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Bring the Grizzlies back to Vancouver (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by AllOutRaptors@alien.top to c/nba@nba.space

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The Memphis Grizzlies are currently selling tickets for as low as $2 per seat. They are averaging the 5th worst attendance in the league at 16, 833 which is worse than half of the Vancouver Grizzlies seasons almost 30 years ago when average attendance league wide was much lower than now.

Am I still petty that Memphis took our team? Absolutely.

But I can also guarantee you'd be hard pressed to find tickets to a Vancouver NBA game for the price of a quarter of a water at Rogers Arena. Not to mention I'm positive that Vancouver could do better than the 5th worst attendance in the league.

I look forward to seeing salty Memphis fans in my DMs, but just remember you would be frustrated too if a worse market stole you're NBA team, and then showed poor support to an actually talented team.

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[–] realair@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Not going to happen. The recent news about the NBA looking at more Canadian teams was bullshit too.

The NBA absolutely hates having the Raptors in Canada already, they're not going to add another team here. Vancouver is too close to Seattle, who will likely get a team. And you can forgot about a team in French speaking Montreal. The idea of a Mexico City team is a joke (no offense to Mexico).

Just look at how they treat the Raptors, the NBA goes out of their way to pretend the Raptors don't exist. They leave them out of promo's and media all the time. Always giving them the worst time slots and game days. NBA talking heads openly and repeatedly talk about how much they hate coming to Canada and how they hope they don't have to go there, and the league does nothing about it. Not saying its the leagues place to dictate what the media says or does, but the league doesn't even push back against the narrative.

Also, look at what happened to the original Grizzlies. The draft rules they put on the Raptors and Grizzlies were some of the stupidest rules ever put in place and while they hampered both teams a great deal, I get why they did them and they wouldn't be around this time. But the point is, look at what happened the second things weren't going 100 in Vancouver; they instantly moved the team. The league could not wait to get that team out of there, that's why they moved so soon. Look at Charlotte, that franchise was and has been generally terrible. They were so terrible they moved, but that didn't stop the league from instantly promising the city another team, which they got pretty quickly.

And then there's New Orleans. A franchise in such a terrible situation, no stadium to play in and no ownership. Look at the lengths the league went to keep a team in New Orleans, they let temporary bought the team and let them play in another city. An insane amount of hardships were faced by that franchise and the league said, no problem, we'll keep you in New Orleans.

And one last thing about these cities. The metro population of Charlotte is ~2.7 million. The metro population of New Orleans is ~1.26 million. The metro population of Vancouver ~2.67 million. So clearly this isn't an issue of market size or not enough people to sustain a team. If the NBA wants a team in a city, they can have a team in that city. The issue is the league would rather have American teams and there are legitimate business reasons for that. Until that changes, I don't see any international teams joining the NBA.