BASKETBALL

ABA 2000

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In the opinion of USC sports business professor David Carter, not this many.

"There are certainly too many basketball leagues to be able to continue like this," says Carter, who has closely followed the blossoming of independent sports leagues in recent years. Carter predicts any more than two or three competing leagues will lead to an "alphabet soup of leagues" that will dilute fan interest; not to mention overload the available pool of players, available TV time, and fan dollars. The current land rush, he suggests, is in part a response to the vacuum created as major-league sports have increasingly marketed themselves to the upscale consumer.

"One of the things that minor-league sports has done well, arena football and some of the others, is be very good with customer service, really deliver in many ways the sports product that families used to get a generation ago when going to the NBA and NFL and so forth," says Carter. "They have recognized a niche, and recognize that families are willing to trade off absolute athletic prowess for a better-rounded entertainment experience." (In other words, you can buy your kids hot dogs without needing a bank loan.)

Regulation via competition?

I can vouch for this personally. This year, for the first time since junior high school, I limited myself to barely a dozen big-league baseball games, thanks in part to ticket prices that outstripped my meager bank balance. At the same time, I became a season ticket holder for the WNBA's New York Liberty ($14 a pop for mid-level baseline seats that would run $63 for Knicks games), and started eagerly attending games of the indie baseball Atlantic League. Just last week, after a fruitless morning of busy signals trying to phone for opening day Yankee tickets, I called one of my baseball buddies to give him the bad news. "That's okay," he said, "we can just go to the Newark Bears game instead."

This sort of conversation -- where sports fans start weighing their choices among competing options, is just what some critics of the sports industry have been hoping for. Economists James Quirk and Rodney Fort, in their books Hard Ball and Pay Dirt (recommended reading for readers of this column, incidentally), argued for the forced breakup of the major sports leagues into competing entities, to eliminate the leagues' monopoly power and let the free market work its competitive magic. Once they had to compete, the argument goes, the leagues could no longer hold cities hostage for stadium subsidies under threat of leaving town, because another league would be waiting to jump in and fill the void.

But the current glut of minor basketball leagues points up a problem with the regulation-via-competition model. Attempts at major leagues, like the USFL or the old ABA, invariably fold or are subsumed into the existing league structure. Meanwhile, minor leagues stay minor, creating a hierarchy of talent and markets that effectively divide up the market with no real competition. If the Detroit Red Wings threatened to leave town, for example, would fans really be placated to know the IHL Vipers were still around as a backup?

Finally, there's nothing stopping the major sports leagues from simply extending their monopoly power into this new arena. The NBA has already made a major foray into "second-tier" sports by launching the affordable and family-friendly WNBA to quash the now-defunct American Basketball League. And the NDBL, its planned new developmental league, is "a shot across the bow of the CBA," as Carter puts it. Plus, there's always the danger that the minor leagues will begin to emulate their major league brethren instead of the other way around -- baseball's Atlantic League launched in 1998 with the demand that cities build new stadiums (albeit relatively modest ones) to qualify for franchises.

Still, it's fun to watch while it lasts. If I'm ever in Indianapolis, I'll be less likely to fight for Pacers tickets than to check out the Indiana Legends take the court at Hinkle Fieldhouse -- if they haven't folded yet, that is.

Questions or comments? Please write to Neil deMause at neil@demause.net or to the SportsJones editors at sjeditor@sportsjones.com

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