Driving home was thinking about all of the 2nd tier leagues out there and how some of them in promotion and relegation countries, manage to have fans and there's hope and all that.
I'm not entirely sure I want to create a promotion & relegation NBA, because in my world, a 2nd tier league would technically get a smaller piece of the TV contract and media rights, but would belong to the same club and not manage to dilute the brand. Can you imagine, for a second, how lucrative minor league clubs would be if you could buy on and have a semi-realistic chance to make the majors if your team was worth a damn?
Anyway, driving home yesterday my thinking was "you could probably do okay for yourself with a 2nd tier league so long as your teams weren't in overlapping markets by and large and you could manage to get a few recognizable players."
In my current Fast Break Pro Basketball 3 save, the same one I've used for the previous ODDCs, we're heading into the year 2000-01. There are still 27 teams in the NBA, but rather than bring in a 28th team just yet -- I'd like to wait -- I'd prefer to see what a 2nd tier US based league could do.
So here's the backdrop:
12 ownership groups who want to own NBA teams but aren't able to get the league to expand, decide to put teams in markets without NBA and to attempt to start a rival league. Except, not really. The league would run in the summer, though since FBPB3 doesn't simulate that, we'll run it at the same time.
My interest is to see what sorts of players would stay at home if there was a league that could afford to pay them to do so. The first thing would be, we'd need salaries that could be competitive to what they'd make overseas so you could effectively make the 2nd best league in the world. They always say that's the D-league in real life, but I'm not interested in a feeder league for this game and I haven't decided if the NBA will ever take this league on in some other scheme, but if you take all of their expansion markets away by giving the fans a solid product, maybe it works?
Ok so, the salary caps of my other active leagues are: (I had to rig the numbers a certain way to get the sort of result I wanted in terms of local kids staying in their home countries, while also making sure stars weren't going to Europe, so the numbers are artificially low. Also there are some things I did on purpose like in my world, Finland likes basketball.)
SPAIN: $1.495m
GERMANY: $30k
AUSTRALIA: $50k
UK: $44.951k
PUERTO RICO: $47.5k
EGYPT: $9k
FINLAND: $12.75k
GREECE: $1.184m
IRAN: $975k
ISRAEL: $125k
JAPAN: $35k
KOREA: $5k
ITALY: $1m
ARGENTINA: $500k
NBA: $58.79m
FRANCE: $695k
TURKEY: $1m
RUSSIA/VTB UNITED LEAGUE: $717k
So I debated the league's salary cap of our new U.S. league and at first, I thought 1% and then 10%, so decided to split the difference and go with 5% or (2.9395 million salary cap for the league) Our owners are deep pocketed guys who wanted to own NBA teams, so this is a bargain for them. Plus it ensures they can compete for the best guys and entice some guys on the bench of NBA teams to consider jumping ship, plus being able to entice one or two of the best foreign guys over, as well.
So now, let's look at our markets. Rather than add fewer and add more later, just going to go ahead and shock the system immediately with a
sixteen eighteen team league. There needs to be enough of a critical mass to make it worthwhile and for the NBA teams to feel it, after all. Plus 1
68 teams would give them a viable enough product to get a TV deal from somebody.
We'll initially only go to markets where there are no NBA teams, but realize my NBA reality here is slightly different than real life, so there will be a few markets that confuse you when I put them here. If the league manages to expand, teams 17-20 would be teams in "1st markets" or in suburbs next to major markets that might have NBA teams already. But not initially.
I used this list, coupled with the cities that lacked teams & tv markets to come up with the teams for the initial sixteen.
To keep it interesting, four NBA owners fearing the loss of quality expansion markets decide to move their teams. Hence the things crossed out as original places I was considering.
Minneapolis Lakers to Riverside, CA (Los Angeles Lakers)
St. Louis Hawks to Atlanta, GA (Atlanta Hawks)
New Orleans Jazz to Montreal (Montreal Jazz)
Cleveland Cavaliers to Las Vegas (Las Vegas Cavaliers)
The NBA ends up adding a 28th team to keep us out of Chicago, too. The Milwaukee Bucks who were folded a few decades ago, are brought back as the
Chicago Stags.
So this complicates things somewhat slightly and forces me to move some teams that were originally going to be in other markets, but I went straight with places that can afford a team and hoping the tv thing can take care of itself.