Houston's daily paper covers today's crappy news. Local and national fans will be having their say, on the boards and at the HRR, which has been the best source of Houston info for years now-- if that city ever gets another W team, you'll hear from Kris Gardner fast.
Houston furniture guy Hilton Koch seems to have been the kind of guy who would have owned a WBL team, back in the day-- OK as a placeholder for a year or two while the league sought more appropriate buyers, not OK after that. And not because he didn't want the team.
One takeaway from this story-- and from the failed multi-year saga of Dave King's attempt to land a team in Colorado-- is, I think, that to run a WNBA team you need to be able to lose what for most people, including most successful local business owners, amounts to a ton of money. You might not lose it, if your team does well, but you need to be able to lose it.
So the universe of potential non-NBA owners for WNBA teams is smaller than a lot of fans might think-- and while Donna Orender (and, behind her, David Stern) will do a lot of things to help the league, one thing they won't do is run a team with no appropriate owner, year after year.
Why not? One of many good reasons: it would mean that committed non-NBA owners, like those in L.A. and Washington, would have been sending to Houston, via the league office, money they wanted, and perhaps needed, for their own teams. The league's future, still, depends on how many people who can afford to own teams want to own them-- and on whether those people change their minds.
As long as Sheila Johnson, Ron Terwilliger, Bill Davidson, the women of Force 10, the San Antonio Spurs-and-Stars organization, and most of the rest of the remaining owners-- especially the non-NBA owners-- want to stay in, and can afford to stay in, we'll be fine.
And if they stop wanting to stay in, or can't afford to stay in, we'll be in trouble, and the league might vanish. But if that happens, the reason won't have much to do with the Comets; it will have everything to do with the economy, which is casting a pretty long shadow over professional sports almost everywhere.
Houston furniture guy Hilton Koch seems to have been the kind of guy who would have owned a WBL team, back in the day-- OK as a placeholder for a year or two while the league sought more appropriate buyers, not OK after that. And not because he didn't want the team.
One takeaway from this story-- and from the failed multi-year saga of Dave King's attempt to land a team in Colorado-- is, I think, that to run a WNBA team you need to be able to lose what for most people, including most successful local business owners, amounts to a ton of money. You might not lose it, if your team does well, but you need to be able to lose it.
So the universe of potential non-NBA owners for WNBA teams is smaller than a lot of fans might think-- and while Donna Orender (and, behind her, David Stern) will do a lot of things to help the league, one thing they won't do is run a team with no appropriate owner, year after year.
Why not? One of many good reasons: it would mean that committed non-NBA owners, like those in L.A. and Washington, would have been sending to Houston, via the league office, money they wanted, and perhaps needed, for their own teams. The league's future, still, depends on how many people who can afford to own teams want to own them-- and on whether those people change their minds.
As long as Sheila Johnson, Ron Terwilliger, Bill Davidson, the women of Force 10, the San Antonio Spurs-and-Stars organization, and most of the rest of the remaining owners-- especially the non-NBA owners-- want to stay in, and can afford to stay in, we'll be fine.
And if they stop wanting to stay in, or can't afford to stay in, we'll be in trouble, and the league might vanish. But if that happens, the reason won't have much to do with the Comets; it will have everything to do with the economy, which is casting a pretty long shadow over professional sports almost everywhere.
posted by Stephanie at 9:18 PM
