwolves play the Pacers on national TV?
warriors are leaving the oakland oracle stadium and going into san francisco. They did their ground breaking on the new stadium today, KD, Steve kerr, curry all were there it was a big event. its sick with water views
I'm all for contraction not expansion. You must have missed that in there. Imagine if you reduced the league by 3 perennial bottom feeder, small market teams in each conference, I'll just pick 3, y'all might pick 3 others: WEST: New Orleans, Minnesota, Sacramento EAST: Milwaukee, Charlotte and New Jersey Spread out the talent to the remaining 24 teams across the league and remove the undesired players and you actually have very competitive teams to contend with every night and then it starts to become any teams trophy. Just imagine the following players added to the depth of the remaining teams: Anthony Davis, Jrue Holiday, Tyreke Evans, Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns, Zach LaVine, Kris Dunn, DeMarcus Cousins, Rudy Gay, Ben McLemore, Kosta Koufos, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jabari Parker, Greg Monroe, Kemba Walker, Nicolas Batum, Brook Lopez, Sean Kilpatrick, Bojan Bogdanovic, etc. That's just 19 players, some of whom would make a huge difference in a teams chances of getting a title that had an already established star. The talent is spread too thin. It's a cake walk for teams like Cleveland and Golden State but you put DeMarcus Cousins or Anthony Davis on the Celtics, Thunder, Blazers, Memphis or Houston and it's gonna be brutal for them. I just don't get how people don't see how much fat there is in this league! Condense.
I don't understand how two more teams will make things worse than that. It is as it is and can't change. So why not one or two more? Maybe for you it won't matter but for the fans of the new teams that they will finally to get NBA bball in their city and support a team it will. If people only watched their teams because they were top 2 or 3 contenders then hardly anyone would be watching ro going to the games.
Less teams means also less jobs and less opportunities to create new stars and develop players. You think that Zach LaVine Giannis , Gobert etc would be given a chance to develop if every single nba spot was so precious and rare?
