Okay…
Whats the difference between the LA Lakers and the LA Clippers?
How does a city end up with more than one Basketball Franchise?
Market size. Team can make more money with half of LA than with all of Peoria.
CHI Cubs/Sox
LA Dodgers/Angels
NY Yankees/Mets (1940s, Yanks, Gints, Bums)
NY Rangers/Islanders
$ , and from what I hear LA has plenty.
BTW, while I’m here: Enola, did you go to HS in Somers Point? I went to EHT, 2 years older than you, but most of my freinds went to MRHS.
It is unusual in this day and age for two pro sports teams in the same league to share the same venue.
In baseball, some teams have shared venues, but at least they were in different leagues.
The situation with the Lakers/Clippers would be similar to the Mets and Yankees both playing in the AL East and both using Yankee Stadium as their home and with each team having to play “road” games in their own home.
When the Clippers moved to L.A. from San Diego, they played their home games at the L.A. Sports Arena while the Lakers were at the Forum in Inglewood. But when Staples Center opened, both franchises moved in to the new arena (which is actually owned for the most part by the LA Kings hockey team).
However, both the Forum (aka the Great Western Forum named after a bank that doesn’t exist anymore) and the L.A. Memorial Sports Arena (where JFK was nominated back in 1960) are still standing. Not much goes on at the Sports Arena anymore. Just USC basketball and that should stop in a couple of years. I think the Sports Arena may finally get sent to the scrap heap then.
It pissed me off to no end that my precious Giants had to play an “away” game against the Jets in Giants Stadium last season. Then I realized this meant that Big Blue had, in effect, 9 home games and only 7 away games. Way cool. "We"got to use “our” regular locker room, but had to use visitor parking spaces. And the 70,000+ rabid fans were wearing green, of course. But no travel.
Hey, you take the good with the bad.
A city ends up with the Clippers if it is being punished.
Whats the difference between the LA Lakers and the LA Clippers?
There are several. Some of them include:
- The Lakers win an average of over 25 more games a season.
- The Lakers have 14 more championships (6 since the Clippers arrived in LA).
- It costs about $1500 more for Laker tickets (based on hightest prices shown on Ticketmaster).
- The Lakers have about $30 million more in payroll.
- Jack Nicholson likes the Lakers, Billy Crystal likes the Clippers.
How does a city end up with more than one Basketball Franchise?
Three ways:
- Create a team there. Hasn’t happened in NBA history, but the Los Angeles (now Anaheim) Angels and Anaheim Mighty Ducks were created as expansion teams (1961 MLB and 1993 NHL respectively).
- Move a team there. The Clippers moved to Los Angeles in 1984. In other sports, the Raiders became L.A.'s second football team in 1982.
- Acquire a team from another league. Happened in New York when the Nets were assimilated from the ABA in 1976. In football, the NFL added the New York Jets when they merged with the AFL in 1970.
D
The more strategic answer to your question, of course, is the same answer to the questions “Why does the New York area have three hockey teams?” and “Why does Los Angeles have no football teams at all?” Or, why does Milwaukee have a baseball team, but Washington does not? Why does Kansas City have a baseball team and a football team, but not a basketball team or a hockey team? Why does Toronto not have an NFL team?
The placement of teams is entirely dependent upon whether or not a rich person or corporation is willing to buy a team and pay to have it play in a particular city. New York has three hockey teams because one was always there (the Rangers) and its owners always wantesd to keep it there; one was created there (the Islanders) because a rich guy wanted to start a second team there, and one was moved there (the Devils) because another rich guy decided to move his team from Denver to New York because he would make more money there.
The placement of sports teams does not always make sense with respect to market size; it’s all dependent on whether there is an available owner, and owners will keep or move teams in cities dependent on a lot of variables. Los Angeles does not have any football team not because Los Angeles is a bad market, but because the owners of L.A’s football teams got really juicy stadium deals from St. Louis and Oakland. Ft. Lauderdale, which is a terrible market for hockey, had a team (the Florida Panthers) while Seattle, a great market for hockey, does not have a team, because there just hasn’t been anyone there with a lot of money interested in owning a team. Toronto, which could easily support three hockey teams, has only one because the owners of that one team put up a huge fight whenever someone suggests moving another team there.
By and large the league’s decision making process in determining where teams will set up shop is based wholly on where owners with the necessary funds can be found. Leagues force-expanding to new territory rarely works. An excellent example is the Vancouver Grizzlies. The NBA had ownership groups clawing each other’s eyes out to start a team in Toronto, which was a can’t-miss market, but they decided for some reason that two Canadian teams would be better than one and so sold a group in Vancouver on an NBA team. While Toronto makes money by the bucketful - as everyone predicted they would - the ownership group in Vancouver was never really prepared to own an NBA team and they ended up having to be moved to Memphis.
The NHL had a similar problem in Ottawa, where the league was so determined to expand to Ottawa that they gave the team to an owner without the startup capital he needed, and then let it be sold to another owner with the same problem. The team became horribly mired in debt, to the point that the team was making a strong operating margin that was being totally consumed by debt servicing, and at one point last year Ottawa could not pay their players. Things turned out okay because they were bought out by a billionaire who paid off all the debt, so they make lots of money now, but it could have turned into a catastrophe had a really rich owner not been interested in paying all that debt to own a team.
Now, a league’s operating principles CAN have an effect on team placement and mobility. The NFL exerts very little control on its owners with respect to team placement, and so NFL teams move remarkably often considering how strong the league is; just in the last 25 years, we have seen the Raiders move from Oakland to Los Angeles and back to Oakland, the Cardinals move from St. Louis to Phoenix, the Rams move from L.A. to St. Louis, the Colts move from Baltimore to Indianapolis, the Browns move from Cleveland to Baltimore, and the Oilers move from Houston to Nashville, plus expansion to three cities means that, by my count, FOUR cities have lost a team and gotten one back - Baltimore, Houston. St. Louis, Oakland, and Cleveland, and Oakland lost and regained the same team! Yet all the franchises that moved were doing okay where they were, and didn’t really NEED to move; they just got really sweetheart deals in new cities.
By comparison, in the last 25 years, the number of baseball teams that have changed cities is exactly zero. They’ve expanded into four cities (Phoenix, St. Petersburg, Denver, Miami) but not a single team has moved. Many teams have THREATENED to move, like the Giants and Expos, but baseball placed greater restrictions on that sort of thing.
So the reason L.A. has two NBA teams is very simple; Two different ownership groups - one that owned the Minneapolis Lakers and one that owned the San Diego Clippers - decided that L.A. would be a better place to run their team than Minneapolis or San Diego.
I don’t have time right now to read your whole post but their is a big difference between the OP and your example of the 3 NHL teams. These three teams play in 3 different cites (and two states). Manhattan, NYC (Rangers), East Rutherford, NJ (Devils) and Uniondale, Nassau County (Islanders- AKA Fishsticks).
However, we do have two “NY” NFL teams playing in the same NJ arena (for now).
I think there’s a gentleman’s agreement with the CFL not to encroach across the border.
Eh, I think Vancouver would have been a fine market for basketball if they didn’t have an expansion franchise as inept as the Grizz. Too bad West couldn’t have come in and saved the franchise 4 years ago.
The Lakers and Clippers have their own dressing rooms and I think they may sit at their usual end of the court for both “home” and “road” games against each other.
I had forgotten about the Giants and Jets sharing Giants Stadium. However, those two teams don’t play each other every year. The Lakers and Clippers play each other four times. So each team gets 43 home games instead of 41.
They do change the colors on the court depending who is the home team. I also think that the “road” cheerleaders don’t come to the game. If it’s a Clippers home game, the Laker Girls aren’t there.
From 1994-1999 The LA Clippers played about 7 games per season at the Arrowhead Pond which is in Anaheim and is the home of the Mighty Ducks. They almost always sold out and actually won when they played at the Pond. Why Donald Sterling, the owner of the Clippers, decided to share the Staples Center with the Lakers is unknown but …
The following is opinions I have read in local newspapers and do not have a cite for any of it, just my memory
There was ome problem with agreeing on a contract with the owner$ of the Pond. Also the Clippers sell tickets even with their crappy multiple losing seasons so there is no incentive for Mr. Sterling to put out a good product. There has been some decent players play for the Clippers, but they are gone as soon as they have to be paid a decent salary, so the team has a large turnover of players.
I think the main reason that the Clippers stayed in L.A. and didn’t move to Anaheim was that the Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, a very very very very strange man, just didn’t like the idea of having to go to Anaheim to watch his team. He also perceived Anaheim as being a step below L.A. in prestige and didn’t want it to look like the Lakers drove him out of town.
Sterling is a man with an enormous ego.
Ahem. When it’s a Jets home game, the place is called “The Meadowlands”. Same thing happened when the Angels played in Dodger Stadium - for their games, it was “Chavez Ravine”.
Back to the Clippers, it’s hard to imagine them as ever being worth a damn, but they were. Their original incarnation, the Buffalo Braves, were perennial contenders in the Seventies, with Bob McAdoo, Adrian Dantley, and Ernie DiGregorio starring. Their move to San Diego was actually a swap of franchises (and a couple of players), with the then-owner of the Boston Celtics getting the “new” franchise in a city and arena where the ABA’s Conquistadors had already failed. For a few years, the Clippers’ corporate name was actually still “Boston Celtics”.
Sports Illustrated ran a fascinating story about Sterling a couple of years ago. All he apparently wants is the “self-esteem” that comes with owning a major sports team in a major city. He never spends a penny he doesn’t have to, and never sells any asset even when good business sense would say to.
Nope…raised and schooled in Northeast Philly.